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MARY THE CHURCH AT THE SOURCE - PART 6

WRITTEN BY: JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER AND HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

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HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

MARY IN THE CHURCH’S DOCTRINE AND DEVOTION

Introduction

The place of Mary in the Church’s doctrine, in particular Marian veneration and the mariological saturation of Catholic devotion, has long given rise to tensions within the Church, but never more so than in the last decades. Some adhere to the principle “of Mary never enough”. Others suspect a twofold danger. Mariology, they say, threatens the hierarchy of Christian truths, at whose center are Christ and the triune God (whereas Mary belongs on the side of the graced creature) and jeopardizes ecumenical dialogue with the ecclesial communities stemming from the Reformation, most of which (with some important exceptions) regard the veneration of Mary as a perilous excrescence on the organism of Christian devotion. (With the Eastern Church, on the other hand, there is no tension; there would be only if we curtailed veneration of Mary.)

Now, it is probably fair to say that both of these tendencies in the Church have fallen into a certain one-sidedness. The motto of the one (“of Mary never enough”) must obviously not be understood in a quantitative sense, as if the mere multiplication of dogmas, or even of feasts and devotions, were a desirable goal in and of itself. The “never enough” can refer at most to a deeper understanding of the place of Mary in God’s saving work and the dignity she has because of that place. Moreover, such an understanding would only bring out more clearly how Mary is embedded in the truths concerning Christ and the Trinity. In response to the critical demurral of the others, however, it should be pointed out that Scripture speaks of no other woman in such detail and so often (and not in the episodic style that characterizes the stories of Judith and Esther), inasmuch as each scene in which she appears is intimately connected with the Christ’s Incarnation, his childhood, his public activity, his Passion, or the prolongation of his life in the Church. Although the individual scenes that tell of Mary are scattered throughout the Gospels, when we take a deeper look at them we find that they form a network of relationships whose individual elements—as in a hall of mirrors—endlessly illuminate, augment, and deepen one another.

Undeniably, the very fact that the Marian mysteries are so many-sided makes it difficult to talk about Mary and occasions the risk of one-sided formulations. But is it any different in the case of the even greater mystery of her Son? If we may legitimately call Mary the Queen of heaven, of the angels, and of the Church, this is surely because she is the “lowly handmaiden” who found favor with God. But are not both aspects already united in her one recorded statement about herself: “He has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed” (Lk 1:48)? No one who acknowledges the authority of Scripture can defy the claim of this statement (he has regarded his handmaid) and promise (henceforth all generations will extol her). Moreover, this kind of paradox makes sense in the realm of Christian thought. After all, even the Lamb of God who sits victorious on his Father’s throne will for all eternity be the “Lamb that was slain” (Rev 13:8). So, too, the Apostle Paul describes at length how his apostolic power rests upon his conformity to the crucified Christ: “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:10).

Going even more deeply into this apparent tension in the truths of Mariology, we could say that the more a man is handed over to, and plunged into the abyss of, God, the more God can— if he so wills — bring to light his independence. When Jesus says “I am the light of the world” (Jn 8:12) and thereby declares bis exclusive sovereignty, this does not prevent him from applying the same term to his disciples, who now belong entirely to him: “You are the light of the world. . . . Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Mt 5:14, 16). Once again it is good to recall Paul, whose own light is first wholly extinguished on the road to Damascus so that Christ can ignite his own light in him and make it powerfully illumine the whole earth.

In the first part of what follows, we will attempt to delve into the structure of this law — that is, into Christian teaching about Mary — in order to show in the second part what follows for the correct form of Marian veneration and piety in the Church. Now, New Testament revelation is definitive in an eschatological sense. Accordingly, both aspects mentioned here, doctrine and devotion, must themselves have a kernel of definitiveness, and the history of Mariology and Marian devotion unequivocally confirms that this kernel does in fact exist. On the other hand, the Church and her exegesis of revelation progress through the ever-changing periods of world history. New aspects emerge, while others wane; efforts are made to compensate for one-sided emphases, but not rarely they are simply replaced with the opposite extremes. Today too, then, it is a duty to restate the principles in a new and timely way—while being as measured as possible—and in so doing to retrieve what is of permanent value.

I. Mary’s Relation to the Person and Work of Her Son

1. A New Aspect

Before we enter into the specifically mariological discussion, it may be useful to call attention to an aspect of the relationship between human beings, particularly between mother and child, that only recently has come fully to light thanks to the dialogical school of philosophy and sociology. Several factors prepared this discovery. The first was the definitive overcoming of an ancient opinion that came from the Greeks but was not counteracted energetically enough by Christian thinkers. According to this opinion, the father alone is active in the generation of the child, whereas the mother’s role is purely passive. The second factor was the observation that the newborn human, unlike the newborn animal, is particularly helpless: only now does it come to the end of its intrauterine formation. Finally, and even more fundamentally, the developing human being (once more in contrast to the animal) is intrinsically ordered to “being with” [Mitsein] other men, so much so that he awakens to self-consciousness only through other human beings, normally through his mother. In the mother’s smile, it dawns on him that there is a world into which he is accepted and in which he is welcome, and it is in this primordial experience that he becomes aware of himself for the first time. This founding event of human existence, whose import has been duly recognized only in our own day, accompanies the other functions of growth and upbringing: the feeding and care of the child, his initiation into the environment and his historical tradition. Long before the child learns to speak, a mute dialogue unfolds between mother and child on the basis of the “being with” that is constitutive of every conscious human being.

Now, this means that even Jesus himself has above all his Mother to thank for his human self-consciousness, unless we suppose that he was a supernatural wunderkind who should not have to owe this self-consciousness to anyone. But such a hypothesis would jeopardize Jesus’ genuine humanity. This idea itself suggests new reasons why Mary’s motherhood had to be of a singular purity. The same requirement follows, once again, when we consider that Mary introduced her Son into the meaning and depths of Israel’s religion, however simple her words may have been. The Magnificat shows to what degree her own life flowed from the heart of this tradition, which rested upon the promise to Abraham and his posterity and which again and again proved to be the “mercy” and “great things” of God, who casts down the mighty and exalts the lowly. She must have introduced Jesus into the tradition and so enabled him to recognize his own mission in the mirror of the promise. True, Jesus’ personal prayer and the indwelling Holy Spirit disclosed this mission to him with increasing depth. Nevertheless, the human contribution—principally Mary’s contribution—to this process must by no means be underestimated; this, too, would offend against the learning process of a normal human child.

The primary, foundational contact between mother and child, indeed, the symbiosis between them, is by no means purely “biological”, especially given contemporary reflection on “being with”. The essential event is a spiritual one. Therefore, the singular spiritual life of this child entitles us to infer a correspondingly singular spiritual life for his Mother. This in turn gives us a new, and firmer, connection with certain traditional arguments.

2. The Dimensions of the Marian Yes

Scholars are united in affirming that Mary’s final answer to the angel and, through him, to God, “behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word”, is the finally fulfilled expression of the faith of Abraham and of Israel as a whole. Abraham himself had been asked for a measureless obedience of faith: on Mount Moriah he was required to return the very gift that God had given him in exchange for his faith, namely, the son of the promise. Abraham had performed the sacrifice spiritually, even if he had not had to carry it out materially. In Mary’s case, God goes to the end of this faith: on the Cross, under which she stands, no angel intervenes to save, and she must give back to God her Son, the Son of the fulfillment, in darkness of faith that she cannot comprehend or penetrate.

But Jesus’ conception itself requires an act of faith that infinitely transcends that of Abraham (and especially that of Sarah, who laughed in her unbelief). The Word of God who wills to take flesh in Mary needs a receptive Yes that is spoken with the whole person, spirit and body, with absolutely no (even unconscious) restrictions, that offers the entirety of human nature as a locus for the Incarnation. Receiving and letting in need not be passive; in relation to God, they are, when done in faith, always supreme activity. If Mary’s Yes had contained even the shadow of a demurral, of a “so far and no farther”, a stain would have clung to her faith and the child could not have taken possession of the whole of human nature. The freedom of Mary’s Yes from all hesitation comes perhaps most clearly to light where she also says Yes to her marriage with Joseph and leaves it to God to reconcile it with her new task.1

This quality of Mary’s Yes is wholly a function of the requirements of Christology. The same can be said of the two dogmatic propositions it entails: her virginity and her freedom from the original sin otherwise common to all men. The latter affirmation, namely, that she “was conceived immaculate”, says nothing but what is indispensable for the boundlessness of her Yes. For anyone affected in some way by original sin would be incapable of such a guileless openness to every disposition of God. Her virginity, on the other hand, guarantees a christological fact: Jesus acknowledges only one Father, the one in heaven, as his own. This becomes evident from the response he gives as a twelve-year-old child in the Temple (“Behold, your father and I have been looking for you anxiously”; “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” [Lk 2:49]). No man can have two fathers, as Tertullian pithily and accurately says;2 therefore, the Mother has to be a virgin. The point of this christologically motivated virginity lies, not in an antisexual, merely bodily integrity, as if it were an end in itself, but in Mary’s motherhood; in order to be the Mother of the messianic Son of God, who can have no other Father than God, she must be overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and she must say to that overshadowing a Yes that includes her whole person, both body and soul. Virginity within the Church, too, is meaningful only if it has the same purpose: to enable the virgin, in a distant imitation of Mary, to be “undivided”, as Paul puts it, “holy in body and spirit”, “devoted to the Lord” (1 Cor 7:34-35). The point, then, is the spiritual motherhood that Jesus himself promised to those who hear and follow God’s word in pure faith (Lk 8:21 par.).

The scene of the Annunciation merits consideration for another reason, too: it is not only wholly christological; it is wholly trinitarian as well. It is strikingly obvious that its structure amounts to a first revelation of God’s triunity. The angel’s initial salutation, which calls Mary the one full of grace par excellence, brings her the greeting of the “Lord”, Yahweh, the Father, whom she knows as a Jewish believer. As she ponders what this greeting might mean, the angel responds with a second speech that reveals that she will give birth to the “Son of the Most High”, who will at the same time be the Messiah for the house of Jacob. And when she asks what is expected of her in all this, the angel offers a third explanation in which he reveals to her that the Holy Spirit will overshadow her, so that her child can legitimately be called the Holy One and the Son of God. In response, Mary declares her readiness to let this be done to her, the handmaid. The divine Trinity must be made known when the Son becomes man, but not by means of a merely verbal statement, as, for example, God’s laws were promulgated on Sinai. It must also be enacted existentially in a human being possessing perfect, archetypal faith. It is the Abrahamic faith of the Old Testament that is being fulfilled and, for this reason, raised to the experience of the Trinity. This experience must therefore be the starting point of a New Testament, ecclesial experience of faith, and this starting point must be given in the very existence of Mary herself. For this reason there is, parallel to the life of Jesus, a life of Mary. Starting from the intimacy of the chamber of Nazareth, she is educated by her Son into the role that is bestowed on her at the Cross: to be the archetype of the Church.

3. Mary’s Education as Mother of the Church

At first it was the Mother who introduced the Son into the Old Covenant and thereby trained him for his messianic office. However, it was not she but his own knowledge of the Father’s mission in the Holy Spirit that showed him who he was and what he had to do. The relationship is thus reversed: from now on it is the Son who educates the Mother for the greatness of his task, cultivating in her the maturity she needs to stand under the Cross and, finally, to receive, at prayer within the Church, the universal gift of the Holy Spirit.

From the very outset, this education reflects Simeon’s prophecy that a sword would pierce the Mother’s soul. It is a pitiless process. All the episodes handed down for us are more or less brusque rejections. It is not as though Jesus had been disobedient for thirty years; we have an explicit affirmation to the contrary (Lk 2:51). However, the merely physical relationship to which faith was so intimately tied in the Old Testament is sovereignly, ruthlessly forced open. Henceforth faith in Jesus, the incarnate Word of God, is the only thing that counts. Mary has this faith—this is made especially clear in the scene at Cana, in which she says without wavering, “Do whatever he tells you.” At the same time, she, the perfect believer, has to be the one to serve the Son as an illustration of his separation from “flesh and blood” (anything can be formed out of her Yes), and it is precisely in this way that she herself is brought up to perfectly open faith. As we have seen, the response of the twelve-year-old child who opposes his Father to his putative earthly father is already brusque; only the first counts, whether Jesus’ earthly parents understand this or not. “And they did not understand” (Lk 2:50). Jesus’ response to his Mother’s observation at Cana, with its delicately implied request, is inconceivably sharp: “O woman, what have you to do with me?” Mary most likely did not understand this, either. “My hour has not yet come” (Jn 2:4), doubtless the hour of the Cross, when the Mother will be granted full right of intercession. Yet Mary’s imperturbable faith—“do whatever he tells you”—succeeds in bringing about a symbolic anticipation of her Son’s Eucharist, a foreshadowing of the same sort as the multiplication of the loaves. The scene in which Jesus, teaching those gathered around him in a certain house, refuses to receive the visit of his Mother, who is standing outside, seems almost unbearable to us. “Here are my mother and my brethren! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mk 3:34-35). Jesus means her more than anyone, though he does not mention her by name. Yet who understands his meaning? Did Mary herself understand it? We have to accompany Mary in spirit as she makes her way home and try to imagine her state of mind. The sword gnaws at her soul; she feels as if bereft of her inmost self, as if the point of her life has been drained away. Her faith, which at the beginning received so many sensible confirmations, is plunged into a dark night. It is as if the Son, who sends her no news about what he is doing, has run away from her, yet she cannot simply let him go away: she has to accompany him, full of dread, in her night of faith. And she is once again pushed back anonymously into the rank and file of believers when the woman of the people praises the breasts that Jesus suckled (and so already begins the fulfillment of the promise that all generations will call Mary blessed). Jesus changes the subject: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (Lk 11:28).

The purpose of this constant training in the naked faith Mary will need under the Cross is often insufficiently understood; people are astonished and embarrassed by the way in which Jesus treats his Mother, whom he addresses both in Cana and at the Cross only as “woman”. He himself is the first one to wield the sword that must pierce her. But how else would she have become ready to stand by the Cross, where not only her Son’s earthly failure, but also his abandonment by the God who sends him is revealed. She must finally say Yes to this, too, because she consented a priori to her child’s whole destiny. And as if to fill her bitter chalice to the brim, the dying Son expressly abandons his Mother, withdrawing from her and foisting on her another son: “Woman, behold, your son” (Jn 19:26). This gesture is usually understood primarily as evidencing Jesus’ concern about where his Mother will live after he is gone (in which case Mary obviously has no other biological children; otherwise it would be superfluous and inadmissible to commit her to the disciple of love). This must not, however, lead us to overlook a second motif: just as the Son is abandoned by the Father, so, too, he abandons his Mother, so that the two of them may be united in a common abandonment. Only thus does she become inwardly ready to take on ecclesial motherhood toward all of Jesus’ new brothers and sisters.

4. Archetype of the Church

The Catholic tradition, through unflaggingly intense and profound reflection, has brought forth such an abundance of ideas on this subject that I shall only mention them briefly here. This is, however, no grounds for claiming that they are unimportant and outmoded, as, regrettably, is rather frequently done in contemporary ecclesiology. The Son places Mary in the care of one of the apostles and thus inserts her into the apostolic Church. In so doing, he gives the Church her center or apex: an inimitable, yet ever-to-be-striven-for embodiment of the new community’s faith, a spotless, unrestricted Yes to the whole of God’s plan for the salvation of the world. In this center and apex, the Church is the bride “without spot or wrinkle”, the immaculata, as Paul expressly calls her (Eph 5:27), not only in the eternity to come, but already now.

Yet this preeminent member of the Church does not possess these special qualities privately for herself alone; she does so in a new fruitfulness for the community as a whole and for each of its members, a fruitfulness whose origin is the grace of the Cross, Sin alone gives man the mentality of the private individual, because it deprives him (Latin: privatum) of the spirit of communion and of the will to selfless communication. In contrast, the more purely a man receives God’s grace, the more obvious [selbstverständlich] is bis readiness not to keep it for himself, his readiness to let everyone participate in it. Jesus’ Mother, who for her Son’s sake was granted the highest believing and loving readiness, is therefore at once the archetype [Urbild] that transcends us and the model [Vorbild] we are to imitate and that helps us to do so. The popular image of the mantle of grace Jesus’ Mother spreads over all the members of the Church simultaneously expresses both sides of the same truth. We must always keep in mind, though, that this image does not make sense by itself, that Mary is not a revamped pagan tutelary goddess. Rather, she speaks her perfect ecclesial Yes to the person and work of her Son, who himself cannot be understood except as one of the divine Trinity Consequently, as we must still show, an ecclesial piety cannot stop with Mary; if this devotion is truly ecclesial, and if it is genuinely Marian, it immediately and necessarily leads through Mary to Jesus and, through him, back to the Father in the Holy Spirit.

Mary’s position in the Church as exemplar implies a number of insights and consequences that are important for our age. First of all, the Church in her perfect core must be feminine. This should not surprise anyone who knows the Old and New Testament. The synagogue itself was described primarily as feminine—as a bride or wife—in relation to Yahweh. So, too, is the New Testament Church in relation to Christ (cf. only 2 Cor 11:1f); even in the eschaton, the Lamb espouses his bride, who is adorned for this union. This femininity of the Church is all-encompassing. By contrast, the ministerial office filled by the apostles and their male successors is a pure function within this overarching reality. This relationship should move much more to the foreground of contemporary debates about the possible participation of women in the ministerial office. Seen more profoundly, women would be exchanging more for less.

A second, connected point concerns the Church’s sacramental actions. Could anyone in the Church really grasp and respond to all the grace offered in a sacrament except the Ecclesia immaculata? But the Church includes us imperfect receivers. Therefore, the woman who receives with a perfect Yes must stand behind their often very inadequate receptions. Let us take two examples.

First, the Mass. Does any Christian really know what a sacrifice it is to offer the Father the Son as the world’s Redeemer after the Consecration? But those who contemplate Mary’s sacrificial gesture get a glimmer of why, despite all objections, we can and must describe the eucharistic celebration as a sacrifice (not of Christ alone, but also of the Church). And does any one of us really receive the Son in Holy Communion as perfectly as he offers himself? We are right to pray, “Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church”: on that perfect act of faith that was nowhere as undivided as in Mary.

The second example: Who can so fully open his heart in confession that he lays bare the most secret recesses of his sin? No one can do it apart from the woman who, unburdened by any sin of her own, laid open before God the most hidden corners of her soul. Behind those who confess imperfectly stands the archetypal Church with her total transparency before God.

Finally, there is a motif that has occupied theologians since the second century of the Christian era. In Mary, virginity and maternity are inseparably united. They condition and illuminate each other. The same is true in the Church. Because Mary and the Church are virginal, because both live only for union with Christ in the Holy Spirit, because both—to speak the language of the Old Testament—refuse adultery with idols or—to put it in contemporary language—resist the seduction of ideology, they are fruitful. Fruitful through God and his grace in them, through the loving and hoping faith with which they respond to this grace, through the gift of participation in God’s will to save all men. And thus the image of Mary’s mantle of grace can be applied in a certain sense to the virginal and maternal fruitfulness of the Church. This mantle is spread over the whole of humanity, as far as God’s saving will extends, and it includes the apostolic action that is categorically demanded of the Church, the ecclesial prayer that encompasses all men, and the ecclesial suffering that is offered for the world as a whole. When we recall the scene at Cana, where Mary, despite having been repulsed by Jesus, speaks to the servants with steadfast faith, “Do whatever he tells you” (Jn 2:5), we begin to see with what certainty of being heard the Church that suffers and prays for the redemption of the world may present her petitions and sacrifices.

5. Jesus and Mary

As we bring the doctrinal part of our remarks to a conclusion, we have an occasion to consider again the unity the Son and the Mother form in the New Testament. The foregoing ought not to give the impression that the figure of Mary simply disappears into the Church, as if from now on only the Church witnessed Christ to world history. Throughout historical time, the Church remains a Church of sinners, and her saints are the first to confess themselves such. No less than Saint Augustine urged upon the whole Church the need to pray “forgive us our trespasses” every day as long as this age of the world lasts. The Church as we find her concretely is nowhere totally equal to her tasks, not even in the representatives of the ministerial office. For this reason, the Church is forced to look for help, above all to her Lord, but also to her own archetypal response to the Lord, to the one who alone was able to say an unconditional Yes. Mary remains a person whom we can pinpoint precisely in history, a person who was a member of the Church, who can therefore join all the members of the Church in responding to grace, and who can train them all to say Yes in the right way. But as a historical person she nonetheless remains the chosen one, the Virgin Mother of Christ who was taken out of the sinful context of all the children of Adam and placed at her Son’s side, so that together with him she could be all the more deeply in solidarity with all those to be redeemed.

The Son and the Mother thus form a unity. This explains why from the start they were called the new Adam and the new Eve, although we are very clearly aware that Jesus, as the Son of the eternal Father, stands on an entirely different level from Mary, who is a simple human being. But even though Mary’s holiness and immaculateness depend entirely on the saving grace of God and Christ, we must not overlook what we emphasized so insistently at the beginning of this doctrinal section: how intensely the Son wanted to be dependent on the Mother, how much of himself he wanted to owe to his Mother. Together they both illustrate vividly how God and man relate to each other in the covenant the eternal God wants to make with man: man has the pure grace of God to thank for his ability to correspond to God’s offer; but God, in his sovereign freedom, deigns to become dependent upon man insofar as he created man free and in the covenant of grace takes that created freedom seriously.

II. Mary in the Church’s Devotion

The practical applications suggested by the ideas developed so far now are readily apparent. First of all, whoever intends to listen to, and to heed, the Gospel must take the scenes in which Mary appears as seriously as anything else it contains. And he must also really have the intention to unite the scattered tesserae of the mosaic in order to see the total picture of Mary, of her person and function, light up. Anyone who fails to do so, either purposely or out of habit, can hardly be called an attentive hearer of the Word. But, as we have already said, the image that results when we see the tesserae together does not exist in isolation; rather, in every part and in every respect it constantly refers both to Christ and to the Church. It follows immediately from this that Marian piety, if it means to be Catholic, must not isolate itself; it must always be embedded in, and ordered to, Christ (and thus to the Trinity) and the Church.

Let no one object that this is difficult and, given the trends that dominate much of popular piety, perhaps nearly impossible. We all are familiar with these trends. At first blush, they give the impression that the praying people sees Mary as the symbolic embodiment or archetype of God’s nurturing, maternally merciful grace, that they thus elevate Mary into the divine sphere and so overlook Christ’s decisive work. On the one hand, this impression (especially in Catholic countries with adequate catechetical instruction) can be quite deceptive: the prayers and pilgrims are fully aware of the overall dogmatic context; they feel themselves to be a part of the Church as she intercedes and implores grace; and they turn to the one whose intercessory power with God they—rightly—judge to be the highest. Moreover, the most frequent Marian prayers continually refer to the larger context: both to Christ and God and to the Church. On the other hand, the above-mentioned impression can be accurate in the case of peoples who are less well catechized. For them, Mary is often a sort of quintessence of salvation as a whole. The evangelization called for so urgently by the episcopal synods and the Pope has to begin here. It must undertake the necessary corrections with gentleness and prudence. In any case, we must not say that it is impossible to bit the right measure in the practice of Marian devotion. After all, even simple people can perceive the proportions and essential articulations of the Christian faith as expressed in the Apostles’ Creed. However, the core of Marian devotion will be correct if, in whatever form, it is an entry into, and a training in, the right understanding of all the articles of faith.

1. Veneration of Mary

Veneration of a human being must in no way be confused with the adoration shown to God alone. We see at the end of the Old Testament, for example, what veneration pious Jews paid to their great forefathers, the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets (cf. Sir 44-50), without thereby offending in the least against the worship owed to God. As we shall see, in the New Testament there is an even closer relation to truly venerable persons on account of the mysterious laws of the “communion of saints”. As a special gift of grace that God makes to his Church, it deserves praise and thanksgiving, which can be rendered only if the gift is duly appreciated as such and, supposing it to be a person, honored. Mary shows her utterly unselfconscious awareness of this when in the Magnificat she extols the great deed that God has done to her, the deed all generations will acknowledge by calling her the blessed woman par excellence.

In his apostolic letter Marialis Cultus, Pope Paul VI treats at length the right way for the Church to venerate Mary. He first shows the place of Mary in the renewed liturgy of the Church, then depicts Mary as the model of the true worship of God, and finally gives guidelines for a proper renewal of Marian veneration. This veneration must take its bearing from the Trinity, Christ, and the Church; it must have a firm biblical basis and thus be ecumenically acceptable; finally, it must also take into account the distinctive anthropological accents of the present. We have at least touched upon most of these aspects in the foregoing, even the ecumenical aspect, inasmuch as Scripture is common to all Christian confessions. The liturgical aspect shows the Church’s fervent, yet always biblically colored, Marian veneration in her official public worship. As for the anthropological aspect, Mary certainly shows herself to be the strong woman who (together with the other holy women) endures the scene of horror from which most of Jesus’ male disciples have fled. Yet it would be hard to find in her the traits of the militantly emancipated woman, for she lives fully for the service of her Son and must let him dispose of her as he needs and wills. On the other hand, this kind of service is always at the core of Christianity, however much the image of women may vary from period to period.

The veneration of Mary is the surest and shortest way to get close to Christ in a concrete way. In meditating on her life in all its phases we learn what it means to live for and with Christ — in the everyday, in an unsentimental matter-of-factness that nonetheless enjoys perfect inner intimacy. Contemplating Mary’s existence, we also submit to the darkness that is imposed on our faith, yet we learn how we must always be ready when Jesus suddenly asks something of us.

The most popular Marian prayers always lead us into this concrete closeness to the Lord and to the whole mystery of redemption. Let us mention three of these prayers. Up to the concluding petition, the Hail Mary consists only of words from Holy Scripture: the angelic salutation (“hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you”) and, immediately following that, the wonderful words of Elizabeth, which are a model of proper Marian veneration (“blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”). The petition added at the end, which, with the Council of Ephesus, gives Mary the christological title “Mother of God”, formulates as straightforwardly as possible the concern of the sinful Christian in the Church: the imploring of intercession for the present and for the all-decisive hour of death. The Angelus, too, does not go a single step beyond the pattern laid down in the Bible. The three short sentences are christocentric: the message of the Incarnation, the Virgin’s consent, and the realization of the Incarnation itself. The three additional Aves give us a chance to linger with the human being in whom the Incarnation was realized and in this way to enter ourselves, so to say, into the radius of the miracle. Every Christian who prays the Angelus knows that the enfleshment of the Word concerns him just as immediately, that it also has to take place in him if he would bear the name of Christian. Finally, the Rosary. To be sure, the Rosary is not always an easy prayer, nor does it appeal to everyone in the same way. And yet, it is a prayer that weaves everything pertaining to the history of salvation into Marian prayer. The Rosary is a way of making present the mysteries of Jesus’ life—his youth, the conclusion of his public life in the Passion, and his Resurrection and consummation, into which he also draws Mary as the archetype of the Church. It also makes present Christ’s prayer to the Father and, finally, the ever-new glorification of the Trinity. The whole is introduced by the Creed. In the succession of the Ave Marias there opens for the one who prays contemplatively an almost infinite world of prayer, a space that can be traversed in all directions.

But those who pray in it do not get lost. Mary is there as a compass. In her, as we showed, the mystery of the Trinity opens itself for the first time; she then accompanies the incarnate God from the cradle to the grave and beyond that into his transfigured life. She has a unique share in his destiny, so much so that she is even assumed bodily into heaven, a gift that she receives as the first among believers, who will one day follow her. The Rosary is truly a prayer composed of purely biblical words and aspects. This is why down through the centuries it has been recommended again and again to Christians for common and personal prayer.

2. Veneration and Imitation

Veneration from afar would be useless if Mary’s attitude did not also immediately encourage us to imitate it, indeed, in a certain sense, to duplicate it. Here someone might voice the objection that we are to follow and—as Paul says—imitate Christ alone and that the imitation of another person would be a distracting interference. But this is not so. If everything in Mary rests upon her Yes to God, this Yes is nothing other than the perfect human echo of Jesus’ divine-human response to the Father: “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God” (Heb 10:7); “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me” (Jn 6:38). The Our Father contains the same petitions for all Christians: “Thy will be done”, which is the prayer that Jesus wrests from himself in his death agony on the Mount of Olives. The center of Mary’s Yes lies in the very center of the Son, but it does not disappear into it. For Mary was the first to utter it, and she did this in order to help make the Incarnation possible in the first place, and her Yes remains for the members of the Church the central and fully valid answer to the Lord’s demands. Christ’s Yes and Mary’s Yes are fully intertwined. This relationship is such that Mary always declares her faith-filled readiness thanks to a grace that is ultimately christological, while the Son, for his part, never denies what he owes to his Mother. An either-or between Christ and Mary is as impossible as an either-or between Christ as the head and the Church as his body. If Christ is artificially detached from his Mother or his Church, he loses his historical believability in Christian devotion; he becomes something abstract; he becomes one who falls down from heaven like an aerolite and then goes back up without having become rooted concretely in the past or future tradition of human beings.

Because Mary’s Yes is so spotless and perfect, veneration and imitation of her do not in any way constitute some special spirituality. We must say just the opposite: No approved spirituality in the Church can afford to seek God while bypassing this model of Christian perfection; none can afford not to be Marian as well. From one end of the Church to the other, there is no point where the answer of faith the Church must give has resounded more clearly and been lived more consistently. Nor is there any form of Christian perfection that does not consist in the Marian act of unrestricted readiness, which has been described in ever new ways in the course of the ages. The Fathers called it “passionlessness” (apatheia); the Middle Ages, Gelassenheit (meaning not remaining attached to worldly things); and Ignatius of Loyola, “indifference” (meaning being content in advance with everything God decides for us). All of these are merely variants on what Mary’s Yes has always already accomplished for all Christians, indeed, for all men. Needless to say, this Yes, this Gelassenheit and indifference, is for the Christian nothing other than the act of the living, loving, hoping faith of which Abraham’s obedient readiness laid the first stone. The one fundamental act can be accentuated in many ways and, in this sense, leaves room for many spiritualities, but they all proceed from the same center and must also go back to it—to the one Yes of Christ, of Mary, and of ecclesial man to the saving design of the Father for all and each. But it is the Holy Spirit who effects the unity between the Father’s disposition and the answering Yes.

The imitation of Mary’s Yes also leaves open, of course, a further broad spectrum of possibilities, since Mary encounters us in so many different situations: as the courageous woman in the flight to Egypt; as the inconspicuously employed housewife; as the one who contemplates in silence and who, as Scripture stresses twice, keeps all the events pertaining to her Son in her heart and rocks them back and forth (Lk 2:19, 51); as the intercessor for the poor, who have no more wine; as the one who accompanies the Son’s official activity with caring and suffering prayer; as the one most painfully transformed into the archetypal Church (here she merges into the vision of the Woman of the Apocalypse, who cries out in the pains of labor); as the one who disappears into the Church in prayer and action. There are entryways everywhere, and every group in the Church may choose its own. All lead to the same center.

3. Why Mary Stands out in the Communion of Saints

What we have said should make clear that Mary can never be isolated from the communion of saints. She can be called “Mother of the Church” because she is the Mother of Christ and thus of all of his mystical members; in spite of that, she remains our sister and is glad to be so. Yet the communion of saints cannot be compared with an ordinary gathering of men in which individual stands next to individual, even if they are all marching in the same direction or are animated by the same concern. Rather, the selflessness of Christian love founds a kind of communism of spiritual goods, and the more perfectly a Christian develops this selfless love in himself, the more ah others can live on his goods as if they were their own. Not only are individuals transparent to one another, they also radiate what is theirs into the others—although we can speak only in a loose sense of “theirs”, because perfect selflessness and transparency are nothing other than the life of God and Christ in creatures. Mary, as the purest of all creatures, irradiates what is her own least of all. Everyone within the communion of saints has something Marian about him.

Here at the end, however, we need to draw attention to a curious phenomenon that seemingly cannot be harmonized with what we have said. There have been Marian apparitions in every age of the Church. Nevertheless, it is striking that from the nineteenth century on—with the apparition to Catherine Laboure, then especially to Bernadette (Lourdes), but also to Melanie (La Salette) and to the children of Beauring and Fatima, to name only the best known—Mary steps forward in an especially emphatic way. Our point here is not to judge the authenticity of the individual apparitions, nor is this the place to caution against the numerous cases that are dubious or obviously inauthentic. We can limit ourselves to the event of Lourdes, which has been tested and approved in so many ways. It astonishes us that the “beautiful lady” gives the simple child a sort of self-definition that the child does not understand at all but constantly repeats to everyone she meets: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” It is not the content of the mystery that concerns us here, for it had been solemnly defined a few years earlier, but the fact that Mary presents herself at all. Something analogous happens in other apparitions. Is it not almost shocking to see the lowly, humble handmaid step forward in this way in our times and even to point to herself? Is this compatible with our image of her?

There are two things we can say. Mary’s humility is not that of the contrite sinner; rather, it is a blithe, unselfconscious, childlike humility that would never get the idea that anything she had was her property instead of God’s gift. “All generations will call me blessed”: these words already show the distinctive quality of her humility. When she steps forward, it is to point through herself to God’s grace, very much in the way that Christ says, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (Jn 7:16), and “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Without the human speech of the divine Word, we would never have understood the Father’s heart: the Son was necessary to display the Father, whom no eye has ever seen. This brings us to the second thing that has to be said. Perhaps it is precisely our time that especially needs to see Mary. To see her as she shows herself, not as we would like to imagine her. To see her, if at all, in order not to forget her essential role in the work of salvation and in the Church. In reality, she shows herself and defines herself as the archetypal Church, whose form we have to take as our pattern. We. That means every single Christian, and yet it may mean even more: our image of what Church is. We are busily refashioning and improving this Church according to the needs of the times, the criticisms of our opponents, and our own models. But do we not lose sight in all this of the only perfect criterion, that is, of the archetype? Should we not keep our eyes fixed on Mary in all of our reforms—not in order to multiply Marian feasts, devotions, or even definitions in the Church, but simply in order to remain aware of what Church, ecclesial spirit, ecclesial conduct really are? Will this distract us from the hard realities of the present and lure us into a Utopia? But are not Mary’s few words—“they have no wine” and then “do whatever he tells you”—sufficient to mark her as the archetype of the Church’s concern for the poor, for their hidden, shamefaced poverty? Does she not live in the midst of the basic law of revelation, namely, that God casts down the mighty from their thrones and raises the lowly, fills the hungry with good things, and sends the rich away empty-handed? We recover our greatest, most serious concerns in Mary’s attitude, but as a part of something larger: her Son’s concern that God’s name be glorified on earth, that his kingdom come and his will be done on earth as in heaven.

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1 Heinz Schürmann considers Mary’s question to the angel (Lk 1:34) as a redactional matter (Das Lukasevangelium, vol. 1 [Freiburg, 1969], 51), inserted to give a reason for the angel’s answer about the overshadowing by the Spirit.

2 Tertullian, Ad. Marc. 4, 10.

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