Mary, Protestant and Catholic

In my wanderings on X I was directed towards an interesting document: Who Is My Mother? The Role and Status of the Mother of Jesus in the New Testament and in Roman Catholicism by one E. Svendsen. It’s especially interesting for me since his first degree came from Tennessee Temple University/University of Tennessee at Knoxville. I doubt that he, sitting in class at Temple, had any idea of the heartburn the whole subject of Mary caused the Catholic Charismatic renewal not so far from where he was getting his education. I plan to take this in a personal direction, but I don’t want to avoid the bigger picture: the matter of the Mother of God, more than any other single issue, divides Roman Catholics and Protestants, and that divide is about as gaping as the one between the rich man and Lazarus.

In the Scriptures? So What?

Svendsen’s central purpose is to show that the Roman Catholic concept of Mary is at odds with that presented in the Scriptures. As is the custom with seminary academics and those adjacent thereto, he gets lost in the weeds from time to time, but his case is basically sound. It is at its best when he deals with Mary’s appearances in the Gospel narratives after Our Lord’s birth; she could not grasp the radical nature of who he was and what he was doing and teaching, that only becoming fully evident after his Resurrection. She wasn’t alone; that ignorance permeated his other disciples as well. In his discussion of Mark 3:21-35, Svendsen discusses Jesus’ rebuff of his mother and his brothers; a Mary who had divine wisdom as the Roman Catholics posit would have never put herself in the position of such a rebuff. (This also shows that Mary did not grasp the superseding of blood relationships with the formation of the Christian church in the blood of Jesus Christ, something I’ve seen repeated from my own home church to the maudlin sentimentality of Scots-Irish evangelicals.)

Such arguments, however, will fall on deaf Roman Catholic ears, as their response will be simple: the Tradition of an infallible church and Pope say otherwise. Svendsen does investigate the witness of the Fathers, but in doing so he runs into Bossuet’s objection: at what point in history do you stop agreeing with the Fathers and the Church? But that’s a two-edged sword, by their own admission Peter was entrusted to preserve the deposit of faith, does contradicting the Scriptures accomplish that? Of course not, we are at an impasse.

The Days of Wine and Vatican II

At the start of his work, Svensden notes the following:

Küng and Moltmann, relating the events at Vatican II (1962-1965), inform us that the proposal to draw up a separate document on Mary was rejected by a slim majority of the council (1,114 votes to 1,074), and Marian doctrine was instead incorporated within the larger Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium). The council further “explicitly warned against Marian exaggerations” (1983:vii). Since that time Marian emphasis has waned considerably from the excesses found in the period just prior to the council. McKenzie witnesses to this same phenomenon when he says: “When I studied theology nearly fifty years ago, my professor said that this belief [Mary as Mediatrix of all grace] was ripe for dogmatic definition [by the pope]; now it has fallen into the Marian silence.” (1983:4).

The source he refers to is the work Mary in the churches, the 1983 compendium edited by Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann. It was the work of advocates of a more moderate role for Mary, but as we will see, the view from the pew is that by 1983 they were fighting a rear-guard action. One of the contributors was John McKenzie, to whom I refer frequently on this blog and whose works The Two-Edged Sword and The Power and the Wisdom I have found life-altering. Svensden’s inclusion of material like this is one of the few admissions by a Protestant I’ve run across that adoration of Mary has ever slacked off in the Roman Catholic Church, but I am a witness to the contrary.

My first Mass was on Mother’s Day 1972 at St. Edward’s Catholic Church in Palm Beach. Sitting a few rows behind the place where Jack Kennedy knelt with his family when in town, I was regaled by two things: the Novus Ordo Missae, which was for me a positive, and one of the schmaltziest, saccharine sermons I have heard from any pulpit, where the priest related our own mothers to Our Mother–Mary. That didn’t go down too well; if I had been force to endure more of those, I might not have swam the Tiber. Two parishes later I was at a parish where my parish priest received me into the Roman Catholic Church and seldom an Ave Maria was heard in Latin or English. (He also introduced me to John McKenzie and G.K. Chesterton.) That lack of Marian devotion continued through my years in university and up until I left for the two and a half year ordeal at First Baptist Church.

Much of the nonchalant attitude towards Our Lady was part and parcel with a post-Vatican II belief that the Catholic Church, like a house lived in for a long time, had accumulated a lot of clutter and that it was necessary to clean the house to make it better to inhabit. Marian devotions and prayer weren’t the only thing in the crosshairs (one only needs to recall striking St. Christopher from the calendar because we had no evidence he actually existed) but they were high on the list.

When I returned to Roman Catholicism in 1981 things were different. In the intervening time the new Pope John Paul II had gotten up to speed and my Catholic Charismatic prayer group had split–bitterly so–over Marian devotions. (I found out later we weren’t alone.) The two were related. Vatican II had laid out what were on paper fairly restrictive conditions for ecumenical activity. In the chaos that followed Vatican II, these could be ignored, and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal did so with gusto. (That includes the community of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.) Marian devotions could not be cast aside so casually, and the Church under John Paul II used them as a “wedge issue” to enforce what Protestants would call “denominational distinctives” and get the non-Catholic people out of the Renewal. It’s not an understatement that the Catholic Charismatic Renewal would have never gotten off the ground if the Church had enforced Marian spirituality in the 1960’s the way they did in the 1980’s.

So (Where) Do We Go From Here?

At this point this state of affairs–which has continued under both Benedict XVI and Francis–is pretty much reduced to missal attacks (I saw this delightful autocorrect misspelling on X) on social media. It’s tempting to think that Leo XIV, a product of a low period in Marian enthusiasm, might relent and take a more moderate course on the subject, but I wouldn’t count on it. Marian devotions have support in the Church across the spectrum, and priests and bishops have in them a useful weapon to keep the faithful in line.

McKenzie mentioned earlier the business of Mary as the Mediatrix of all graces. If Leo really wants the nuclear option on this topic, he only needs to proclaim ex cathedra that she is the co-Redemptrix along with her Son. There are difficult theological problems with that position which exceed those of the Immaculate Conception, but we got that, and there’s a steady undertow in favour of it. Such a move would put paid to much of the dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, which would be painful for those who are engaged in it, but that’s life.