Mark Shea: Mariology From A-Z

Zenit ^ | 7/17/09 | Annamarie Adkins

[bdeaner]

One would think it impossible to spill any more ink about the Blessed Virgin Mary, judging from the number of Marian titles on the shelf at a local Catholic bookstore.

But when popular Catholic author Mark Shea was considering entering the Church, there were no comprehensive titles where he could address his concerns as an evangelical Protestant about Catholic Marian doctrine and devotion.

Twenty years later, that book was still missing from the shelves, so Shea set out to write it.

The result is Mary, Mother of the Son, a three-volume apologetics tool published by Catholic Answers.

Shea is senior content editor at Catholic Exchange and a regular columnist for both Inside Catholic and the National Catholic Register.

In Part 1 of this interview, he shares with ZENIT why almost everything non-Catholics think they "know" about Mary is wrong.

ZENIT: Why did you write a book about the Mother of God? Where does your trilogy fit on the already crowded shelf of books and treatises about Mary?

Shea: I wrote this book because it's the book I wish somebody had written when I was coming into the Church.

I waited around for 20 years, hoping somebody else would do it, but when nobody did, I decided I'd take on the project (which is only fair since I'm the only one who really knows what questions and doubts I had and what would constitute a satisfactory reply to them).

As to where the trilogy fits on the bookshelf, I suppose I'd say "Anywhere."

That is to say, part of the reason I wrote it is because there simply wasn't any book I could find that did what this book does. For instance, the books on Marian dogma didn't deal with questions about apparitions. Devotional literature didn’t answer questions about where the Church was getting all this stuff about Mary. Books tracing the development of doctrine didn't talk about the rosary. In short, the literature was out there, but most people don't have time to locate all the resources for the host of questions they have about Mary. So I created Mary, Mother of the Son to be a sort of "one-stop shopping" resource for virtually every issue a non-Catholic (or uncatechized Catholic) might have concerning Marian doctrine and devotion.

It tackles everything from the sources of Marian belief and practice (a huge issue since oodles of non-Catholics simply assume the whole thing is a data dump from paganism) to the Catholic approach to Scripture to the four Marian dogmas to the broad spectrum of Marian devotion to private revelations and apparitions to possible ways forward in Catholic/Evangelical conversations about the Blessed Virgin.

When it comes to Marian Willies, I've run the gamut in my own life and had to deal with pretty much every difficulty and problem with Mary to which non-Catholic flesh is heir, so it's a book that comes from my heart (and gut) as well as my head.

Nothing in it is new (God willing) and the whole thing is ultimately a restatement of the Tradition. But it's a restatement that tries to run the gamut of Catholic teaching on Mary, not simply focus in on one specialized area. And it's written in order to be intelligible to the non-specialist.

ZENIT: You discuss in your books why most of what people think they know about both Mary and the Catholic Church is really pseudo-knowledge. Can you describe this phenomenon and why there is so much pseudo-knowledge lurking in the culture about the Church?

Shea: Pseudo-knowledge is the stuff that "everybody knows," not because it's true, but because somebody with "important hair" said it on TV, or because your favorite magazine said so, or because a beloved character in a movie stated it as fact and lots of other people repeated it around millions of water coolers.

Pseudo-knowledge is why "everybody knows" Humphrey Bogart said, "Play it again, Sam" (except he didn't). It's why "everybody knows" the US Constitution speaks of a "wall of separation" between Church and State (except it doesn't). And it's why "everybody knows" medieval Europeans all believed the world was flat (except they didn't).

Pseudo-knowledge causes people to go around talking as though they're certain that at one time or other they must have read the Federalist Papers, or boned up on the meteorological data for global warming from the latest scientific studies, or committed to memory the documents of the Council of Trent, when they cannot, in fact, quote five words from any of these things.

What they really know is what that resonant, well-modulated voice on TV or their own circle of friends (or both) told them was "common knowledge" concerning government or science or the Catholic Church.

And, of course, it's why "everybody knows" that "the Catholic Mary" is really just a warmed-over pagan goddess. It's a modern myth that has circulated around for so long that nobody even thinks to question it. And when you do, you discover there's no there there. Nothing. Not a scrap of actual historical support for the claim.

Like many of the myths about the Catholic Church, it arises from a superficial acquaintance with the Church (she's hard to avoid completely and people often judge by fragmentary impressions) and from the fact that many non-Catholics listen only to other non-Catholics circulating baseless junk as "fact".

ZENIT: What is the most important role Mary has played in the history of the Church and its mission of evangelizing the nations?

Shea: Being who she is. Mary is the "type of the Church" in the words of St. Ambrose. Her mission has been the same ever since Jesus gave her to us with the words "Behold your mother." As the model disciple, the Mother of God, the Ever-Virgin, Immaculate and Assumed into Heaven, she has constantly been interceding for us and has, on occasion, even been entrusted with critically needed calls to repentance and grace (as at Fatima and other places).

ZENIT: Why, in your opinion, does Mary keep appearing to people all over the globe? Is there a common theme in the various apparitions of the Virgin?

Shea: Essentially her mission has always been the same: to say to the world "Do whatever Jesus tells you."

As I point out in Mary, Mother of the Son, Mary's life is the most profoundly referred life any mortal has ever lived. All true private revelations have one thing in common: they point us right back to the public revelation of Jesus Christ and to the apostolic tradition of the Church. Mary's message is radically not new: Be good. Go to Mass. Trust Jesus. Little boys should tell the truth. That sort of thing.

If you are living a serious Catholic life of trust in Jesus, obedience to Holy Church, the practice of virtue, and frequent reception of the sacraments, you are doing everything that all those visions, miraculous healings, and dancing suns were wrought by God to say to the human race.

ZENIT: Why do so many important Church documents -- from conciliar statements (Lumen Gentium) to papal encyclicals (Caritas in Veritate) -- seem to always conclude with a paean and exhortation to seek the intercession of the Blessed Mother?

Shea: Because it is good and fitting (and smart) to do so.

God has given her primacy among all creatures and we are to accord her hyperdulia: the highest honor due a mere creature. But "creature" is such a cold word, isn't it? Like something out of a science fiction movie. You wouldn't give your Mom a Mother's Day card and address it "Dear Exalted Creature". You would give her a card that says, "Dear Mom: I love you and I appreciate all you've done and sacrificed for me." The Church says the same to our Mother.

Some will complain that speaking of Mary's "sacrifices" is taking away honor due to Jesus alone. I reply: Imagine a church service for the parents of a son killed in Iraq in which the pastor points to the grieving parents and says, "God was the one Who gave these parents their child and it was He Who sent their son to die for the freedom of the Iraqi people. They didn't sacrifice anything. They merely assented to be a part in God's plan."

Nobody talks that way at any time about any sacrifice that any ordinary person ever makes. All the rest of the time, we can grasp the fact that, while God is the Author of all things, our sacrifices and choices really matter too -- by the grace of God.

The only time people talk this way is when Evangelicals who are weirded out by Mary dehumanize her and dismiss the sword that pierced her heart so they can talk as though she was utterly irrelevant to the Incarnation and Passion of Christ, instead of the one who was, in fact, more intimately bound up with Him than any person who ever lived. No mortal suffered and lost more in the Passion than Our Lady did. If we can spare words of thanks to the parents of a fallen soldier, how much more gratitude should we have for her who gave, just as God did, her only Son.

So it's only fitting that the Church honor (and ask the intercession of) the Blessed Virgin. God didn't go to all the trouble of perfecting her in his holiness, love and power just to throw all that away. For 2000 years, it has been her joy to intercede for her children -- because she is more like Christ than anyone who ever lived and it his joy to do exactly the same thing.

Even though the early Protestant Reformers praised the Virgin Mary -- some even had a great devotion to her -- Catholic Marian doctrine has become a stumbling block for many Protestants and divided Christians for over four centuries.

Now, however, some Protestants are rediscovering the Blessed Mother, reinvigorating conversations between Catholics and Protestants about her role in the life and faith of the Church.

ZENIT: Why is Mary such a stumbling block to Christian unity? Shouldn't all Christians at least be able to unite around their Mother?

Shea: They should, but they haven't for roughly four centuries. There's hope in that number however, because it means that hostility to and fear of Mary is, historically speaking, a very recent phenomenon and one that really only took off well after the Reformation began.

Many of the Reformers had a profound devotion to Mary and, in fact, accepted much of Catholic teaching about her. However, as Protestantism became more remote from Catholic teaching (and as, in English-speaking countries, Elizabeth I found it very convenient to supplant the cult of the Virgin with a political cult of the Virgin Queen), that connection failed and was eventually broken.

Along with that went the loss of a sense of the sacramental, of the senses of Scripture, and of an appreciation for the feminine in the life of the Church. Mary came to be seen almost exclusively as a sort of pagan goddess and an actual threat to genuine Christian devotion: a perception that would have been absolutely foreign to the mind of any Christian in the first 16 centuries of the Church.

ZENIT: You note that attacks on the Church's Mariology are really attacks on its Christology. How and why is this the case?

Shea: The thing about Mary is that the thing is never about Mary.

Take the Virgin Birth. One of the earliest slurs uttered against Jesus was that he was a bastard, the product of a liaison between Mary and a Roman soldier named Pantera (probably a corruption of "parthenos" which is Greek for "virgin").

Is the point of the slur to attack Mary? Of course not! The point is to attack Jesus as a mere common bastard and to deny that he is the Son of God or of any divine origin.

Likewise, when the heretic Nestorius demanded that Christians no longer hail Mary as "Theotokos" or "God bearer", his attack was directed not at Mary, but at the notion that the Man Jesus and the Second Person of the Trinity were a unity.

Similarly, the question, "Where is the Assumption of Mary in the Bible?" is not really about Mary. It's a question about the validity of Christ's sacred Tradition and the authority of Christ's Church.

"Why should I pray to Mary?" is not a question about Mary. It's a question about the relationship of the living and the dead in Christ.

"Do Catholics worship Mary?" is not a question about Mary. It's a question about whether Catholics really worship Christ.

In short, Evangelical jitters about Mary both pay homage to and yet overlook the central truth about Mary that the Catholic Church wants us to see: that Mary's life, in its entirety, is a referred life.

Attacks on Christ and his gospel virtually always are made via his Body, the Church. We saw this, for instance, with The Da Vinci Code. The message, as usual, was “I have the highest respect for Jesus, it’s just that the Church has totally perverted what he really came to say (which was, by a strange coincidence, what I am saying).” And since Mary is the type of the Church, it is fitting that she stands as a sort of hedge of protection around the truth of the Faith.

ZENIT: Should Protestants and others be concerned about Catholic Marian devotions? Is the poorly catechized Catholic who clings to her Rosary and prays in front of her makeshift shrine to Our Lady of Perpetual Help really in spiritual danger?

Shea: When it comes to Mary, the average Evangelical Protestant is in a position analogous to that of a teetotaler terrified that a sip of wine at communion will transform him into a raging drunken libertine.

Rather than be hyper-focused on the question of whether Catholics honor Mary "too much" and are just about to bow down to Astarte and Isis, the Evangelical would find much more spiritual benefit asking the question "How is it we Evangelicals honor her ‘just enough'?"

When honestly considered (especially against the backdrop of historic Christianity and the practice of the apostolic Church), what he will discover is that it is Evangelicalism that is peculiarly fearful of the woman whom Scripture declares all generations shall called blessed.

Aside from pulling her out of the closet to sing "Round yon virgin, mother and child" she is basically never spoken of among Evangelicals—except to say that Catholics are way overboard about her.

But the reality is that the most Marian Catholics (think John Paul II or Mother Teresa) also tend to be the most Christocentric ones. That's because all real Marian devotion refers us to Christ.

Is that to say it's absolutely impossible for a Catholic to make an idol of Mary? Certainly not.

Human ingenuity in sin is never asleep and we can make an idol out of any creature. On very rare occasions, Mariolatry can happen. But it is to say that Protestant fears on this score are as much in touch with reality as a cradle Catholic of bygone generations who feared that reading the Bible on his own will lead directly to snake handling.

Catholics have, by and large, entered the twenty-first century when it comes to that superstition. But there are still millions of Protestants who subscribe to a grossly superstitious fear of Marian devotion that is a relic of the late nineteenth century. I’ve traveled from Australia to Ireland and have never met a soul who mistook Mary for God. The real blunder about Mary to which some Catholics (the sort who are fascinated with visions, apparitions and private revelations) are prone is this: some mistake her not for another God, but for another Pope, insisting that the bishops have to do this or that because Mary told them to.

For both Mary-wary Protestants and Catholics who imagine the Church should navigate by making Marian Apparitions into a sort of One Woman Magisterium, It's time to move on (or rather back, to the practice of the early Church fathers and a clear understanding of the Church’s magisterial office).

ZENIT: Is there too much attention paid to Mary in today's Church, or too little?

Shea: There's too little attention paid to the Faith, period. So ignorance and apathy about Mary are part of that, I reckon.

ZENIT: Your book is praised by a number of prominent evangelical-Protestant theologians. Is there a growing interest in the figure of Mary among Protestants? Why?

Shea: Starvation makes you hungry. Jesus knew what he was doing when he gave Mary to the Church as our mother. The human soul needs her and Protestantism has been starved of her for going on four centuries.

So there is, in the Providence of God, a growing interest in her, especially among the rising generation of Evangelicals (sometimes referred to as the "Emergent Church").

People are taking a fresh look at the ancient reverence of her in the apostolic Churches and asking "Where is the harm in that?" It's a good question, especially since Mary is, in every healthy expression of Christian spirituality, always immediately pointing us to Jesus.

And, of course, through Mary's unique gifts in Christ, God can minister to hurts in the human soul that are unreachable by other forms of Christian piety.

Evangelicals, for instance, who have lost a child, have found themselves turning to Mary for consolation since she too knows what it is to watch her Son die. That's a mighty powerful bond of compassion and it can overcome the fears of Mary which typically prevail in Evangelical culture.

ZENIT: Archbishop Fulton Sheen once wrote in an essay about the apparitions at Fatima that Mary was the key to bringing Christ to the Islamic world. What do you think of this proposal?

Shea: I think he's on to something.

I have no idea how it will all play out, but I was struck by a conversation I once had with a man from Turkey who emailed me asking for more information about the Catholic Church. He was raised Muslim but was drawn to Christ.

Looking over the vast menu of Christianities available on the web he was very quick to pare it all down to the Catholic Church. Why? "Because you honor Mary as we are taught to do in Islam."

I think there's something mighty important going on in that, just as I have noticed that, among the various folks I have met who have become Catholic from a Jewish background, virtually all of them have had some sort of mystical encounter with Mary.

I'm not sure what that means, but it has always felt significant to me.

She seems to be getting busier as we draw ever closer to That Day.

[Petronski]

Well, I don’t regard the RC church as “the church.”

Me neither!

The Catholic Church is "the Church."

[Petronski]

And the replies are...

Plentiful and well-documented.

[Petronski]

None of that says “divinity.”

YOU say that says “divinity.”

But it does not.

[Petronski]

So what do we have, generally, from the Catholic Church, about Mary?

Centuries upon centuries of scholarship that you do not understand.

[Petronski]

Oh and one more thing - if a Catholic DOES believe in Mary's divinity, would they admit it, given (for example) the aggression I've received here?

This is the most exquisite example of The Game that I have ever seen.

Catholics don't believe what they say they believe, they believe what the anti-Catholic bigot says they believe.

Further, they deny they believe what the anti-Catholic bigot says they believe so that they can make the anti-Catholic bigot look bad.

O hubris, thy name is Talisker.

[Petronski]

...you refuse to declare that you are speaking from your understanding as a Catholic, or even that you are a Catholic.

LOLOLOL

[Iscool]

You need to look up the meanings of venerate and worship.

I have...And I see many Catholics worshiping Mary...

[Talisker]

From the article (you know, the one that is the point of this thread?):

Zenit: Why, in your opinion, does Mary keep appearing to people all over the globe? Is there a common theme in the various apparitions of the Virgin?

Shea: ...If you are living a serious Catholic life... you are doing everything that all those visions, miraculous healings, and dancing suns were wrought by God to say to the human race.

Notice - he doesn’t say, what apparitions? Rather, he acknowledges “visions, miraculous healings, and dancing suns” which, of course, are attributed to Mary, but which he specifies as “wrought by God.”

And this is my point - that the Church is making an enormous effort to tell millions of Catholics receiving “apparitions of the Virgin, visions, miraculous healings, and dancing suns” that Mary is NOT divine, because they are confused by these apparently divine experiences into believing that Mary IS divine.

So, in a direct question about Mary, the author of the book attributes these Marian experiences to God, and doesn’t mention Mary. Why? Because that is the point he is making: that that is the problem the Church has, that many, many Catholics - not thousands, but due to Mary’s many, many, personal interventions and public apparitions (i.e Medjugorje, etc.), millions - believe Mary is divine.

And, according to the Catholic Church, this error must be corrected.

That mere EXISTENCE of these simple, obvious and well-known facts are met by relentless denial, ridicule, slander and personal attacks on this thread merely underscores the intense concern the Church has over this issue. And as usual in such a situation, there are always true believers quite willing to charge off and slaughter the heretics for even observing the problem exists.

Heretically speaking, therefore, perhaps it is precisely that eager willingness of so many true believers to crush contemplative thought in the name of protecting doctrine, that has caused Mary to now resort to contacting so many of her children directly.

[Mr Rogers]

You do realize that the word used for the brothers and sisters of Jesus is the same word used EVERYWHERE in the New Testament for brother or sister...don’t you?

There is another word for cousin, which is not used. Brother can mean fellow countryman, but that makes no sense in the context, since EVERYONE at the event was, in that sense, his brother and sister.

I don’t care IF Mary remained a virgin, but it is certainly not the plain teaching of scripture. Catholics believe it because the Pope has declared it, not because the Scriptures suggest it - and Scripture certainly does NOT require it!

[Iscool]

Oh that is Christian, mock the Pieta which is depiction of Mary holding the body of Christ after He has been brought down from the Cross. Can you get any lower?

Not guilty...I am again mocking the Catholic depiction of the event...You guys most always make Mary much larger than Jesus...You always depict the Son of God as some effeminate wimp...And this statue is no different...Always elevating the mother above the Son...

[Upbeat]

I don’t normally comment on debates like this but something struck me while reading the back and forth posts. I have learned a great deal about Roman Catholic doctrine on Free Republic. A running complaint from a number of your fellow Catholics, here on Free Republic, has been a lack of full understanding of Catholic doctrine by numbers of Catholics who have been poorly catechized. If there are over a billion Catholics in the world I would suggest, respectfully, that it is not that far out of line to suggest that “some tens of millions” of Catholics don’t understand the role of Mary in official Catholic doctrine. If 50 million don’t have a proper understanding, it still means that more than 95% do. BTW, it was a Catholic brother-in-Christ whose prayer, friendship and practical help were key in my return to a relationship with Jesus Christ. God bless you

[Iscool]

This is plain common sense.

That's why your wrong...So you think Jesus was born as God with flesh...Sinless flesh on top of it...You need to put down those Catholic books of propaganda, dump your logic and read what God has to say about it in the scriptures...

[stfassisi]

..So you think Jesus was born as God with flesh

God was not flesh until He joined with Mary.

Are you drunk?

[Ann Archy]

WHAT?? The Cardinal os saying the exact thing I did....no Catholics WORSIP Saints...they are VEVERATED....REVERED....NOT ADORED! God is ADORED!

[Mr Rogers]

“Joining flesh with a sinful Mary would mean that Christ takes on a sinful nature because He took a flesh from a sinful human nature to become true man and true God.”

Maybe I’m not understanding what you are saying. Jesus became fully man, and was fully tested by sin. How could He have been tempted as we are, if He didn’t fully partake of humanity?

Jesus conquered sin. He didn’t escape temptation, but neither did He give in to it.

[Iscool]

Do you have evidence of this level of acceptance? The evidence that I have indicates that the Septuagint was the Scriptures of choice for the Jewish people, including the Deuterocanonicals. When did any Catholic authority not accept the Septuagint?

Some of your earliest church fathers quoted from the Majority text, NOT from the Septuagint...One of these days I may get ambitious and look up the references again...

That fact alone is enough to debunk the Septuagint theory...

[Iscool]

Of the approximately 300 Old Testament quotes in the New Testament, approximately 2/3 of them came from the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) which included the deuterocanonical books that the Protestants later removed.

You can dump all you want...All that proves is that Origen copied the Greek of the NT when he created the Septuagint in about 350 AD...

[Iscool]

Article 829 of The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: "But while in the most Blessed Virgin the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she exists without spot or wrinkle, the faithful still strive to conquer sin and increase in holiness. And so they turn their eyes to Mary: in her, the Church is already the “all-holy."

Apparently these people don't even read their own church history other than the talking points that their church pushes...

In this paragraph, it is acknowledged that the 'Church' is the pope and the institution...

The faithful are NOT the church which is a direct contradiction of God (again) and the scriptures...

[Iscool]

Are you drunk?

I'm not Catholic...

[Talisker]

Centuries upon centuries of scholarship that you do not understand.

What is wrong with my understanding of the Catholic Church's teachings about Mary? I have stated that the Church teaches she is not divine, but rather the Mother of God and an intercessionary responsive to prayer, existing in spirit and body in heaven and declared exalted by the pope. Do you have a problem with that?

But why do I ask - instead of simply stating your personal Catholic faith, you post dog cartoons.