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>Jan Jarboe Russell
>New York Times News Service
>Saturday, January 6, 2001
>
>
>"The world of today is in desperate need of a mother," whispered Prof. Mark
>Miravalle as he sat behind his desk at Franciscan University in
>Steubenville, Ohio, carefully fingering a string of rosary beads.
>
>Half a world away, inside the Vatican, yet another enormous box arrived
>filled with petitions asking Pope John Paul II to exercise his absolute
>power to proclaim a new and highly debated dogma: that the Virgin Mary is a
>co-redeemer with Jesus and cooperates fully with her son in the redemption
>of mankind.
>
>Miravalle, 41, began the petition drive four years ago from his obscure
>position as a professor of Mariology -- the study of Mary -- at one of the
>most conservative Catholic universities in the nation. Since then the pope
>has received more than 6 million signatures from 148 countries asking him
>to give the Virgin Mary the ultimate promotion.
>
>In addition to ordinary Catholics, Miravalle has received support from 550
>bishops and 42 cardinals, as well as from Cardinal John O'Connor and Mother
>Teresa. Along the way, his movement has laid bare a deep-seated conflict
>between wildly popular devotion to the Virgin Mary and the efforts of the
>established church to keep that devotion in check.
>
>If Miravalle's campaign succeeds and John Paul proclaims the Virgin Mary as
>a co-redeemer, she would be a vastly more powerful figure, something close
>to a fourth member of the Holy Trinity and the primary female face through
>which Christians experience the divine. Specifically, Roman Catholics would
>be required to accept three new spiritual truths: that Mary is
>co-redemptrix and participates in people's redemption, that Mary is
>mediatrix and has the power to grant all graces and that Mary is "the
>advocate for the people of God," in Miravalle's words, and has the
>authority to influence God's judgments.
>
>For the millions of Virgin Mary devotees who have signed Miravalle's
>petitions, these are an accepted part of their daily spiritual lives. They
>represent what theologians call popular piety, practices that are widely
>accepted by ordinary religious people over the learned objections of the
>establishment. Indeed the idea has been present in Catholicism at least as
>far back as the 14th century. There is also historic precedent for petition
>campaigns like Miravalle's. Two other Marian dogmas -- the dogma of the
>Assumption in 1950, which declared that Mary was taken up, body and soul,
>to heaven after her death, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of
>1854, which established that Mary was preserved from original sin -- were
>both preceded by floods of petitions. Yet within the Vatican, the dogma
>that Miravalle advocates has touched off a private holy war.
>
>Although it has the support of at least 12 cardinals in Rome, others fear
>that its acceptance would cause a major schism among Catholics and set back
>all efforts at ecumenism. Because the dogma would be an infallible
>proclamation by the pope, it would trigger a renewed debate over the role
>of the pope's power in modern society.
>
>"It seems to put her on an equal footing with Christ," said the Rev. John
>Roten, director of the International Marian Library in Dayton, articulating
>the primary reason for opposition. "That just won't do." The Rev. Rene
>Laurentin, a French monk and a leading Mary scholar, agrees. In a fax,
>Laurentin said that the proposed dogma would be the equivalent of launching
>"bombs" at the Protestants and would deepen the breach between the Vatican
>and the Eastern Orthodox church. "Mary is the model of our faith, but she
>is not divine," he said. "There is no mediation or co-redemption except in
>Christ. He alone is God."
>
>'Totus tuus'
>
>Pope John Paul has made no secret of his devotion to Mary. He has the
>phrase "totus tuus" (which in Latin means "totally hers") as his papal
>motto and credits the Virgin Mary with saving his life during a 1981
>assassination attempt and for the fall of communism. He has used the phrase
>"co-redemptrix" six times in his papacy to describe Mary, which has led
>Miravalle and his petitioners to hope that during his lifetime the pope
>will proclaim her co-redeemer.
>
>