Mary makes a comeback: a new book predicts the return of the Mother of God, beloved by ordinary Catholics, but ignored by reformers

National Catholic Reporter, April 30, 2004 by Andrew Greeley

MISSING MARY By Charlene Spretnak Palgrave, 274 pages, $24.95

The historian and critic Henry Adams, a quintessential New England WASP, wrote a poem to Our Lady that was found in his papers after he died.

   Simple as when I asked her aid
      before;
   Humble as when I prayed for grace
      in vain
   Seven hundred years ago; weak,
      weary, sore
   In heart and hope, I asked your help
      again ...

   You who remember all, remember
      me;
   An English scholar of a Norman
      name,
   I was a thousand who then crossed
      sea
   To wrangle in the Paris schools
      for fame.

   When your Byzantine portal was
      still young
   I prayed there with my master
      Abelard;
   When Ave Maris Stella was first
      sung
   I helped to sing it there with St.
      Bernard

   For centuries I brought you all
      my cares,
   And vexed you with the murmurs
      of a child;
   You heard the tedious burden of
      my prayers;
   You could not grant them, but
      at least you smiled.

That smile of Our Lady is the metaphor that Creates the perennial appeal of the Mary story: She represents the mother love of God. The Ultimate may not love his creatures as a mother loves a newborn child, but the suggestion that this smile is a hint of the nature of the Really Real is such good news that it will persist no matter how powerful or determined its opponents are.

In Missing Mary, Charlene Spretnak, a professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, details the opposition to Our Lady during and after the Second Vatican Council, how liturgists, catechists, religious educators, ecumenists and feminist theologians have tried to diminish Mary's role in Catholic life, if not eliminate it all together. She argues that they almost succeeded, but now there are signs of a "return to Mary." They were surely successful on the level of intellectual discussion. Theologians shy away from the subject. Liturgists insist that screens be put in front of her statue at liturgical events when Protestants are present. Spretnak reports that when she tells women (nuns, usually) that she is a pro-Mary progressives, they reply that is impossible. If you are pro-Mary you have to be a conservative. Such are the constraints of ideology that admits of no nuances, no reservations, no limited dissent--and no critical thought.

My friend Garry Wills suggests that Mary be discarded and replaced with a feminine Holy Spirit. Sr. Elizabeth Johnson says that because the metaphor of Mary for the mother love of God is "patriarchical" in its origins it must be abandoned. We must rather emphasize the womanliness of God Herself. In an observation that is almost self-satirical, Johnson criticizes Mary for being "passive" at the marriage feast of Cana. ("She noticed the lack of wine and, rather than deal with the lack on her own initiative, performed an act of self-emptying by turning to Jesus for help.") Such an unintentionally comic reductio ad absurdum is what rigid ideology does even to brilliant people. It is an ideology that wants to sweep away most of the cultural riches of the Catholic heritage, to pretend that nothing worthwhile happened between the last book of the Bible and the middle 1960s.

One could say to both Professor Wills and Professor Johnson that one cannot see the smile of either God or the Holy Spirit, but one can see the smile of the Madonna, and that's what sacramentalism is all about.

I ask myself why this vendetta against Our Lady and her smile. She has often been distorted as a negative sexual image. The right-wing have declared that she is a champion of their cause. Professional Mariologists seem to believe that one improves the power of the metaphor by adding new and more outrageous titles. The alleged private revelations have been used as a self-righteous, neo-Gnostic club to beat up on those who are dubious. Sentimental and silly songs and creepy, tawdry devotions have caricaturized her. The metaphor has been tattered and battered, distorted and perverted, twisted and turned. It does not follow, however, that Henry Adams' smile of the virgin is not an awesomely powerful metaphor. Nor does it follow that one should dismiss or ignore the tsunami of painting, architecture, music, poetry and sculpture that the metaphor has produced for the last millennium and a half just because Professor Wills and Professor Johnson think the metaphor is politically incorrect.

Like Charlene Spretnak, I would like to think of myself as a pro-Mary progressive. I would like to believe that it is the genius of Catholicism to say "both ... and." I would like to be able to persuade myself that one can say "both ecumenism and Mary," "both liturgy and the rosary," "both Mary and dialogue with Islam" (which devotes a whole chapter of the Quran to her), and "both the Council and the 'Salve Regina.' "It would seem that such deviation is not permitted. In these critical days of the fight for gender equality, such messy paradigms are intolerable.

However, the new generation of idol smashers will be no more successful than were the followers of Henry VIII or Martin Luther or Leo the Isaurian and Constantine Copronymus. You cannot wipe out a 1,500-year tradition with a few keystrokes on your computer. Charlene Spretnak writes of a "return to Mary." However, in truth she never went away. Dean Hoge, in his study of Catholic identity among young people, lists four criteria that are checked as "very important" by over 50 percent of the respondents--concern for the poor, the presence of God in the Sacraments, the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and devotion to Mary the mother of Jesus. Conor Ward and I replicated this in Ireland, where Ward is a professor at the National University of Ireland, and the findings were the same. Indeed the strongest Irish support for Mary was in the cohort who were born since 1978, who do not go to Mass and ignore the church's sexual teaching.