Viewpoint : 'Our solitary boast'
Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
TIME magazine titled a recent cover story "Hail, Mary." It devoted eight pages to Jesus of Nazareth's mother.
"A Mary for All" was how the Economist bannered an earlier report. And Life magazine led off with "The Mystery of Mary." And shortly thereafter, Time did a two-page spread titled, "Mary, So Contrary."
What's going on here? After centuries of "sullen neglect … Christians of all denominations are finding their own reasons to venerate Mary," Time reports. Families, pastors and theologians, within US Protestant churches, are rediscovering the Virgin Mother.
Harvard University minister Peter Gomes notes this trend in a joke about a Protestant pastor at heaven's gates. "Ah, Professor. I know you've met my Father," Jesus says in making the introductions. "But I believe you don't know my mother."
The new appreciation of Mary stems from the very arena in which Protestants historically pride themselves most: a careful and full reading of Scriptures.
Mary stood by the Cross. And she figures in "a skein of appearances longer and more strategically placed than any other character in Scriptures," Beverly Gaventa, Princeton University professor of New Testament literature, points out.
"She is present in all key situations -- at Jesus' birth, at his death and in the Upper Room," Gaventa writes in "Personalities of the New Testament," Whether in Egypt, Nazareth or Cana, "there isn't a figure comparable to her."
The new thinkers are exploring the implications of Mary's excruciating presence at the crucifixion. She "kept Christian witness intact almost single-handedly through its darkest moment."
There are critics, Time notes. Southern Baptist Convention leaders complain their colleagues are "guilty of over-reaching."
That would baffle Muslims. Mary is Islam's most honored woman, the Economist notes. She's "the only one to have an entire chapter named after her in the Koran."
"Christians and Muslims alike see in Mary an affirmation that there is no limit to proximity of God that any human can attain," the report asserts. "Surely, that is reason enough for people of any faith to feel reverence for history's foremost Jewish mother."
The Economist cites the "wisdom" texts in Jewish and Christian scriptures and the Eastern Church's lesser-known Gospel by James. It reviews studies by Methodist Hebrew scholar Margaret Barker to Jaime Moran, religion and psychology writer.
Muslim and Eastern Christians "cherish the story of Mary's childhood in a place of supreme holiness. Both name Mary's guardian as the priest Zechariah or Zakariya."
"Catholics would tell you, rather firmly, that Mary is not a goddess," the Economist notes. "She is not worshipped but rather venerated: a human being with a unique role in praying for and protecting the human race."
That hews closely to Muslim belief.
The wisdom texts speak of a "woman clothed with the sun." And down the centuries, "heart-stopping turns of phrase" have been applied to Mary, the Economist notes. "Our tainted nature's solitary boast" was the way one poet put it.
"Shortly after Vatican II, a period of Marian silence descended," recalls Fr. Catalino Arevalo, S.J., of the Ateneo de Manila University. "We, in the Philippines, did not go through that phase."
"Churches in former communist Eastern Europe have not experienced the 'eclipse of Mary' either," notes this Filipino theologian. "What strikes a mainland China visitor, who gets in contact with Catholics there, is that veneration of Mary has never been stronger."
That "Marian silence" and "dechristianization" of Europe led the German theologian Karl Rahner to write: "Many Catholics today are going through a winter of belief."
Once known as "Christendom," Europe built the continent's loveliest cathedrals from Chartres to Notre Dame. Now, Europe suffers from a "vacuum of faith," the Los Angeles Times notes. The Gallup Millennium Survey reveals barely 20 percent of West Europeans attend church services once a week.
"When the new springtime of faith comes … the cult of Mary, the Mother of God, will return," Rahner added. "In fact, it will be its surest sign. Its form may perhaps be different, but if Christian tradition is valid, it will return."
That was in 1968. Today, Rahner's comments resound in essays by, among others, Lutheran Carl Braten: "I can't predict exactly how the (Mary rediscovery) will happen. Some of it will be good, and some may be bad. But I think it's going to happen."
Some 37 years after Rahner wrote of this "second spring," Arevalo notes, "this appears a remarkably prophetic text."
This comeback of Our Lady is seen on the dateline of stories from new Marian shrines -- Medjugorje in Yugoslavia, Akita in Japan, Kibeho in Rwanda and Cuenca in Ecuador. "News accounts fueled renewed interest in the Marian movement."
Then, there was Pope John Paul II. "No pontiff in the entire history of Catholicism has had so strong and articulate a devotion to Mary." He willed that her logo be carved on his plain cedar coffin.
If Rahner was right, then perhaps the current cover stories may be more significant than they appear, Arevalo says. Are they buds of the "the new springtime of faith," which Rahner foresaw, about to begin?
