Issue Date: April 30, 2004
 |
MISSING MARY
By Charlene Spretnak
Palgrave, 274 pages, $24.95 |
Mary makes a comeback
A new book predicts the return of the Mother of God, beloved by ordinary
Catholics, but ignored by reformers
Reviewed by ANDREW GREELEY
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 progressive, 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.
The sacramental imagination is still alive and well and as long as it
is, the smile that charmed Henry Adams will continue to captivate millions of
people and to be one of the richest resources of the Catholic heritage.
Fr. Andrew Greeley is the author of three new books,
The Catholic
Revolution: New Wine in Old Wineskins (University of California Press),
Priests: a Calling in Crisis (University of Chicago Press) and The Priestly
Sins (Tor).
| Q&A: Making more of Mary
Author fosters 'quiet rebellion' in her quest to restore Mary's
significance
Editor’s note: NCR’s Antonia Ryan recently
interviewed Charlene Spretnak about her book Missing Mary. In it,
Spretnak, a liberal Catholic, argues that the diminution in Mary’s stature
since Vatican II has resulted in an unfortunate loss of meaning, mystery and
beauty.
NCR: Could you say a little about your background and the
experiences you brought to writing about this subject?
Spretnak: I grew up in the 1950s and early ’60s when Mary
and the other mysteries of the Catholic faith were almost palpable. My mother
and grandmother had a beautiful Marian spirituality. Politically, I’m a
Green. Professionally, I’m a professor of philosophy and religion and the
author of several books that examine the interface between modernity and
religion, community, nature and our sense of self.
What made you feel it was necessary to write this book now?
A lot of grassroots Catholics are puzzled about the radical shrinkage of
Mary (except in ethnic parishes) over the past 40 years. It resulted from a
very close vote at Vatican II, the great modernizing conference of the church.
There was a Marian debate of almost mythic proportions: The
“modernizers” represented the new preference for the rationalized,
historical, semiotic text-based approach to religion while the
“Marianists” represented the traditional Catholic sense that the
mysteries of the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the dynamic Creation extend
far beyond the boundaries of any text, no matter how historical. I call this
traditional Catholic perception the “biblical plus” type of
Christianity. By the way, I take issue with only one one-eighth of one of the
16 major documents created at Vatican II.
I wrote Missing Mary both to interpret and to advance the case
for what I call the “quiet rebellion” of liberal Catholics today who
feel that the church went too far in lopping off the full, cosmological sense
of Mary. I argue for an inclusive position that honors both the biblical and
the “biblical plus” -- that is, the sacramental, the mystical, the
aesthetic dimension. Traditionally, Catholicism always situated the Gospel
texts within the mysteries -- not set off alone and reified. The text is not
the Incarnation.
What, exactly, is the Vatican II teaching that minimized
Mary?
In the major Marian vote, on Oct. 29, 1963, the “modernizers,”
who sought to “purify” Marian doctrine of all nonbiblical aspects,
won by a majority of less than 2 percent. From that slight majority vote came a
huge reduction of Mary’s officially recognized spiritual presence. The
subsequent chapter on Mary in the new constitution deftly notes that although
such nonbiblical titles as Mediator and Advocate have been applied to Mary by
the church in the past, Christ is the one and only Mediator. The Marian chapter
also warns against “a certain vain credulity.” After Vatican II, a
silence about Mary descended, as many of her statues were removed, her
devotions phased out and her name barely mentioned in theological instruction
of nuns and priests. The sacramental/mystical dimension was strongly
de-emphasized in favor of the biblical focus, but I believe that a rebalancing
is now beginning.
When did “modernity” and this “disappearing” of
the mystical -- including Mary -- actually start? The Renaissance? The
Reformation?
All four of the foundational movements from which the ideology of
modernity gradually emerged -- Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the
Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment -- were unfavorably disposed toward
Mary in her larger, glorified, cosmological form. They were right about many
things, but they missed -- as in failed to grasp the full meaning of --
Mary.
You say that, in general, progressives within the church think
Mary’s identity should be circumscribed within the limits of the little
that the Gospels say about her. What are their reasons for feeling this is so
important?
The “progressives” at Vatican II achieved numerous
constructive outcomes, but when it came to the traditional perception of Mary,
they saw her only as an embarrassing medieval vestige that was blocking
ecumenical rapprochement with the Protestants. They threw out the entire sense
of her full cosmological spiritual presence, allowing only the historical,
“rationalized,” text-based perception of Mary as a Nazarene woman
mentioned a few times in the Gospels. There are various reasons that most
“progressives” strongly support this diminution of Mary today. For
one, except in ethnic parishes and the developing world, most young Catholics
under 45 have known no other Mary at all. Also, feminism emerged in the
post-Vatican-II years, so as women entered theological degree programs feminist
thought often became conflated with the new, historicized,
“rationalized” view of Mary.
In general, those “progressives,” who are delighted that
Catholicism has become nearly as uncluttered, post-mystical and text-based
after Vatican II as Protestantism, are comfortable with strict historicism as
the only worthwhile approach in religion. I have found, however, that many
people who share liberal/progressive views on numerous issues facing the church
today are beginning to agree that perhaps too much of the aesthetic beauty, the
mystical symbolism, and the richly sacramental dimension was lopped off when
Catholicism modernized. They, like myself, wonder why we cannot have both the
liberal/progressive accomplishments on social issues as well as the spiritual
richness of our tradition.
Why has Mary as Queen become identified with the Catholic
right?
Because the Catholic right claims that the full, traditional version of
Mary is emblematic of their conservative social and political positions …
and most Catholic progressives acquiesce to that appropriation. This holds
mainly in modernized cultures, however. In much of the Catholic world, Our Lady
of Everything is the patron and protector of social-change movements.
Do you think that the generation of Catholics growing up today are
more open to the mystical dimension of Mary?
That’s a lovely thought. I hope, for their sake, that you’re
right. |
National Catholic Reporter, April 30, 2004 |