Cunningham

Authors
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
Title
Mary in Catholic doctrine and practice.

Source
Theology Today. 56(3):307-318. 1999 Oct. [References]

Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is a deeply held part of Catholic theology and practice. Expressed in a wide variety of cultural forms, it is part of the fabric of Catholic culture.
Full Text
** Copyright Theology Today 1999 **
I was taught that every contemplative soul to whom it is given to look and to seek will see Mary and pass on to God through contemplation.
Dame Julian of Norwich
My own religious upbringing, nurtured in a Catholic family and molded by twelve years of parochial education in the preVatican II atmosphere of piety, was saturated with marian devotion. The months of October and May were dedicated to the Virgin. In the latter month, a young girl, dressed in an ersatz wedding gown, would crown a statue of the Virgin to inaugurate Mary's month. By the time I was in elementary school, I knew how to say the rosary-which meant that I had memorized the Hail Mary, the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed, and the Glory be to the Father as well as the titles of the fifteen mysteries upon which we meditated as we prayed. I had sung the English translation of the medieval hymn the Stabat Mater as we made the Lenten stations of the cross, and knew the responses to the marian litany of Loreto. Our family went to Mass on the feasts of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception. We heard the tolling of the parish Angelus bell each day at our parish school. We made pious visits to the shrine of Mary located between the parish church and the priest's house. The windows of our church depicted scenes like the Annunciation while there was a shrine chapel dedicated to Mary with flickering votive lights. Like every Catholic kid, I wore, at one time or another, a miraculous medal or a scapular of Mary around my neck. At the end of every Sunday Mass, we asked the Virgin Mary to intercede for the conversion of Russia.
In my youthful innocence, all these practices, devotions, and prayers were part of what it meant to be a Catholic. It never struck me-why should it?-that these practices developed over a long period of time becoming added to the Catholic experience as something natural in itself and organic to our identity. The one thing that is very clear is that this formation ran very deep in the shaping of Catholics. That the rosary took its current shape only in the fifteenth century, that the Stabat Mater was a medieval hymn, that the litany of Loreto was first published in the sixteenth century, that the prayer for the conversion of Russia was a modern devotion were of no consequence to us. These things were what we did and if the Protestants did not do them-well, they were not the True Church and more's the pity.
When one looks back, in a somewhat dispassionate fashion, at the slow rise and development of marian devotional and doctrinal formulations it becomes clear that every age has attached to Mary some of its most highly prized religious and cultural values.1 The patristic writers who emphasized the virginity of Mary before, during, and after the birth of Jesus did so at a time when Christian asceticism was a paramount value. The picture of Mary who suffered while standing at the foot of the cross was a counterpoint to the increased emphasis on the humanity of Christ inaugurated, as it were, in the writings of Saint Anselm, emphasized by the Cistercian mystics, and brought to a culminating point in the life of Saint Francis of Assisi. The high mariology of the Gothic cathedrals epitomized by Chartres (which claimed to possess a tunic of the Virgin) is inexplicable if one ignores the courtly love tradition with its emphasis on the chaste adoration of an idealized woman loved at a distance. That motif, of course, found its best expression in Dante's Comedia, where Beatrice leads the poet through the heavenly spheres until Mary, at the request of Saint Bernard, points the poet's gaze towards the mystery of the triune Godhead.
The early modern explosion of religious congregations for both men and women devoted to the Virgin, overwrought treatises of devotion to Mary penned by the likes of Grignion de Montfort and Alphonsus Liguori, various para-liturgical practices, and the like are partially explicable as a reaction against the anti-marian temper of the Reformation. Furthermore, some scholars have argued that the modern rise of marian apparitions developing into shrine sites (Lourdes, Fatima, and so on) as well as the modern definitions of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption (1950) were self-conscious challenges to the rationalism and modernism of the post-Enlightenment world. It was, in so many words, the church saying that despite the rise of skepticism the Virgin still lives and, indeed, appears to peasant children and not to the learned of the world.
LINES OF DEVELOPMENT
Apart from the scattered witness of the New Testament writers, preeminently Matthew and Luke, the place and role of Mary had a slow development in the Christian tradition before the definition of Mary as theotokos at the Council of Ephesus.2 What we know about Mary in the writings and material evidence of the period before Ephesus might be summed up as follows. (1) Mary did conceive her son virginally and this fact is important for the faith of believers; (2) Mary's holiness and virginity served a paradigmatic function for those who wished to follow the ascetic life; (3) Just as Christ was the New Adam so, some of the early fathers, as early as the second century, described Mary as the New Eve; (4) Mary was invoked in prayer with evidence pointing to the late second or early third century; however no liturgical feasts were observed in Mary's honor until the fifth century subsequent upon the Council of Ephesus; (5) Some early depictions of the Virgin and Child appear in Christian catacomb art in the immediate post-Constantinian period.3
The crucial moment in marian doctrine and devotion came with the definition of Mary as theotokos at the Council of Ephesus in 431; the pertinent canon of that council says succinctly: "If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is God in truth, and therefore that the holy virgin is the mother of God (for she bore in a fleshly way the Word of God become flesh), let him be anathema."4 That brief canon, redolent of the prophecy of Isa 7:14 about Emmanuel being born of a Virgin (according to the Septuagint) and John's prologue (1:14), followed the logic of orthodox christology, which attempted, with great difficulty, to understand Jesus Christ as one person who was both human and divine. In the eyes of the council, to deny that Mary was the true mother of the God-Man was to open the door to a whole range of heterodox opinions, especially the Nestorian claim that Mary was better described as christokos-the Christbearer.
The raging christological debates of the period are beyond the scope of this brief essay. One point, however, must be emphasized. If the earlier tradition looked to Mary primarily as a model of holiness or ascetic virginity, the doctrinal definition of Ephesus drew the Virgin into the theological construction of the very heart of Christian faith by insisting that Jesus Christ did not enter the world in a purely accidental manner. The very historicity, specificity, and incarnational character of the plan of salvation hinged upon the acceptance of the plan of God articulated by the angel Gabriel (see Luke 1:38).
Although Paul does not mention Mary by name anywhere in his epistles, he seems to have caught this notion of the economy of salvation perfectly: "In the fulness of time, God sent his son, born of a woman, born under the law . . ." (Gal 4:4). To paraphrase: When the prophetic tradition came to a conclusion, God sent the son who was born (he did not appear; he was not an angel; and so on) in a specific situation of being under the law (as a Jew).
One could argue that both in the Christian West and the East any number of developments derived from the theological affirmation of Mary as theotokos-God-bearer.5 These developments, both spiritual and doctrinal are too complicated to trace in any detail but some of them can be enumerated in a brief manner.
There was a certain inevitable development by which Mary as theotokos became honored slowly in the public worship of the church either by being invoked in liturgical prayer, or by the slow development of feast days or by the dedication of churches in her honor. As Kilian McDonnell's useful survey has shown, this development proceeded at a rather leisurely pace.6 A basilica in Mary's honor, now known as Santa Maria Maggiore, was dedicated in the early fifth century. Honor to "Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ, Our Lord and God" found a place in the eucharistic canon in the middle of the same century. By the end of the seventh century, there were processions in Rome on the feasts of the Annunciation, Dormition, Nativity, and Purification of the Virgin-feasts that would be standard in Rome until the fourteenth century.
The Christian East had a well-established tradition of liturgical poetry composed in the Syriac Church as early as the fourth century7 as well as the tradition of hymnody found at Constantinople in the sixth century by Romanos Melodos. The apex of that poetic development was the composition of the seventh-century elaborate hymn to Mary known as the Akathistos hymn, which was sung standing (akathistos = "not-sitting"). The later translation of that hymn into Latin would influence western litanies to the Virgin.
The legitimacy conferred on theologians, liturgists, preachers, and monastics to honor Mary because she was the God bearer led, inevitably, to exercises of meditation, prayer, and reflection on her singular dignity as well as her symbolic role as the New Eve, type of the church, model of virginity, and participant in the Incarnation. A more intense moment occurred when, to borrow a phrase from R.W. Southern, a "new direction in medieval devotion" developed through the prayers composed by Saint Anselm of Canterbury.8
Anselm's prayers, written mainly between 1070 and 1080, exercised an enormous influence on the development of medieval piety in general and marian piety in particular. Anselmian echos can be heard in the Cistercian literature of the twelfth century as well as the Franciscan tradition of the thirteenth. Anselm's affective love for the humanity of Christ and his tender devotion to the sinless Virgin would provide an almost tactile sensibility to the spiritual life of Christians for the next several centuries. The three long prayers Anselm composed for a fellow monk contrast human sinfulness with Mary's holiness, her role as an intercessor, and her place as an advocate of mercy before Christ the judge. Subsequent believers would overemphasize those sentiments so that Mary became identified with mercy pleading before the stem judge who is Christ. In Anselm, that division is not open or wide. For Anselm, Mary is a sure advocate before the throne of heaven:
Blessed assurance, safe refuge,
The mother of God is our mother.
The mother of him in whom alone we have hope
Whom alone we fear,
Is our mother.
The mother of him who alone saves and condemns
Is our mother.9
In the high Middle Ages, one can detect two parallel trajectories. One line traces out the exploding growth of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Titles attributed to her are indicative. She is Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven (this is a monarchical age), the Refuge of Sinners, Seat of Wisdom, Sorrowful Mother, and, of course, Mother of God. In monastic culture, a special short office of the Blessed Virgin was added (as was an office of suffrage for the dead) to the regular canonical hours. The monks observed Saturday as "her" day. From the twelfth century to the present, the monks have ended their day with the singing of the Salve Regina. Monastic commentators began to comment typologically on books of the Bible (especially the Song of Songs) through a marian lens.
Such exuberant piety was not restricted to the cloister. The popularity of liturgical dramas, pilgrimage sites like Walsingham (England) and Chartres (France) or to the shrine of Our Lady of the Pillar in Spain were enhanced by putative relics of the Virgin housed there. The pious lay person would repeat with frequency the "Ave Maria"-devotions that would influence the subsequent pious activities of the recitation of the rosary codified in its present form only in the fifteenth century10 and the ringing of the Angelus bell (The word "Angelus" comes from the Lucan account of the angel [Latin: angelus] with which the prayer began) three times a day. There was an enormous interest in Mary who stood at the foot of the cross and the same mother who received the body of Christ after his resurrection, thus giving rise to the iconographical depiction of the pieta figure in both painting and sculpture. The piety of popular religion received reinforcement from the makers of high culture who celebrated the Virgin in literature (for example, Dante's Paradiso), stone (the sculptural programs of the gothic cathedrals), iconic representations in painting, and the production of illuminated books of hours.11
The other medieval trajectory would be the more sober theological reflections of the scholastic doctors. We may use Saint Thomas Aquinas as our paradigm. Thomas discusses the Virgin Mary in the third part of his Summa Theologiae, which is where Thomas devoted himself to the doctrine of Christ. He devotes four questions to an explicit consideration of the Virgin (27-30) subdivided into a number of articles. In subsequent questions, he discusses Mary in the light of his consideration of the life of Christ. Question 27 concerns the sanctification of the Blessed Virgin. He does not think that she was conceived without original sin (nor did Anselm, Bernard, or Bonaventure) since such a belief would mitigate the saving power of Christ although he does believe that she was sanctified in the womb.
Question 28, divided into four articles, holds, along with the unanimous opinion of the early doctores like Jerome, Augustine, and Bede, that Mary was a virgin when she conceived Christ in her womb. In two subsequent articles, he holds that Mary was a virgin in the very process of giving birth and remained a virgin after birth, while concluding, in the fourth article, citing the authority of Saint Augustine, which he culled from the glossed Bible, that Mary must have taken a vow of virginity. Question 29 discusses two issues that were characteristic of scholastic speculation: Was it good that Christ was born of a virgin who was engaged? Was the marriage of Joseph and Mary a true marriage? Question 30 concerns the Annunciation with the most important observation happening in the first article, namely, that Mary had to say "Yes" to the invitation to bear Jesus in order for the plan of salvation to be achieved.
Subsequent questions of the third part of the Summa have articles discussing Mary (for example, in the section on Christ's nativity) but the above four questions are the ones in which Mary is named in the question. As one reads through Aquinas, however, it is clear that he has no desire to advance beyond the inherited doctrinal formulations received from the tradition of the past, even though he gladly affirms what the tradition holds. The crucial point is, of course, that Thomas places his discussion of Mary firmly and exclusively within his consideration of the mystery of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. He reiterated those sentiments in some sermons he preached on the "Ave Maria" in tandem with other nonacademic sermons on the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments. In short, what Aquinas does in his writing is to compress into his writings the accumulated insights of theological speculation that went back to the age of the apostolic fathers.
It is a truism to say that the Reformation of the sixteenth century had a profound impact on Christian attitudes towards Mary. It is beyond my competence to say anything beyond the obvious about the early reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, except that their single-minded focus on the figure of Christ as single mediator between God and sinful humanity made diminution of the importance of Mary in particular and the intercession of saints in general inevitable.12 It is that inevitability rather than any putative crusade against Catholic superstition (although there were elements of such a crusade in the iconoclastic impulses of the second generation of reformers) that was a by-product rather than a direct result of the reformers' activities. In any event, the common claim that late medieval piety was totally incoherent, superstition ridden, and devoid of genuine religious sentiment has been questioned by such careful recent historians as Eamon Duffy.13 One result of the polemics between Rome and the Reformation, however, is quite clear. By the end of the sixteenth century, there began to appear separate Catholic theological treatises on the Virgin Mary, with the earliest being resources for apologists like the 1577 De Maria Virgine Incomparabili, published by the Jesuit Peter Canisius (1521-1597). Running to over twelve hundred columns, it was a frankly apologetic sourcebook that combed patristic literature for sources and engaged in direct polemics with the writings of Luther, Calvin, and Melancthon. At a more systematic level, the Spanish Jesuit Francis Suarez (1548-1617) was the first theologian who produced a systematic theology on the Blessed Virgin. He did so by setting out twenty-three topics of discussion based on questions from the third part of Aquinas's Summa. Suarez is generally regarded as being the founder of "systematic or scholastic mariology."14
After Suarez, there was a tradition of mariological treatises among the scholastic writers that perdured right down to the eve of the Second Vatican Council. The most important fact about this development is that these treatises were almost always free standing. As a result, speculative theology relative to the Blessed Virgin tended to take on an independent life, a quite separate methodology, and a tendency to find ways to inflate mariological claims without sufficient context guaranteed by the earlier tendency to discuss the Virgin Mary in the light of christological doctrines and affirmations. Mariological speculation was further fueled under the influence of the highly affective piety of the seventeenth-century French School of spirituality as well as the popularity of such writers as Saint Alphonsus de Liguori. 15
One way to understand the developing lines of mariological speculation is to trace out the evolution of the doctrine of Mary's immaculate conception-the belief that Mary, from the first moment of her conception, was free from any stain of original sin. Neither Anselm and Bernard of Clairvaux nor the scholastic doctors Thomas Aquinas or Bonaventure accepted such a doctrine, as we noted earlier, for the simple reasons that they thought it contrary to the universal saving work of Christ. The Oxford Franciscan John Duns Scotus (died 1308) seems to have turned the tide with his assertion that Mary was saved from the stain of original sin by the "prevenient" grace of the savior that, as it were, cleansed her soul before actual conception in anticipation of the conception of Christ. This solution to the problem gained ground in Catholic circles even though free theological discussions continued for the next few centuries.
It is interesting that the definition of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX in 1854 was immensely aided not by further theological clarification but by devotional practices that happened in the nineteenth century, especially the 1830 apparitions of the French nun, Catherine Laboure, who engendered the custom of wearing the "miraculous medal" whose inscription read "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." The correctness of the proclamation of the devotion seemed assured in the minds of many of the faithful when, in 1858, Mary appeared to a peasant girl at Lourdes in France identifying herself as the Immaculate Conception.
The last doctrinally defined dogma concerning Mary was that of the Assumption of Mary into heaven proclaimed by Pope Pius XII in 1950. That proclamation is the only infallible pronouncement made by any pope after the doctrine of papal infallibility was proclaimed at the First Vatican Council in 1870. Mary's assumption into heaven evolved out of a long tradition of piety and devotion that sprung from the celebration of Mary's "falling asleep" (the Dormition of Mary is celebrated in the Christian East) and an apocryphal narrative giving details about her empty tomb and bodily ascension into heaven. Defenders of the papal doctrine of the Assumption have cast it largely in terms of Christian eschatology, that is, that Mary's heavenly life is a pledge and foreshadowing of the end of every Christian believer.16
THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL
In the preparatory stages antecedent to the opening of the Second Vatican Council, there was much discussion about whether the council should develop a separate document on the Virgin Mary. After sometimes heated debate, the decision was made not to do so both because there was a feeling in Catholic theological circles that mariology had developed too much in isolation and, secondly, that if the council were to have an approach to churches separated from Rome, marian doctrines would have to be placed in the context of a larger theological framework. A close majority voted on October 29, 1963 to include the conciliar reflections on Mary in the dogmatic constitution on the church (called, by its Latin name, Lumen Gentium-Light of the Nations).17 Chapter eight of the dogmatic constitution emphasized the following salient points:
First, the mother of the Son, she is the daughter of the Father and the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit. That exalted position, however, should not erase the fact that Mary stands in solidarity with all human beings who need salvation.
Second, the truth about Mary derives from sacred Scripture as it has been read in the church from its beginnings. Of special note is her assent to the Incarnation, which implicates her in the mystery of salvation, which she does in the obscure but sure act of faith by which she becomes the mother of the redeemer.
Third, since the work of the church is the continuation in time of the salvific work of Christ, so Mary, who assented to the salvific plan of God in the economy of grace, becomes a type of the church. In the sections where this nexus between Mary and the church is discussed (viii. 60-62), the document uses the word "mediatrix" but not in the maximal sense some desired. Mary is a mediatrix in the sense that she mediated the plan of salvation but also in the sense that as an "advocate, helper, protector, and mediatrix" Mary is, along with all the saints, an intercessor before the throne of God in heaven. By highlighting the typological nexus between Mary and the church, the council attempted to reinvigorate a theme found in the patristic sources.
Fourth, the council affirmed that devotion to Mary is a hallmark of Catholic piety while it warned against two extremes: the snobbery of Catholic minimalism that looks down on the simple piety of people who are devoted to the Virgin and the, alas, too common forms of credulity, superstition, and exaggerations that are torn from the roots of Scripture, the testimony of the tradition, and the liturgy. The council goes on to say that private revelations do not rank as sources of the faith.
In its penultimate paragraph, Lumen Gentium concludes with sentiments that sum up briefly the faith of the church in Mary as a figure of eschatological hope for all the pilgrim people of God:
Meanwhile, however, the mother of Jesus, as already glorified in body and soul in heaven she is the image and the beginning of the church which will receive fulfillment in the age that is to come, so here on earth until the day of the Lord arrives (see 2 Pet 3:10) she shines forth as a sign of sure hope and comfort for the pilgrim people of God.18
CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS
The doctrinal formulations about Mary at the Second Vatican Council effectively neutralized the tendencies of an independently functioning mariology while, at the same time, driving theologians back to a deeper appraisal of the role of Mary in the tradition of the church. A number of other post-conciliar developments abetted this process of reappraisal.
The first new development came from the burgeoning area of feminist scholarship in general and scholarship concerned with Mary in particular.19 The feminist critique had both a negative and a positive side. Feminist scholars, rightly, objected to the traditional emphasis on Mary as a passively compliant maiden who was set forth largely by celibate males as a paragon of the innocent, virginal, pure girl who embodied two strongly male desires in women, namely, that they be virginal and motherly.
On the other hand, feminism, using the insights of Latin American liberation theologians has turned to another aspect of Mary: the young woman, born into a patriarchal culture, who moves from a marginalized existence by becoming a vehicle for the salvation of the world. Such commentators have paid special attention to the hymn of Mary (Luke 1:46-55) with its theme of the poor who are exalted and the downfall of the mighty from their thrones. Furthermore, Mary's song is an echo of the song of Hannah in 1 Sam 2:1-10, thus putting Mary into the narrative tradition of exalting the heroic women of the biblical trajectory. As two Brazilian women theologians recently expressed it in terms of Mary and the base communities:
In her song, the Magnificat, the people in the ecclesial base communities hear Mary's constant "yes" to God and God's plan, and, at the same time, her "no" to injustice and the state of affairs with which it is not possible to come to terms, no to the sin of indifference to the sufferings which makes victims of others. Mary . is also a prophetic woman who takes on God's word and the people's aspirations, who speaks and lives the denunciation of sin and the proclamation of the covenant.20
This reorientation of looking at Mary "from below" insists on new ways of seeing the biblical narrative about the place of Mary. To borrow from the now famous litany of the Pax Christi movement, Mary is invoked as a single mother, as one who is poor, homeless, a migrant, the mother of a condemned prisoner, the widow who buried her executed child. In other words, to repeat something noted in the very beginning of this essay, our age has found new symbolic ways of understanding Mary appropriate for the times and cultures within which we live.
The feminist reflections on Mary must be seen in tandem with other marian manifestations in our day. One is the continuing fascination with apparitions of Mary reported in the popular press as taking place both here and abroad. The official church is very cautious about such reports, in general, viewing them with sensible precaution. Even when well-received by large numbers of people, they are part of the world of "private revelations" and, as such can either be accepted or ignored by Catholics. The very fact of their reported frequency has, in itself. generated a good deal of scholarly reflection. It may well be that as a religious phenomenon, such reports of visions (as well as weeping madonnas, icons, and the like) represent a reaction to religious change and cultural malaise.21
The continuing fact of such popular marian phenomena must be seen in tandem with Pope John Paul II's reiterated "high" approach to mariology, which is partially explicable by reason of the piety that nourished him, his own mystical propensities, and his naturally poetic style of writing. Not all Catholic theologians have been comfortable with his marian emphases since they live in fear that for the millennial celebrations he might feel tempted to proclaim further dogmas about Mary even though, despite pressure to do so, such eventualities are not likely to occur. In his recent book on Mary, the highly regarded Catholic theologian George Tavard states bluntly that no new dogma about Mary should be proclaimed and the recent ones (the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption) ought to be rethought in the light of present day ecumenical discussions.22
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is a deeply held part of Catholic theology and practice. Expressed in a wide variety of cultural forms, it is part of the fabric of Catholic culture. There is no reason to think that the church will abandon its marian emphasis even though it is clear that its official articulation of marian doctrine will root itself in a larger theological context and with an eye to the larger Christian world both Orthodox and Protestant. That truth is succinctly stated in the recent (1994) Catechism of the Catholic Church: "What the Catholic Church believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ" (#487). It is that dialectic rooted in christologythat is fundamental to any consideration of the place and role of Mary in Catholic theology.
Second, Catholic practice is traditional in the sense that it conserves within itself the memory of the life and practices of the past generations of believers. To say that the Catholic tradition is conservative, however, is not to say that it is a museum or that past practices are caught in amber. A living tradition must look back on its past to understand why things were done or devotions practiced in order to gain insights to help us today. Such reflection is part of the role of being in communion with the "cloud of witnesses" of which the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks (12:1).
The second ecumenical Council of Nicaea proclaimed in the year 787 that it was legitimate to depict and honor icons of Christ, Mary, the angels, and saints. One of the oldest forms of the icons depicts Mary holding the Christ Child. She gestures toward him with her hand. Known as the hodoteria ("She who points the way"), it is an excellent visual image of how the Catholic tradition understands Mary, namely, as one who presents to us her son. As the Zen saying would have it, we should pay attention not simply to the pointing finger but to the direction in which the finger points. That insight was once perfectly captured in a short quatrain Saint John of the Cross composed for Christmas:
The Virgin, heavy
With the Word of God
Comes down the road:
If only you will give her shelter!23

1The literature on Mary in historical or cultural perspective is vast. Some more accessible volumes would include: Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1985); George Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary (Collegeville, MN: Glazier/Liturgical Press, 1996); Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
2The ecumenical study of Raymond E. Brown, et al: Mary in the New Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) is still standard.
3I am in debt in this summary to Tavard, The Thousand Faces, 58-9; also see Robert Eno, "Mary and her Role in Patristic Theology," in The One Mediator, the Saints, and Mary: Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue VIII (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1991), 159-75.
4Translation of the conciliar statement is from Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 1, ed. Norman Tanner, S.J. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990). 59.
5Although theotokos is often translated as "Mother of God" (Latin: Mater Dei) I have preferred to use the more traditional usage of "God bearer," which does better justice to the Greek word, a word that predates Ephesus by nearly two centuries in the Christian tradition.
6Kilian McDonnell, O.S.B., "The Marian Liturgical Tradition," in One Mediator 177-91.
7Among the best examples are the nativity hymns of Ephrem the Syrian (306-373); see Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns (New York: Paulist, 1989), 61-218.
8R.W. Southern, Saint Anselm: Portrait in a Landscape (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 106. An accessible translation of Anselm's prayers is The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Prosologion (New York: Viking Penguin, 1973).
9The Prayers and Meditations, 122.
10Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1997) is also useful for its description of late medieval marian piety in general.
11A useful survey of this period may be found, along with bibliography, in Elizabeth Johnson's "Marian Devotion in the Western Church," in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt (New York: Crossroad, 1987) 392-414.
12A good summary of Reformation attitudes may be found in the entries under "Mariology" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) 3:10-4.
13Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
14"Francis Suarez," in Theotokos: A Theological Encyclopedia of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ed. Michael O' Carroll (Wilmington: Glazier, 1986), 334-6. This work, although quite uneven, has much interesting information.
15On the French School, see The French School of Spirituality: An lntroduction and Reader, ed. Raymond Deville (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1994); on Alphonsus, see Frederick M. Jones, Alphonsus de Liguori: The Saint of Bourbon Naples 1696-1787 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1992). The latter work is a brilliant but too little noticed work of scholarly religious biography.
16The best traditional theological reflection on these two doctrines still remains Karl Rahner's Mary, The Mother of the Lord (New York: Herder & Herder, 1963). From an ecumenical perspective, see Man in the Churches, ed. Hans Kong and Jurgen Moltmann (New York: Seabury, 1983).
17For a discussion of both the debate and the pertinent chapter of Lumen Gentium on Mary, see Commentary on the Documents of Vatican Tvo, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Her@er, 1967), 1:285-96.
18Lumen Gentium, viii. 68 in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, II: 898.
19The best known of these early critiques is Marina Warner's Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Man (New York: Knopf, 1976).
20Ivone Gabara and Maria Clara Bingemer. "Mary" in Mvsterium Liberation is, ed. Ignacio Ellacuri'a and Jon Sobrino. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 494-5: their entire essay is a compressed version of their earlier book Mary, Mother qf God, Mother of the Poor (Maryknoll. NY: Orbis, 1989).
21The most interesting book on this subject if Sandra Zimdar-Schwartz's Encountering Mary: From La Salette to Medjugorje (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1991); Michael Carroll's The Cult of the Virgin Mary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) has much interesting material hammered into a relentlessly Freudian framework.
22 The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 190-201. For a positive reading of recent Roman Catholic marian doctrines, see John Macquarrie. Mary for all Christians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990).
23The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, ed. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, Rev. Ed. (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies. 1991), 72; I have slightly amended the translation from the Spanish.
Author Affiliation:
Lawrence S. Cunningham is Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is author (with Keith Egan) of Christian Spirituality: Themes from the Tradition (1996) and Thomas Merton and Monastic Wisdom (1999).
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