Keeping Mary Close - Mike Aquilina, Fr. Frederick W. Gruber

Keeping Mary Close (eBook)

Devotion to Our Lady through the Ages

Mike Aquilina, Fr. Frederick W. Gruber (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
160 Seiten
Servant (Verlag)
978-1-63582-325-7 (ISBN)

If you've ever wondered what devotion to Mary is all about, you'll treasure this one-of-a-kind, popular glimpse into the early Church's life, doctrine, and devotion to Our Lady. Through lively stories, teachings of the Church fathers, and evidence from ancient archaeology, the authors invite you to enter the fascinating world of the early Christians, giving you an imaginative glimpse into how they demonstrated their love for Mary through their prayers, art, and daily life. Along the way, you'll gain a deeper understanding of Mary's role in your own life and that of the Church today.

Chapter One

From Jerusalem to Ephesus

Then they returned to Jerusalem…. And when they had entered, they went up to the upper room, where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer, together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. (Acts 1:12–14)

That is how the original Church described itself. The words come from a meticulous historian of the first generation, St. Luke the evangelist, who testified that he had interviewed eyewitnesses (see Luke 1:1–4).

In the days after Jesus’s ascension, the disciples awaited the gift the Lord had promised as the seal of their salvation. In the Upper Room, they waited to be filled with the Holy Spirit. They gathered “together with…Mary the mother of Jesus.”

That was the primitive Church on its own terms. The Blessed Virgin Mary was in its midst. She was a disciple among disciples, and yet her place and her role were unique. In the Acts passage above, she is the only woman to be mentioned by name; in fact, she is the only non-apostle to be identified. And as the last named, she holds a place of prominence.

She is a quiet presence, but constant and crucial. She changes the composition of the picture. Suddenly the Upper Room is more than a waiting room in an all-male seminary. There is a feminine presence identified as mother. The gathering is a family, and the room becomes a home.

And that is how the Church viewed itself throughout its early life. Mary remained a presence, often acknowledged, clearly loved and honored, and necessary for the coherence of the gospel’s proclamation.

This book is about devotion to Mary in that period, the so-called patristic era—the time most people mean when they speak of the “early Church.” The period begins with Christianity’s first generation. Some of these Fathers—Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp—received the faith directly from the apostles.

Through most of the period that concerns us, the practice of the faith was illegal, and sometimes it was a capital crime. Periods of intense persecution, however, were also times of intense devotion. Something worth dying for was also worth protecting, preserving, and passing on. Because our ancestors in the Church took risks to preserve so many prayers, sermons, and letters, we can—with some degree of confidence—write a book about the Marian devotion of those ancestors.

Signs of Devotion

The beginning of the patristic era is fairly clear, but historians differ on the date when it ended. Many say it closed with the death of St. John of Damascus in A.D. 749, though some extend it to the close of the first millennium (A.D. 1000) and others draw the line at the death of St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1153). Both John and Bernard were passionate in their love for the Blessed Virgin—having a remarkable influence on all future Marian reflection in the East and West respectively—and it is tempting to include them in our study. But we’ve decided that the scope of this book should be much smaller.

We’ll concentrate instead on the period from roughly A.D. 30 to A.D. 431. The first date corresponds (again, roughly) to the scene we evoked at the beginning of this chapter, the scene in the Upper Room. The latter date corresponds to the great Council of Ephesus. It was at Ephesus that the bishops of the world summarized, synthesized, and dogmatically proclaimed the key Marian teachings of the centuries before. This was the crowning moment of the early Church’s Marian devotion. Ephesus, then, is a helpful vantage point from which we can look back and see the very beginning.

Focusing on the first four centuries will also allow us to correct some common misconceptions about the early Church. In the last couple centuries, it has been fashionable for scholars in the English-speaking world to minimize or dismiss the ancient Church’s Marian devotion. This tendency first arose in the years after the Reformation, when Protestant scholars sought to justify their churches’ rupture with Catholic traditions regarding Mary. Over time, this anti-Mariology became reflexive—a “Mary allergy,” so to speak—and even some Catholics adopted it in order to advance in their professions.

The contemporary historian Stephen Shoemaker writes of an “anti-Catholic prejudice” and “bias” in his field, a “prejudice of early Christian studies against attributing much significance to the veneration of Mary before the council of Ephesus.” “There is,” he said, “a palpable tendency in much scholarship to minimize the strong devotion to Mary evident in the ancient church.”1 The tendency is to reduce devotion to cult—the official public worship of the Church—and then, further, to interpret cult even more narrowly as direct invocation. So the only true instance of Marian devotion, for such scholars, would be a prayer addressed directly to Mary, asking for her intercession.

Devotion, however, involves much more than that. There is ample evidence of devotion to Saints Peter and Paul in the same period. We know this from intercessory prayers, yes, but also from artwork, from shrines dedicated to the apostles, from graffiti scratched on plaster walls, from feast days celebrated far and wide, and from books that describe their heroic deeds and teachings.

As in the Acts of the Apostles, so in those first centuries: Mary’s is a quiet presence in the Church, but it is no less real and persistent than those of Peter and Paul. It is, in fact, more important in the history of Christian doctrine.

In considering the role of Mary in the Church, we will look to the words of the ancients and also to the recent findings of archeology. From the first century to the fifth, we find hymns about Mary, books about her, paintings of her, as well as sculptures and graffiti praising her. Fabrics and jewelry, wall decorations and oil lamps bear witness to the Church’s devotion to Mary. And throughout the early life of the Church, we find great men fiercely defending her.

We find devotion. It is not as diffuse as the devotion to Saints Peter and Paul but more concentrated and intense. It is, moreover, distinct from any other Christian devotion. It is altogether different from devotion to the Persons of the Blessed Trinity, yet it is elevated above the devotion given to other saints and martyrs. Mary’s place in the early Church, like her place in the Scriptures, is uniquely “blessed.”

After centuries of explaining such evidence away, academic history has begun to recognize this. As universities turn increasingly secular, more historians—wary of both Protestant and Catholic polemics—have been willing to reexamine the evidence from the early Christian centuries. This has been good for the Catholic cause and especially for the study of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This book takes full advantage of that new wave of research.

Developing Doctrine and Devotion

We do not, of course, possess as many documents and artifacts from this period as we would like to have. Still, those that we do have amount to thousands of pages, and it is interesting to note how many of the early documents mention Mary. Sometimes the mention is as brief, but also as significant, as St. Luke’s glance in the Acts of the Apostles. In other instances, Mary is the center of attention. She is treated consistently with tenderness, love, and admiration—with devotion.

In other words, it seems that the early Christians approached Mary as Catholics do today. This does not mean they prayed with rosary beads—they did not. This does not mean they wore the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel—they did not. This does not mean they prayed novenas to Our Lady of Perpetual Help—they did not. Nor did they join parish sodalities, or sponsor May Crownings, or pray the Memorare and Salve Regina. The ancients did few of the things most closely associated with modern Marian devotion. Yet all of our modern and medieval practices developed from the doctrines and practices of the Church of the Fathers. They correspond to the model of devotion established by our ancestors.

Such development—in both doctrine and devotion—is faithful to the pattern set by the ancient Fathers. St. Basil the Great wrote in the fourth century:

The same doctrine has been developed through progress, and what now is mine has not taken the place of what existed in the beginning.…

Through progress we observe a certain amplification of what we say, which is not a change from worse to better, but is a completing of that which was lacking, according to the increment of our knowledge.2

Development, as the Fathers understood it, is not innovation; it introduces nothing new to the faith that the Church has received from Jesus through the apostles. Nor is it an evolution; it does not cause the faith to morph into something different from what it has been since the beginning. Development is, rather, an elaboration—a deepening of understanding. Development makes explicit what is implicit in the Scriptures.

The classic example of doctrinal development is the Church’s teaching on the Godhead. The...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	19.1.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
ISBN-10	1-63582-325-0 / 1635823250
ISBN-13	978-1-63582-325-7 / 9781635823257

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