August 1980 Print

 

by Malcolm Brennan

FOR THOSE who are not up to date on the state of devotions to Mary in the Conciliar Church, the rationale goes like this: The decline in Marian devotions, and other devotions too, is not just an unfortunate by-product of the Vatican II renewal but is in fact a predicted and planned development. Non-liturgical devotions of the present age (to the Sacred Heart, the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady under her several titles, the saints, and others) became widespread and took their present forms mainly after the Council of Trent, because Trent's reforms so clericalized the liturgy that laymen were practically excluded from the official worship of the Church. Consequently, these pious exercises, independent of the sacraments and the divine office, were invented to supply the religious needs of the laity.

Now, however, lay folk are given full participation in the liturgy (and how! some congregations practically concelebrate the Mass), and they need not look elsewhere to satisfy their religious feelings. In fact those Catholics who still clamor for Benediction, Forty Hours, May Processions, Miraculous Medal Novenas, Scapulars, Rosaries, etc., show by this clamor that they are not yet "renewed" enough and they need to be more fully enveloped in the new liturgical services. When you innocently asked your parish priest a few years ago for a return of those pious devotions, he possibly replied to you indulgently or condescendingly (they call it pastorally), but what was really going through his mind was a new resolve to jazz up the liturgy even more so as to sucker you away from those passé, embarrassingly "Catholic," and old world forms of prayer.

Whether the next development was part of the plan or not I have been unable to discover. But what has in fact happened in many places is that Marian and similar devotions have been replaced by a number of things: a whole bunch of committee meetings on everything under the moon, or an endless stream of get-in-touch-with-y our-feelings rap sessions, or all of the above. One need only name the fact to be aware of the terrible decline in Catholic life.

PREDICTABLY, a new Mariology has been developed to justify the decline in Marian devotions, and unfortunately it touches Mary's place in the liturgy as well as her non-liturgical devotions, for it justifies current proposals to drop several Marian feasts from among the holy days of obligation. In the past, you see, (according to several articles in Chicago Studies in 1970, and elsewhere) thinking about Mary was 'privilege-oriented.' Her holiness, her humility, her purity, her queenship, and other qualities, were all thought of as exceptional privileges accorded to one unique human being. Nowadays, they say, we have gained a further insight into Mary as 'sharing' these qualities and roles with her divine Son. ("Further insight"—that's a term used in the Conciliar Church to repudiate an old doctrine or practice and introduce a contrary one.) 'Sharing' is a clever term, at least superficially, for it is true that Mary shares in her Son's work. But then all Christians share in the graces of the redemption, in the sufferings of the Cross, all are intercessors for one another, and in a way it may be said that all Christians are theotokoi (God-bearers)—and I suppose you could even stretch that precious Marian title to apply to every creature, since each bears God's creative imprint. The purpose of this new concept, sharing, is to show that the Blessed Virgin is not really unique and differs from the rest of us only in degree of purity, sanctity, and the rest. This purpose is similar to that of the sixteenth-century reformers, who imagined that they would exalt God be belittling His favored ones, Mary and the other saints. And it makes possible another heterodox purpose, the exaltation of man, for if we are not very different from Mary, then we too have been exalted above the angels.

Another reason for playing down Our Lady's excellence is that many of her perfections do not coincide with notions of how to live the good life according to the Cult of Man. Mary's greatest accomplishments are not really accomplishments at all; that is to say, she did not apply her human intelligence in setting goals for herself and then apply her human determination to achieve them. For example, she was not even conscious when she became the Immaculate Conception; and to become the Virgin Mother she was totally passive: "Be it done unto me." All her glories were done unto her rather than personal achievements.

A more serious 'problem' with Marian devotions is that they carry a heavy cargo of belief, a traditional freight which the new breed would like to be disburdened of.

The Assumption, for example, which we celebrate this month—and which is high on the hit list of liturgists—is closely allied with the Resurrection of Our Lord. Instructed by certain modern Biblical scholars, many would prefer to think of the Resurrection as a state of mind, something like hopefulness or optimism, instead of as an historical fact that proves the faith is not vain and gives a glimpse of things divine. The fact that Our Lady was taken bodily into heaven is an imitation of, and therefore a confirmation of (because you cannot imitate what never was), the Ascension of Our Lord, which is in turn a completion of His Resurrection. Those who wish to obscure the Resurrection, then, must also denigrate the Assumption.

Her Assumption is also a promise of our own resurrection on the last day. As our Gate of Heaven (from the Litany of Loreto), Mary in her Assumption shows something about the manner of our translation into the next life, namely, that our whole selves, body and soul, will be taken into glory (or, alas, cast into hell).

Well, for some this focuses altogether too much on the after life. Religion for them is supposed to explain our human experiences and teach us how to bring God into our lives (the arrogance! not bring us to God but God to us), and all this talk about the hereafter just promotes escapism from our daily round of duties. Such people are quite content to speak of heaven as having streets paved with gold and flowing with milk and honey, because this is obviously metaphorical but the Assumption of Our Lady, like the Ascension of Our Lord, insists that there are literal bodies in heaven, bodies which are male and female and which still bear the marks of their earthly sojourn, like pierced hands and feet or like virginity and motherhood. What the Assumption adds to the Ascension is this vital information: that bodily existence in heaven is not peculiar to the Incarnate Word alone but is a blessing shared with the human race.

(I never thought of it before, but it must be this desire to de-emphasize heaven which was at work in redesigning the Preface of the Mass. Just before the Sanctus the Tridentine Rite enumerates the angelic orders and also individualizes them by attributing to each a distinctive activity: the Angels praise, the Dominions worship, the Seraphim celebrate together in joy. The Novus Ordo has a multitude of Prefaces, but they are always vaguer: sometimes just angels, sometimes angels and saints, sometimes choirs of angels and hosts of heaven, and seldom is there any distinction in the forms of their praise.)

Funny, isn't it, how this wandering off into the more exotic features of heaven (a sort of celestial sociology?) is not an escape from ordinary reality, because the meditations which Marian devotions provoke almost always lead back to the practical concerns of daily life. For the Assumption, as we see, testifies to the importance of the body, rightly understood as integral with but subordinate to the soul, destined like the soul to its own kind of immortal glorification—or damnation. Now, your Modernist is also terribly interested in the body, but he is equally confused about it. On the one hand he has a lively concern that everybody gets his minimum daily requirement of vitamins, be free from poverty, disease, and hassels, have a good sex life, jog a lot, and generally satisfy his appetites. But on the other hand he finds many physical things merely trivial: contraception, masturbation, premarital sex, and also genuflecting, fasting, incense, and virginity. This is to say that the Modernist loves the body as a vessel of clay (St. Paul's phrase), whereas the Assumption tells us that the body is a Vessel of Honor, a Spiritual Vessel (Loreto again). (This observation, by the way, is not meant to exhaust those rich titles.)

A RELATED MARIAN devotion that carries a weighty cargo of traditional Catholic faith is the veneration of the Immaculate Conception. By a "singular privilege," said Pope Pius IX in his ex cathedra definition of the dogma, the Blessed Mother was exempted from the stain of original sin (though not from all its consequences, like bodily death). The Immaculate Conception confirms, then, among other things, the traditional doctrine of original sin—because exemption can only be from what is. And you have noticed, no doubt, that this is a doctrine conspicuously ignored or falsified in Modernist catechisms.

Actually, to honor Mary in the Immaculate Conception flies in the face of two heretical traditions. Protestant reformers, Luther in particular, claimed that no one is immaculate, even after Baptism much less at conception—no one, that is, but Christ. The human soul is never cleansed, purified, made saintly—which is why Protestants do not have saints. What happens when a soul is saved is that God in its case chooses to ignore its essential vileness; He does not change the Soul but covers up its foulness with the merits of Christ. His grace is not sanctifying but prophylactic.

But the Immaculate Conception tells us that the corruption we see in human nature is not essential or necessary to it, that human sanctity is not confined to the Redeemer alone, that knowledge of the fruit of the tree of good and evil is not something that we must have in order to be fully human, that sin is not 'natural' or 'only to be expected.' Mary is proof that you do not have to be divine to be holy. The singularity of her singular privilege is also proof that holiness is not commonplace or automatic.

This depressing Protestant theology became too much for the freedom-loving men of the Enlightenment, and so they proclaimed the dogma that everyone is an immaculate conception. "Born free," announced Rousseau in the opening of his famous essay—free from the burden of original sin and ultimately from dependence upon God. If people would just do what is natural and reasonable, the philosophes promised, they would find themselves in a state of perfection. Rousseau even devised educational systems to help them be saved, and his ideas are still at the bottom of what we call modern education: following natural curiosity, unstructured curricula, open classrooms, moving at one's own pace, and the like. But I digress. The fact that Mary alone is the Immaculate Conception makes clear that the rest of us are not exempt from a darkened mind, a weakened will, a certain death, and a guilty stain.

The Immaculate Conception also tells us that some people are better than others—shocking as it may sound in this democratic age. The Blessed Virgin did not earn her exemption from original sin; Our Lord granted it as a privilege. Privilege means, literally, a private law. God made one law for the rest of us and one for His Mother. He is free to bestow His gifts where He will, and Mary is proof that He is not bound by human notions of equality. The Immaculate Conception confirms that the Church was right all along in being cool to the world's passion for equality and to direct our attention to the hierarchies which He has established, hierarchies of nature and of Godliness. (How un-Catholic, then, for the Novus Ordo to smudge over the distinctions of rank and office in His heavenly hierarchies.)

THE PIOUS old customs in honor of Our Blessed Mother, we see, are not just exercises in nostalgia, suited to certain old-fashioned forms of sentimentality, such as traditionalists are often accused of wishing to indulge. While Catholic dogma, which we love, is the intellectual expression of the faith, and while Catholic morality, which we love, is the ethical expression of our faith, so these devotions are important personal practices of the faith; nor are they any more separable from dogma and morality than those two are from each other. If they were too far removed from the official worship of the Church (a very doubtful hypothesis), then the solution to that problem was to raise their status, not throw them out. This is how the divine office achieved official status in the liturgy.

They are practices of the faith which are rich, deep, subtle, exact, beautiful—and barely touched upon in these remarks; and where they are in decline the faith is narrower, shallower, both more cerebral and more subjective. And as acts of faith they belong in a special way to the faithful. For while it is the business of the clergy to teach, govern, and sanctify (though they now prefer to say teach, santify, and unify—another bit of fudging with Catholic truth), it is the special vocation of the faithful to be faithful, that is, to believe and live the faith. Where these devotions, these acts of faith, are denied to the faithful they suffer a grievous deprivation. They are impaired in their pre-eminent duty and delight, to believe with all their hearts. It takes a kind of perversity, or inexcusable mindlessness, for someone to deny the wisdom of the ages, to repudiate the practices of centuries by claiming that Marian devotions hinder instead of nourish the faith, even if there have been occasional abuses. It were better that such a one had a millstone tied about his neck and he were cast into the deep. How exceeding strange—to use the weakest of words—that many wish to demote these pious practices just at a time when they are so sorely needed, at a time, that is, when they might speak with such force and clarity to the problems of modern man, and not modern Catholics only.

For alert modern men are aware of the bankruptcy of Protestantism and the collapse of Rousseau's enlightened optimism. Only the thoughtless fail to recognize that Protestants have regularly surrendered to every new idea of the worldlings—divorce, socialism, secularism, contraception, abortion, homosexuality; and only demagogues and their dupes place serious hope for mankind in increased trade, extension of the franchise, environmental controls, a free press and similar trivia—not trivial perhaps in their place, but trivial as means of salvation. For Protestantism says that nothing men can do has any force in the spiritual order, so that all human efforts are ultimately meaningless or pointless; and the other philosophy says that men are self-sufficient and God is superfluous, that human (not divine) rights are supreme, that man (not God) is the measure of all things and the source of all good. Actually, the deficiency of these two notions is so widely recognized that a man will often embrace both together, as if they were complementary, when in fact they are contradictory. This produces a kind of schizophrenia or double standard, one consequence of which is despair about whether there are any important values, and another is a complete divorce between values and affairs ("I'm personally opposed to this thing, but as an official or citizen I cannot vote against it").

Now, many want the Church to plant one foot firmly in each of these sinking vessels, but to the tired claims of Protestantism and modern philosophies the astute modern man says a plague on both your house. Any number of witnesses to this double failure might be cited, but let us call upon Picasso, whom most Catholics despise and who, as far as I know, never discussed the subject. Picasso's testimony, in the form of his mangled and distorted human shapes, is that man is not self-sufficient and autonomous, is not a complete and beautiful whole capable of self-possession and self-perfection. Picasso looked at human nature and discovered it to be incomplete, discordant, unharmonious, substantially imperfect. That is to say, he discovered, apparently without knowing it, that man is a creature, a being essentially dependent and contingent whose perfection, if it is to come at all, must come from outside human nature. He also discovered that man not only lacks some perfection but that he is badly mangled, mutilated, and scarred—though again he did not know the right name for this condition—original sin. So much for secular man's arrogance.

And though Picasso knew man's wreckage, it was to the human form that he was drawn again and again, instead of to some inferior reality like the forms of nature or the form of forms. A fleet foot here, a keen eye there—what though he put them in the wrong places?—they are still testimony that man is not utterly vile and contemptible, as Luther said, but only mortally hurt. Picasso is thus one of an army of miserable and confused people, very modern people, who nevertheless refuse to fall for either claim, that man is sovereignly beautiful or totally worthless, and yet they remain baffled by man's imperfect excellence and misled by vain philosophies.

IF ONLY they could discover Our Lady. If only the Church would join its Lord and say, "Behold thy mother," instead of acting almost embarrassed by her and the ways Catholics have honored her. Men could find in her, as in her Son, a wonderful resolution of the most baffling puzzles of modern life, for she has a way of bringing together pairs of values which most modern men think they must choose between. Thus, without having tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she is become the Seat of Wisdom and the Mother of Good Counsel; she lived her life unpretentiously, but now all generations call her blessed; she has pronounced the most powerful word that has been given to man to pronounce, but it was a word of surrender: "Be it done unto me according to Thy word"; she exercised authority over the Second Person of the Trinity, but was subject to her husband; she has embraced maternity without relinquishing virginity; she is Our Lady of Sorrows, but reigns in bliss; she is Mother Most Pure, but also Refuge of Sinners; she was beset by tyrants but is become Mirror of Justice. She is at once the simplest and most beautiful of creatures: innocent girl, busy housewife, sorrowing mother and widow; yet she is also the rarest and most exotic of creatures: House of Gold, Tower of Ivory, Ark of the Covenant, Tower of David, Mystical Rose. And this wonderful blending of the plain and the exotic is the constant theme of her devotions.

The reason she is both immensely exalted and immediately accessable is that she discovered the stupendous but elusive secret, humility. Her captivating simplicity—so charming in her familiar domestic concerns—is the very reason God lavished upon her His most exalted blessings. "For he hath regarded the lowliness of his handmaid. He hath scattered the proud in the conceit of their heart. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away;" For the hungry acknowledge their need for nourishment, their insufficiency and their dependency on the source of every good and perfect gift—but the rich have decided to take care of themselves. They have decided, for example, to design a liturgy which takes care of their human needs. But the hungry prostrate their bodies and lift up their hearts in wonder and longing. And one of the finest ways to do this is in the devotions to Mary.

Dr. Brennan is a regular contributor to our pages. Readers have long appreciated his articles on the Martyrs of the English Reformation.