In Defense of Mary, Maiden-Mother of God

Why should we revere the Blessed Mother? Is it a requirement of faith that we do so? Isn’t it a bit of an anachronism, however, in an age determined on ecumenism, where the cry of unity requires that we respect the views of those who see her as a divisive figure? Mightn’t it be better, in the circumstance, to simply remove her from the conversation? 

After all, we’re not redeemed by Mary, so why give her such a high profile? Why must we be forever fighting over this particular bone of contention? Salvation depends upon Christ, the Son of the living God, not Mary, who merely gave birth to Him and then pretty much receded into the background, leaving the stage for Christ alone to perform the play.

True enough. But before escorting Our Lady from the theater altogether, perhaps a distinction or two might be helpful. For instance, it is reverence that we’re talking about here—not worship, which quite properly belongs to God alone. 

Latria, as the Church understands these things, is never applied to creatures, not even the most exalted, as in the case of Mary, whom all Christians rightly regard as the Maiden-Mother of God. For her it is a matter of hyperdulia, or veneration of the most heightened sort, higher even than the dulia applied to ordinary saints and martyrs. Of course, there is nothing the least bit ordinary about sanctity; it is always an exercise in heroic virtue, the fruit of divine grace.

But, again, why should we pay this woman any particular or special homage? She is obviously not God, yet the attention she is given suggests, certainly in ears sensitive to hearing the pure Word of God filtered through the faith of 16th-century Protestant Reformers, a quasi-divine status. So, why don’t we just cut it out?

The short answer, of course, is because God commands us to heap high the praise and honor that befits His own Mother, she whom a once undivided Christendom had early on designated as Theotokos (God-bearer). And to that end, God directed not a few inspired writers to set it all down in both Scripture and Tradition, the precise meaning and application of which He entrusted to His Church. In other words, God has enjoined us, and the world He came to redeem, to reverence and venerate His Mother far above all other creatures.  

Now, none of this, of course, gets in the way of the claims made by Christ Himself. “I am the way and the truth and the life,” He tells us in the Gospel of St. John. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (14:6). True enough. And no less true is that no one comes to Jesus except through Mary, who remains the chief point of mediation between ourselves and God. Are we to dismantle this most necessary bridge between Heaven and Earth because in our impatience with signs we have decided to bypass the sign of God’s own Mother?  

“Our tainted nature’s solitary boast,” is how Wordsworth referred to her. And the Protestant poet did not think that in praising her he was subtracting from the honor and adoration we owe her Son. How else is the Infinite God to enter the finite world, becoming the human being Jesus, if not through the womb and birth canal of a woman ordained by God from all eternity to be the perfect vessel for the world’s salvation?

And then, of course, there is Dante, no more sublime example of whom can be found anywhere in the world, whose stature surpasses even that of Wordsworth. And what does Dante do but place on the lips of St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the final canto of the Paradiso the perfect Marian prayer, entreating the Mother of God to intercede on Dante’s behalf that he might actually see the Face of God. “Virgin Mother,” he begins, 

daughter of thy son; 
humble beyond all creatures and more exalted…
thy merit so ennobled human nature    
that its divine Creator did not scorn   
to make Himself the creature of His creature. 

So, who is this extraordinary creature—the daughter no less of her own son (“O figlia del tuo figlio”)!—that anyone who seeks God but does not first seek her will, warns Dante, “have his wish fly upward without wings”? Yet, whose charity will often enough arrive in advance even of our asking for it?  

There exists an ancient and most instructive tradition in the Church—perhaps of apocryphal origin, but it hardly matters since it answers so perfectly to both the logic and poetry of belief. According to this tradition, Our Blessed Lord died on the Cross exactly 33 years to the day following His conception by the Holy Ghost in the womb of a young Jewish girl not much older than 14 years of age. And when did this stunning convergence of calendar dates take place? On the 25th of March. 

And the point? Concerning both conception and Cross, Mary was there, equally and indispensably present, as though the two great mysteries of faith were miraculously to meet square in the month of March.

And so, just as we can understand nothing of Christ apart from the Trinity, in whose depths Christ dwells from all eternity, so, too, we can understand nothing of Mary—neither her identity nor her mission—apart from Christ, the Eternal Word, whom she brought forth into human being for the world’s salvation. Just think of it—the very plenitude of the Godhead, no less, pouring itself out upon her at the very moment when, by God’s grace, she agrees to become the Mother of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. 

Here is the most perfect alliance forged within the finite space of a young woman’s womb. So that by her consent, writes St. John Damascene, last of the Church Fathers, “Mary opened to us the unspeakable abyss of God’s love.” The very One whom not even the stars in the sky can contain, the virgin womb of one woman bore. “She gave milk to our bread,” St. Augustine tells us.

She is thus the perfect Virgin who “let it all happen to her”—indeed, who was prepared to enter into a relationship of deepest intimacy with her Son, the eternal Son of the Father. And because there can be no credible theology of Christ without a theology of the Trinity—since the Son does not come without a Father having sent Him—so, too, there can be no complete understanding of Christ apart from the Woman who said yes to God. 

Were faith to suffer any disconnect between the two, i.e., Mary prescinded from Christ, all that would be left of faith would be no more than an abstract Christ, a desiccated Christ, shorn of any human or historical context. Leave Mary out of the equation and what you are left with is a Jesus so dehumanized as to be unrecognizable.  

How can we not, therefore, wish to reverence the very one who, in preparing a place for the Incarnate Word, provides the best possible evidence we have that God actually became one of us? “Who,” in the words of the poet Hopkins’ “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to the Air We Breathe,” 

not only
Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast, 
Birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace
That does now reach our race—

…This one work has to do—

Let all God’s glory through…