The Problem of Mary

The greatest obstacle to Christian reunion is the question of the authority of the Pope. But almost as difficult for Protestants to accept is the Roman Catholic cult of Mary, whom Catholics revere as their spiritual mother, able to intercede for them before God. Protestants generally reject the idea of the Immaculate Conception and of the Assumption into heaven--both doctrines that have been made articles of faith for Catholics within the last 107 years. Last week, at the annual convention of the Mariological Society of America, a leading Catholic theologian warned that it was time for his church to give a clearer explanation of how such beliefs derive from the revelation of God.

Bone in the Throat. In these ecumenical times, argued Father Walter J. Burghardt, S.J., professor of patristic theology at the Jesuit Seminary in Woodstock, Md., theologians are obliged to look harder at the issues that divide Christians. "For the bone that sticks in the Protestant throat," he said, "is Scripture v. dogma, the original message of salvation from the mouth of God and the promulgation of infallible propositions. It is this passage, this seemingly lyric leap from Scripture to dogma, and from dogma to dogma, that scandalizes the Protestant theologian."

Protestant theologians know that in Catholic belief (as in their own) the public revelation of God ended with the death of the last apostle. But Catholics now explicitly accept as dogma certain things that their forefathers did not. "For all his good will," says Burghardt, "the non-Catholic scholar does not see that any of the sacred authors speak of the Assumption of Our Lady, and yet the Assumption was declared revealed truth in 1950."

Thus the Catholic vision of Mary, says Burghardt, strangles ecumenical dialogue. "She is for the Protestant the visible symbol of Catholic idolatry, the Roman abandonment of Scripture, of the history of Christ. Divine Maternity and Perpetual Virginity and Immaculate Conception and a glorious Assumption--these are already stones of stumbling. But the end is not yet. It may soon be defined as part and parcel of God's public revelation that in union with her son the Virgin redeemed the world."

Logic in Dogma. In the past, Catholic theologians have been content to justify this dogmatic development by saying that the church has the duty to explain and unfold those things that may be hidden, or implicit, within Christ's teaching. But, asks Burghardt: "Is a dogma always logically implicit in revelation? Do I always make it explicit by human logic? Is all God's revelation discoverable in Scripture? If the total vision is in Scripture, just how is it there? In clear propositions? In logical implications? If only part of Mariology is Biblically based, where is the remnant revealed? Can I touch that revelation as palpably as I touch the Bible or must it, in the nature of things, fade into a valid but vague reality called apostolic tradition?"

Resolving such questions, concludes Father Burghardt, may well involve some spiritual agony for Catholics, but "the experience should be intellectually and spiritually stimulating for ourselves--and for those not of our number to whom we say so insistently that the function of Our Lady in the 20th century, as in the first, is to bring God down to men and men up to God."

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