elenmosyne

Mark Shea: Mariology From A-Z (Part 2)

Former Protestant Comments on Mary and Ecumenism

By Annamarie Adkins

SEATTLE, Washington, JULY 17, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Even though the early Protestant Reformers praised the Virgin Mary -- some even had a great devotion to her -- Catholic Marian doctrine has become a stumbling block for many Protestants and divided Christians for over four centuries.

Now, however, some Protestants are rediscovering the Blessed Mother, reinvigorating conversations between Catholics and Protestants about her role in the life and faith of the Church.

Mark Shea decided to provide a comprehensive resource for this dialogue, and the result is "Mary, Mother of the Son," a three-volume work of apologetics published by Catholic Answers.

Shea is senior content editor at Catholic Exchange. In addition to his role as a popular Catholic blogger, speaker, and writer, Shea is the star of an upcoming motion picture -- an adaptation of G.K. Chesterton's novel "Manalive."

He spoke with ZENIT about why attacks on the Mother of God are really attacks on Christ and His Church.

Part 1 of this interview appeared Thursday.

ZENIT: Why is Mary such a stumbling block to Christian unity? Shouldn't all Christians at least be able to unite around their Mother?

Shea: They should, but they haven't for roughly four centuries. There's hope in that number however, because it means that hostility to and fear of Mary is, historically speaking, a very recent phenomenon and one that really only took off well after the Reformation began.

Many of the Reformers had a profound devotion to Mary and, in fact, accepted much of Catholic teaching about her. However, as Protestantism became more remote from Catholic teaching (and as, in English-speaking countries, Elizabeth I found it very convenient to supplant the cult of the Virgin with a political cult of the Virgin Queen), that connection failed and was eventually broken.

Along with that went the loss of a sense of the sacramental, of the senses of Scripture, and of an appreciation for the feminine in the life of the Church. Mary came to be seen almost exclusively as a sort of pagan goddess and an actual threat to genuine Christian devotion: a perception that would have been absolutely foreign to the mind of any Christian in the first 16 centuries of the Church.

Read the rest here

Zenit yesterday and today has published a two part interview with Mark Shea, a well known and respected convert from Evangelical Protestant to Roman Catholicism. He says that one of his biggest holdups in his conversion was Catholic doctrine on Mary – and I figured this fits in perfectly with the series of posts I am doing. He is in the process of publishing a three volume series on Mariology, which promises to be a great gift to the Church with its special sensitivity and awareness of the problems that Protestants tend to have with Marian theology. Here is part I:

Mark Shea: Mariology From A-Z (Part 1)

Former Protestant Addresses Marian Devotion

By Annamarie Adkins

SEATTLE, Washington, JULY 16, 2009 (Zenit.org).- One would think it impossible to spill any more ink about the Blessed Virgin Mary, judging from the number of Marian titles on the shelf at a local Catholic bookstore.

But when popular Catholic author Mark Shea was considering entering the Church, there were no comprehensive titles where he could address his concerns as an evangelical Protestant about Catholic Marian doctrine and devotion.

Twenty years later, that book was still missing from the shelves, so Shea set out to write it.

The result is "Mary, Mother of the Son," a three-volume apologetics tool published by Catholic Answers.

Shea is senior content editor at Catholic Exchange and a regular columnist for both Inside Catholic and the National Catholic Register.

In Part 1 of this interview, he shares with ZENIT why almost everything non-Catholics think they "know" about Mary is wrong.

Part 2 of this interview will appear Friday.

ZENIT: Why did you write a book about the Mother of God? Where does your trilogy fit on the already crowded shelf of books and treatises about Mary?

Shea: I wrote this book because it's the book I wish somebody had written when I was coming into the Church.

I waited around for 20 years, hoping somebody else would do it, but when nobody did, I decided I'd take on the project (which is only fair since I'm the only one who really knows what questions and doubts I had and what would constitute a satisfactory reply to them).

As to where the trilogy fits on the bookshelf, I suppose I'd say "Anywhere."

That is to say, part of the reason I wrote it is because there simply wasn't any book I could find that did what this book does. For instance, the books on Marian dogma didn't deal with questions about apparitions. Devotional literature didn't answer questions about where the Church was getting all this stuff about Mary. Books tracing the development of doctrine didn't talk about the rosary. In short, the literature was out there, but most people don't have time to locate all the resources for the host of questions they have about Mary. So I created "Mary, Mother of the Son" to be a sort of "one-stop shopping" resource for virtually every issue a non-Catholic (or uncatechized Catholic) might have concerning Marian doctrine and devotion.

It tackles everything from the sources of Marian belief and practice (a huge issue since oodles of non-Catholics simply assume the whole thing is a data dump from paganism) to the Catholic approach to Scripture to the four Marian dogmas to the broad spectrum of Marian devotion to private revelations and apparitions to possible ways forward in Catholic/Evangelical conversations about the Blessed Virgin.

When it comes to Marian Willies, I've run the gamut in my own life and had to deal with pretty much every difficulty and problem with Mary to which non-Catholic flesh is heir, so it's a book that comes from my heart (and gut) as well as my head.

Nothing in it is new (God willing) and the whole thing is ultimately a restatement of the Tradition. But it's a restatement that tries to run the gamut of Catholic teaching on Mary, not simply focus in on one specialized area. And it's written in order to be intelligible to the non-specialist.

Read the rest here

I think the most important concept that must be explained about the Catholic (and Orthodox) practice of Marian devotion, and what is most commonly misunderstood by those of our separated brethren who believe it to be idolatry, is that Marian devotion is entirely Christocentric. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the first Marian dogma ever defined by the Church, which is that Mary is properly called Theotokos, God-bearer, or more commonly, the Mother of God. This definitive proclamation was made at the First Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431. The purpose of this Marian dogma was specifically to defeat the Nestorian heresy, which taught that the two natures of Christ, the nature of God and the nature of man, were joined in conjunction, rather than hypostatic union, and that Mary only gave birth to His human nature. This had the effect of presenting Jesus as some sort of half-man, half-God hybrid, like Hercules. By proclaiming Mary as the Mother of God, it was made clear that there was but one person, Jesus Christ, who was fully God and fully man. Thus the definition of this Marian dogma was of a specifically Christological nature.