Matthias, thank you for sharing your difficulties and spiritual journey so honestly. I haven’t read the whole thread, so please forgive me if I have misread it. It seems to me that the thread has gone astray from Matthias’ original question: how to cope with difficulties as a convert. By way of background, I am the Catholic convert grandson of a Baptist minister, who sent his son (my dad) to Anglican choir school, much to the shock of his congregation. My dad remained vaguely Anglican.
Firstly, let me share with you a wise saying of Blessed John Henry Newman, who I can recommend as a kind and generous patron: “A thousand difficulties do not make a single doubt.” It seems to me that what you are experiencing in relation to devotion to our Blessed Mother are difficulties rather than doubt. You explained your powerful conversion experience in the charismatic prayer group and with your priest. The Jesuits have another wise saying: “Never go back in desolation on a decision made in consolation.” The sense of consolation that you experienced points to a reality, namely that, often in spite of appearances, the Catholic Church is the “one true fold of the Redeemer” (Blessed JHN again). Now you are experiencing difficulties. If you enjoy reading, it may be worth retracing the development of devotion to Mary in the Church over the centuries and millennia. As Bl. JHN says, to be deeply in history is to cease to be a Protestant. Yet even after we have abandonned the raft of a Protestant communion for the barque of Peter, we can be prone to backwards glances. Our separated brethren say that devotion to Our Blessed Mother is a later accretion and not part of the deposit of Apostolic faith whereas we say that it’s a development of that faith. If the Protestants are right, they would need to say at what point the catholic faith went astray in relation to Mary. Since a strong theology of Mary can be traced back as far as Origen, student of St Polycarp who himself is said to have sat at the feet of St John the Apostle, it seems remarkably early for the faith to go astray, given that the Lord promised us that the Holy Spirit would abide with us and that the gates of hell would never prevail against th Church.
Next, we can look geographically. Of the original five patriachates: Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch only Rome and perhaps Jerusalem remain in communion with the See of Peter, sadly. Yet, in the Greek Orthodox, Coptic and Syrian churches, devotion to the Theotokos remains. The same is true in the ancient Christian churches of Ethiopia and Armenia. It is not just a Catholic thing. The Protestants are, globally, the exception. As St Augustine says: “Secus judicat orbis terrarum.”
So, it seems to me that your difficulty with Mary, which I share, is one of emotion and imagination since there can be little intellectual cause for disagreement with the devotion. Before he died, I made my dad come with me to Walsingham, our national shrine to Our Blessed Mother. His reaction was to say, “I was brought up to think that all this was idolatry, the Whore of Babylon, yet there is something here.” Later, I was brought closer to Mary through the experience of my wife giving birth to our son. During her labour she asked me to pray the Rosary with her, which I did, for hours and hours. It was a powerful experience of maternal care that I associate both with the Holy Spirit and with Mary, as icon of the Spirit.
For more on the link between Our Blessed Mother and the Spirit, you may find it helpful to read Mary by Fr Francois Xavier-Durrwell. I would also recommend First Comes L
