Let me start with saying that I have two purposes going into this thread.
The OP asked how to explain her love of Mary. That’s easy enough - emotional attachment to one as admirable as Mary shouldn’t need much explanation.
The second is because of whom she’s explaining Mary to - Protestants who by definition object to showing honor in any religious sense except to the Lord. She is going to encounter objections on a theological standpoint, so I offered thoughts on how to approach in a way that goes past those objections, keeps the hackles down so to speak.
Why do we spend so much time explaining to people what Mary is not? Why is so much effort spent diminishing her role, seeming to hang out signs which read, “Proceed with caution” and sheepishly apologizing?
This is a question on which I’m on the opposite side - why spend so much time and effort focused upon Mary when all glory and honor are the Lord’s? The answer forming on your lips as you read this is as you said before:
There is no honor too great for Mary, except for the honor due to her Son. When we honor the mother, we honor the son.
And yet we honor the Son (and the Father and the Spirit) in the Mass and in prayers devoted to Them, both by Person and in Triune Majesty. Is the honor given the Son by the mother from the sinner greater than the honor given the Son by the sinner? This is a question I have yet to find an adequate answer to.
TimH, I really appreciate your being kind here to me. I’ve received less kind treatment in my own parish when I raise such objections.
Why do we have such half-hearted tepidity?
I’m not accusing you personally losh, nor is my intent to question your motives. But I am sitting here wondering what happened. There is a whole traditionalists movement which makes so much noise, but there are few things in our faith more traditional than praising and glorifying God for the great gift of the Mother of God and Mediatrix of Grace.
I can’t speak in general why Marian devotion is not as whole-heartedly followed, though I can guess. Perhaps the reluctance to come to the Lord directly that was certainly present in my father’s and grandfather’s generations has dissipated altogether as my generation, surrounded by contemporary Christian music and WWJD items and books like “The Born-Again Catholic” instead find a God who is very accessible and always eager to hear our prayers. The need for a personal devotion to Mary seems less urgent when one can be within hugging distance of the Real Presence in Eucharistic Adoration (a practice that has increased in my generation’s time), and when apologetics and theology are easier to read thanks to Scott Hahn, Dave Armstrong and Chris West.
It’s an interesting question you ask. My answer is that when I wish to praise God I praise God, when I wish to praise Mary I praise Mary. If we have direct access to both we can talk to both, and if all praise given Mary is given to the Lord, then we do at least as well praising the Lord as we do praising Mary.
I wouldn’t call myself a traditional Catholic - you see that in my own description above and in what else I’ve written. I’ve participated in parish groups that have emphasized the Traditional nature of Catholicism, rather than the personal nature, and felt little fellowship. It becomes a duty, rather than a love or an identity.
You are kind not to point, but you probably suspect that my own half-heartedness towards Mary is from my inability to understand the need for the doctrine nor the doctrine itself. No matter how many saints and popes reiterate it, I don’t see why God needs to send all Grace through Mary’s hands such that those who praise her receive of it and those who don’t … well, de Montfort would say they’re condemned anyway no matter how great their devotion to God if they have no devotion to Mary. And so I teeter on an uncomfortable line of trying to give assent to a teaching that’s intellectually unsatisfying or decrying it and risk heresy. So what comes out is a half-hearted “I accept because the Church believes it, but really don’t believe it myself” on Mary’s roles as mediatrix, redemptrix, adjudicatrix, etc.
I’d feel no less close to the Lord if the Church’s teaching on Mary was simply that, as Rev 12 tells of the woman being whisked away to safety in the desert, so was Mary taken into Heaven to a well-deserved rest, having received the crown of perseverance of the saints, praying for all mankind and worshipping endlessly her Son, along with the Father and the Spirit, one God forever. I’d be no less happy if the Church simply declared that the Lord’s actions of Grace upon each individual - from the small to the salvific - were by the touch of the Holy Spirit, and that Mary as model of faithful obedience inspires our hearts but does not take active part in the salvation of each individual. I’d not think any additional peril to my personal salvation because Mary doesn’t have a personal role in it.
Mary is fundamentally different from all creatures. No other saint was created without sin, but Mary was given that singular gift, which no other creature was ever given.
Yes, but it remains a gift that she
received, not a garment that she crafted for herself by her own hands.
Mary’s glory exceedes all the angels combined, and all the saints combined. She is the pinnacle of creation, God’s perfect creature. No other creature can make that claim.
Yes, God’s perfect creature indeed but a creature all the same. No matter how beautiful we tell the painting it is, the honor is due the painter. We ought to thank God for Mary. To thank any person for their own existence would draw the response “if I had a choice I’d still choose to have been born, but thanks.”
There was a time when people paraded through the town with statues of Mary on a bed of roses, and if anyone asked if she was the Mediatrix of Grace, everyone would say “Of course!” and no one would raise an eyebrow.
I wonder how many actually understood mediatrix - and how many understand it now. When you tell another Catholic - in men’s group or in RCIA - do you ever the get the question “When I pray to God am I actually praying to Mary? Is there a point to praying to God without praying to Mary?”
Every grace from every prayer, every drop of sanctifiying grace which we recieve in the confessional or from recpetion of the Eucharist, all comes to us from the treasury of grace which Jesus gave into the hands of Mary. The conversion of every sinner to Christ is because Mary decides, in conformity to her son’s will, that the sinner should be converted.
(emphasis my own)
Here am I tepid - If you mean to say that Mary’s will is so perfectly in accord with her Son’s that it is truly her Son who decides, not Mary, then there is no need to speak of Mary as if she were a separate being. Mary actually makes no decision - it is made for her. Two beings have two distinct wills, but two beings with one will are really one being. And I am tepid because this becomes a trivial exercise of thought - Mary has united her will to her Son’s so that the Son’s will alone remains.
If, however, you mean to say that Mary truly decides because the Son cannot refuse the Queen Mother, as I have heard others (perhaps even you) say on other threads, then I am cold. If Mary may decide and the Son does not agree, then Mary is our judge, not the Son. Scripture and Catechism are in error and we step closer to declaring this woman so vested with the authority of God that she becomes divine herself. There am I cold indeed.
