Mary: Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix of All Graces, and Advocate of the People of God: an Interdisciplinary Exposition and Evaluation of the Proposed fifth Marian Dogma
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Mary: Co-redemptrix, mediatrix of all graces, and advocate of the people of God: An interdisciplinary exposition and evaluation of the proposed fifth Marian dogma Author: Flynn M. Fernandes Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:105006 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2015 Copyright is held by the author, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise noted. MARY: CO-REDEMPTRIX, MEDIATRIX OF ALL GRACES, AND ADVOCATE OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD An Interdisciplinary Exposition and Evaluation of the Proposed Fifth Marian Dogma A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Licentiate in Sacred Theology Degree from Boston College School of Theology and Ministry By: Flynn M. Fernandes Co-Mentors: Margaret E. Guider, O.S.F. Michael Simone, S.J. Boston College School of Theology and Ministry Brighton, Massachusetts April 30, 2015 Contents PREFACE ....................................................................................................................................... ii Mary of Salvation History ........................................................................................................... ii The Magnificat ............................................................................................................................ x INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: HISTORICAL-CRITICAL EXPOSITION AND EVALUATION .............................. 6 1.1 The Virgin Mary in Early Christianity................................................................................... 6 1.2 The Cult of Mary in the Dark to Late Middle Ages ............................................................... 7 1.3 Mary from the Reformation to the Nineteenth Century ....................................................... 16 1.4 Mary in the Magisterial Documents of the Roman Catholic Church .................................. 19 Chapter 2: SOCIOCULTURAL AND POLITICAL EXPOSITION AND EVALUATION ....... 23 2.1 The Cosmic Mystery of Mary .............................................................................................. 23 2.2 Sociocultural Contexts of Marian Piety and Devotion ....................................................... 30 2.3 Mary is for Every One a Woman of All Seasons ................................................................. 36 Chapter 3: THEOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL EXPOSITION AND EVALUATION . 41 3.1 The Doctrine of Redemption ............................................................................................... 41 3.2 Arguments in Support of the Proposed Fifth Marian Dogma ............................................. 42 3.3 Arguments against a Papal Definition ................................................................................ 50 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 57 POSTSCRIPT ............................................................................................................................... 63 A Developing Mariology .......................................................................................................... 63 Mary the Model of Christian Faith and Virtue ..................................................................... 63 Mary the Liberator ................................................................................................................ 67 Mary the Comforter of the Afflicted in the Journey of Theodicy ........................................... 75 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 80 i PREFACE A study on the proposed fifth Marian dogma that assigns to Mary the tripartite appellation “Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix of All Graces, and Advocate of the People of God” has many underlying themes: faith, virtues, the Immaculate Conception, virginity, motherhood, the Assumption, liberation, and theodicy to name a few. Though it may seem premature to look for invocations of these titles in the Gospels where the primary focus was Christ, the many questions that elicit inquiry into this proposed dogma necessitate a quest for the historical Mary in Scripture and the Apocrypha. At the same time, one should not expect to trace contemporary Marian thought back to Scripture, mainly because the evangelists and other writers of the biblical canon were not thinking in a mariological sense. The paucity of references to Mary in the Bible might surprise today’s reader given the proliferation of contemporary literary works on the Blessed Virgin. Mary of the Bible is to be read from an interchange of evangelistic and communal christologies because the evangelists of the first-century Christian movement wrote from the perspective of their specific communities. To understand the Mary of salvation history we may need to read Scripture backward from the Gospel to pre-Gospel times. The first background segment for this study presented below is a chronological tracing of the Miriam of Nazareth in Scripture and the Apocryphal literature. Mary of Salvation History In Old Testament Prophecies According to Scripture, the “first good news” of the mention of Christ and his Mother, the Woman and her seed, is to be found in Genesis 3:15 (“I will put enmity between thee and the ii woman…”). Most likely an interpretation from the Protevangelium of St. James,1 the woman referred to has been a subject of exegetical debate. Some biblical scholars argue that she is the first Eve according to the Septuagint (LXX), while others favor a Second Eve (Mary) interpretation according to the Vulgate which had an error in its initial translation from the original Hebrew. Contemporary theologians and scholars have struck a compromise that the “woman” refers to Eve in a literal sense but without excluding Mary. J. Coppens, author of the article “Le Protévangile. Un nouvel essai d’exégèse,” prefers a generalized interpretation that includes Eve as more literally representing all other women with Mary envisaged indirectly as Mother of the Savior, as in the later New Testament veiled reference to her in Revelations 12.2 As this first text alluding to Mary and Jesus is understood to be prophetic and messianic,3 Hilda Graef deduces that there is an expectation that the Mother of the Lord should remain hidden. The second important Old Testament prophetic text that alludes to Mary and the birth of her son is found in Isaiah 7:14 when Yahweh instructed the prophet to assure King Ahaz of Judah of his divine assistance during the threatened invasion of Judah by Syria and Israel (ca. 735 BC). The text reads: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and she shall call his name Emmanuel.” It is the translation of the Hebrew almah to ‘virgin’ that led to debate and controversy. Contemporary theologians like R. Laurentin and J. Steinmann have a two-fold 1 A translation based on Papyrus Bodmer 5 by Oscar Cullmann in New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1: Gospels and Related Writings, Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed. (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1991) can be found in the Appendix of Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus, Beverly R. Gaventa (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 133-45. 2 Hilda Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion; With a New Chapter Covering Vatican II and Beyond by Thomas A. Thompson, S.M. (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2009), 1-3. 3 Luigi Gambero, S.M., Mary in the Middle Ages: The Blessed Virgin Mary in the Thought of Medieval Latin Theologians (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 67. Rabanus Maurus (d. 780), a Benedictine monk of the Early Middle Ages, paid special attention to scriptural texts that alluded to Mary in messianic prophecy. He interpreted the woman who is destined to crush the serpent’s head in Genesis 3:15 to represent both the Church and the Mother of God. It is the virtuosity of the members of the Church that will overcome the devil, but ultimately it is Christ, Mary’s Son, who will wipe away all sin and evil. Rabanus wrote that some understood the woman to be Mary because the Lord was to be born from her and he was the one who would vanquish the enemy and destroy death. iii interpretation—the first is that Isaiah 7:14 literally refers to Hezekiah’s birth, and the second, owing to its eschatological and messianic tone, foretells of the birth of Jesus whose mother is Mary. The messianic interpretation is interpreted literally by J. Coppens, finding further support by its import in Matthew 1:22 and Micah 5:2f.4 Other Old Testament texts (Wisdom, Canticles, and Psalms) and types (the Ark of the Covenant) have been applied to Mary in an indirect sense.5 In the New Testament It is not with ease that we can locate Mary in the Bible. There are more references to her in the Holy Quran than in the seventeen instances of the biblical canon. In fact, we hear of Mary’s voice or suffering only four times in Scripture (the Annunciation, the Visitation, at Cana, and at Calvary). That the primary interest of the evangelists and the Apostle Paul was Jesus, not Mary, is one of the explanations for this apparent dearth. Offered below is a summary of direct references and allusions to Mary in St. Paul’s letters, the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, the Acts of the Apostles, and Revelations. None of the letters of the Apostle