From the San Diego
Union-Tribune - Friday, January 5, 2001
RELIGION & ETHICS Section
Petitioners Want Mary Seated Beside Christ
Group asks pope to
elevate her from being an adviser to being a
co-redeemer
by Jan
Jarboe Russell
New York Times News Service
"The world of today is in
desperate need of a mother," whispered
Professor Mark Miravalle as he sat
behind his desk at Franciscan University
in Steubenville, Ohio, carefully
fingering a string of rosary beads.
Half a world away, inside the Vatican,
yet another enormous box arrived
filled with petitions asking Pop John Paul
II to exercise his absolute power
to proclaim a new and highly debated
dogma: that the Virgin Mary is a
co-redeemer with Jesus and cooperates fully
with her son in the redemption of
mankind.
Miravalle, 41, began the
petition drive four years ago from his obscure
position as a professor of
Mariology--the study of Mary--at one of the most
conservative Catholic
universities in the nation. Since then, the pope has
received more than six
million signatures from 148 countries asking him to
give the Virgin Mary the
ultimate promotion.
In addition to ordinary Catholics, Miravalle has
received support from
550 bishops and 42 cardinals, as well as from Cardinal
John O'Conner and
Mother Teresa.
If Miravalle's campaign succeeds and
John Paul II proclaims the Virgin
Mary as a co-redeemer, she would be a
vastly more powerful figure, something
close to a fourth member of the Holy
Trinity and the primary female face
through which Christians experience the
divine.
Specifically, Roman Catholics would be required to accept three new
spiritual truths: that Mary is co-redemptrix and participates in people's
redemption, that Mary is mediatrix and has the power to grant all graces and
that Mary is "the advocate for the people of God," in Miravalle's, words,
and
has the authority to influence God's judgments.
Pros, cons
For the millions of Virgin Mary devotees who have signed Miravalle's
petitions, these are an accepted part of their daily spiritual lives. They
represent what theologians call popular piety, practices that are widely
accepted by ordinary religious people over the learned objections of the
establishment.
Indeed the idea has been present in Catholicism at least
as far aback as
the 14th century. There is also historic precedent for
petition campaigns
such as Miravalle's. Two other Marian dogmas -- the
dogma of the Assumption
in 1950, which declared that Mary was taken up, body
and soul, to heaven
after her death, and the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception of 1854, which
established that Mary was preserved from original
sin -- were both preceded
by floods of petitions.
Yet within the
Vatican, the dogma that Miravalle advocates has touched
off a private holy
war.
Although it has the support of at least 12 cardinals in Rome, others
fear
that its acceptance would cause a major schism among Catholics and set
back
all efforts at ecumenism. Because the dogma would be an infallible
proclamation by the pope, it would trigger a renewed debate over the role of
the pop's power in modern society.
"It seems to put her on an equal
footing with Christ," said Father John
Roten, director of the International
Marian Library in Dayton, articulating
the primary reason for opposition.
"That just won't do."
Father Rene Laurentin, a French monk and the leading
Mary scholar in the
world, agrees. In a fax, Laurentin said that the
proposed dogma would be the
equivalent of launching "bombs" at the
Protestants and would deepen the
breach between the Vatican and the Eastern
Orthodox church.
"Mary is the model of our faith, but she is not divine," he
said. "There
is no mediation or co-redemption except in Christ. He alone
is God."
Papal ally
Pope John Paul II has made no secret of his
devotion to Mary. He has the
phrase totus tuus (which in Latin means
"totally hers") as his papal motto
and credits the Virgin Mary with saving
his life during the 1981
assassination attempt and for the fall of
communism.
He has used the phrase "co-redemptrix" six times in his papacy to
describe Mary, which has lead Miravalle and his petitioners to hope that
during his lifetime the pope will proclaim her co-redeemer.
Miravalle
has visited privately with the pope several times, but he would
not say what
happened during his meetings. "All I can tell you," Miravalle
said
fervently, "is that I am personally confident that the holy father will
make
this solemn definition of the Mother of Jesus at the most appropriate
time.
It's not a question of if. It's only a question of when.
However, Joquain
Navarro-Valls, spokesman for the Vatican, repeated a
statement made by the
Vatican in 1997, which said that "there is no
proclamation of a new dogma on
the Madonna under study either by the holy
father of by the International
Theological Commission."
The Rev. Paige Patterson, president of the
conservative Southern Baptist
Convention, the largest denomination of
Protestants in the United States, is
horrified at the mere suggestion that
Mary might be a co-redeemer. "Such a
view is clearly heretical," he said.
"In order to be a redeemer, it would
require a person to be perfect. It
would require a person to be God. We
certainly don't believe she was God."
Some liberal Protestants have lone argued that the Catholic Church has
used the symbol of the Virgin Mary to restrict women's possibilities by
keeping women obedient to the teachings of the church. Retired Bishop John
Spong, one of the most controversial figures in the Episcopal Church, says
that Christians need a feminine symbol for God, but said such a symbol
needed
to be created by women, not "a bunch of men sitting around in Rome in
their
frocks."
