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Ballyhoo from Mr. Bali Hai

My 76-year-old mother and I do not share the same reading tastes. She tends toward pulp fiction. I don’t. So I was surprised when one day she said, “I have something I’d like you to read.” She handed me James Michener’s Recessional, about retirement centers for the elderly. 

I was astonished to find, in the pages she marked, passages about the Blessed Virgin Mary which essentially said that most doctrines Catholics believe about Mary are not to be found in Scripture or early Tradition. They come mostly from popular myths and legends. So went the charge. 

“Is that true?” my mother asked, concerned — another innocent but ill-informed Catholic sauntering through the swamps of popular literature falls into the quicksand of doctrinal confusion and can’t get out. For my mother, who has had no religious education since the 1940s, this is catechism the hard way. 

How ill-informed Catholics can be is shown by our next exchange. Seeing that a character in the novel spoke of Mary’s “deification” by the Catholic Church, I decided to tackle that one first. “For one thing,” I said, “we don’t ‘deify’ Mary. We don’t worship her as a god or goddess.” 

“We don’t?” asked my mother, a life-long, Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, whose son is a priest. 

Resisting the temptation to put my head in my hands, I merely looked at her and said, “No, we don’t. Mary is a human being, although a very special one, freed from sin and assumed into heaven body and soul. But still a human being.” 

“Oh.” 

Michener’s novel contained enough half-truths and errors, wrapped in apparent credibility and respectability, to dismay most uninformed Catholics. For cynics, skeptics, and enemies of the faith, the book would confirm their suspicions that the Church dreams up doctrines. 

In the eight-page section, a woman minister, Helen Quade, recounts to a group of men the ways women have been oppressed by religious groups over the centuries. Jews, Quakers, Mormons and Paul himself all come in for it. 

Then a character named Jimenez tries to bring up Catholic regard for women (his first mistake), particularly in the person of the Virgin Mary (his second mistake). Staunch but obtuse Catholic that he is, he becomes infuriated and storms out of the room (his third mistake) when Quade brilliantly shows, from Church history and Catholic theology, that Mary’s supposed prerogatives are little more than fiction dreamed up to satisfy peoples’ psychological needs. 

Three days later Jimenez rejoins the group, dramatically approaches Quade, and invites her to accompany him to his table, where he publicly issues an apology (apologetics Michener-style) and kisses her hand. He announces to everyone he has just spent three days in the library researching her charges and has found all of them to be true. He has discovered that centuries of Marian fantasizing were appropriate because it delivered “a noble portrait of a noble woman to the peasants . . . who desperately wanted to believe.” Nodding to Quade, he concludes, “It was Helen’s obstinacy that brought the truth to us.” From then on, the novel says, she “had established her own credentials” with the group. 

What exactly did she say? Following the “deification” remark, she points out that the Bible says nothing about the Virgin Mary’s perpetual virginity or her bodily Assumption into heaven and that for “the beginning three centuries she was not conspicuous, either in the Bible or Church doctrine.” 

This is only partially true. It ignores “Hail, full of grace” (Luke 1:28), addressed to Mary by the angel. That phrase in Greek speaks of a perfection, a completion of grace that is at least compatible with Catholic belief in Mary’s sinlessness. The book also ignores Revelation 12, which speaks of “a woman clothed with the sun” who gives birth to a boy “who is to shepherd the nations.” Here Mary is pictured in glory and splendor, echoing belief in her Assumption and Immaculate Conception. The slam against her perpetual virginity doesn’t mention well-honed Catholic arguments that biblical references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters refer in Aramaic to close relatives such as cousins. 

While it is true that early Tradition says little of Mary, it does say some things. The first recorded prayer to Mary, the Sub Tuum document, might date from the third century. It refers to the “ever-glorious and blessed Virgin.” Other early references to Mary’s privileges date after the first 300 years, it is true, but they are worded strongly enough to suggest that the authors were not inventing ideas on the spot but were passing on what had been handed to them from previous generations. 

Ephraem of Syria (died 373) addresses Christ saying, “Thou and thy mother are in all things fair; for there is no flaw in thee and no stain in thy mother,” an apparent reference to her sinlessness. Besides, there may have been written documentation of these truths at one time during those first three centuries. Perhaps it was destroyed during the Roman persecutions. Perhaps it lies hidden somewhere yet to be discovered. 

The central problem of the passage in Michener’s book, though, is a lack of a faith factor. Catholics believe that the truths regarding Mary-her sinlessness, her Assumption, her perpetual virginity-were passed down through the generations, under the Spirit’s guidance, through Sacred Tradition, mostly word-of-mouth. 

It would have been nice for Quade to say, “Oh, by the way, Catholics believe that these things, while not explicit in the Bible or early written Tradition, have nevertheless been handed down through a divinely-guided oral tradition.” She could have even chuckled or snorted or guffawed when she said it. But she could have said it. Simply to note lack of written evidence and drop it at that does not represent the Catholic position fairly. 

(Her line of argument has been used to discredit Jesus’ divinity, which was not proclaimed officially by the Church until the Council of Nicaea in 325. Some have claimed to see little evidence for his divinity in either the New Testament or early Tradition, saying the belief was borrowed from Greek and Roman mythologies by pagan converts.)

Now come some howlers. Quade mentions the Council of Ephesus’s proclamation, in 431, of Mary as Mother of God. Why was this proclaimed? Why, “to satisfy the growing the growing complaints by women that they had no place in the Church.” The dogma was a bone thrown to women of the time. It was a “happy invention to save the Church,” Quade says, noting correctly that “the general public went wild with celebration” when it was announced.

There is no mention that the cheers went up because the Church statement confirmed what the people already had believed for generations. They were waiting during the bishops’ deliberations, hoping their leaders would give the stamp of approval to their long-held pious belief. Thus the joy when the dogma was given.

There is also no mention by Quade that the proclamation was issued primarily to protect a Christological doctrine, the divinity of Christ. If Christ is God, then, yes, the bishops said, Mary can be called Mother of God. Besides, there is no evidence whatsoever of a feminist agenda among fifth-century Christian women, certainly not one that would prompt bishops to invent a doctrine to appease an interest group of the time. General councils did not operate that way then and they do not operate that way now.

Apparently referring to the Council of Ephesus again, Quade says “It was one of the most widely accepted judgments ever handed down by the Church, that henceforth Mary was certified to have been a perpetual virgin, born and living with no knowledge of sin, and the special mediator between human beings and the Godhead.”

Actually, Ephesus said none of those things-only that Mary could be called Mother of God. Any mediatorship she enjoys is subordinate to the supreme mediatorship of Christ. Her perpetual virginity and sinlessness were proclaimed later in Church history (although they were believed, in some form, by the faithful from the start).

Quade’s argument that these teachings came from popular legend distorts Catholic belief that truth often is developed by the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of the faithful first and later recognized and confirmed by Church authority, again under the Spirit’s guidance. Doctrine often develops from the bottom up. Theologians call that the sensus fidelium, the sense of faithful believers. To the unbeliever looking from the outside in, that can look like popular fancy and nothing more. It isn’t that at all. It’s the Spirit at work among his people.

Michener can argue that his book is merely a work of fiction and that his characters’ opinions are not his own, but I still cry foul. The lone Catholic in the passage, Jimenez, is initially an hysterical dope who comes out of his doctrinal fog only after research into the matter, the episode suggesting that a little more education would cure Catholics of their Catholicism.

While appearing very convincing, reasonable, and even scholarly, this episode is filled with errors, half-truths, and misrepresentation of Catholic belief. It shows how important knowing one’s faith is and how important it is not to place much confidence in the historical or doctrinal ruminations of novelists.

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