Apologetics is the rational defence and explanation of the Catholic faith. But what kind of apologetics is "Marian apologetics"?

It is rational defence and explanation of the truths of the Blessed Virgin Mary. While it is of little use when dealing with atheists or agnostics, I believe it cannot be left at a secondary level of apologetics, because it has great value in two key areas:

Mary is the bastion of orthodox Christianity, in particular the truth of the Incarnation.
In intra-Christian apologetics, that is, explaining and defending Catholicism in dialogue with other Christians, Mary is a strong defence against two erroneous extremes that afflict us today, even within the Church: biblical fundamentalism and Modernism.

In rationally defending and explaining the truths about who Mary is and what she does for us, we find that she is defending our faith. Hence the old liturgical verse takes on a new meaning in our times: "Rejoice, O Virgin Mary; you alone all heresy have slain!"

A major source for Marian apologetics is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, because it offers scriptural and patristic references that we can and should use in defending and promoting the truths of Mary.

WHAT OTHERS THINK ABOUT MARY

In apologetics, you have to enter the mind of the person you are trying to win over. You have to understand "where he or she is coming from". You must be sensitive, patient, able to listen and discern. You must avoid exaggerated language and not assume that this person understands technical religious words and expressions, especially the way we express ourselves.

Therefore I would suggest this exercise. Take a piece of paper and write down what you think non-Catholics, of good will and basic Christian faith, think about the Blessed Virgin Mary. Please answer three questions from a non-Catholic, but Christian, point of view 1. Who was Mary? 2. Where is Mary now? 3. What is her relationship to us now?

From what we can put together in this exercise, I believe we see the need to do some "softening up" before entering debate about Mary with non-Catholics who cannot comprehend our distinctive devotion to her.

There seem to be two basic principles to get across: (a) you cannot separate the Mother from her Son - and this is clear in Scripture; (b) you cannot separate Mary from us, the Church. The first principle is easier to develop than the second, because many Non-Catholics have a very limited understanding of the nature of the Church. This explains why some converts to the Catholic Faith say that they only developed understanding of and devotion to Our Lady once they understood more about the Church, even after their reconciliation to the Church.

However, it is easy to argue that Mary is the first among Christians, the most faithful disciple of the Lord, the paragon of fidelity, our sister in faith. On that all Christians can surely agree. There is no need for apologetics in the exemplar theology of Mary, that is, that she is our greatest example of Christian discipleship and fidelity. But when we move into the dogmatic area, the need for careful apologetics is apparent.

SIX MARIAN TRUTHS

I wish to select six major Marian truths and discuss them in terms of apologetics. These are: the Immaculate Conception, Mother of God, the Perpetual Virginity, the Bodily Assumption, Mary Queen of Heaven, Mary our Mother and Mary our Advocate.

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

When discussing the Immaculate Conception, the first distinction we need to clear up, even among not a few misinformed Catholics today, is that the Immaculate Conception does not refer to the Virginal conception and birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Again and again in films, on television, in newspapers, we Catholics are irritated when these two doctrines are confused. The Immaculate Conception refers to the natural conception of Mary, who was a human being with two human parents, but who was conceived without inheriting the loss and wound of original sin that we all inherit from the first couple.

The second step is for the apologist to know something of the history of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that is, how this belief developed in the Church. From the earliest centuries, it was believed that Mary was specially created by God to be a worthy mother for the perfect Son. Moreover, if he is the second and new Adam, then she is the second and new Eve. She is the "all holy One", Panagia, in the ancient Greek traditions.

That Mary was conceived without original sin was widely believed for centuries, but the doctrine was contested in the Middle Ages. Even great saints and theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Bernard did not accept it. They believed that Mary was freed from original sin, but as a gift granted after her conception. The Franciscans, on the other hand, promoted the Immaculate Conception strongly, and the Council of Trent favoured it by following Saint Augustine and not linking Mary immaculate to original sin. For Catholics, the matter was settled when the Immaculate Conception was infallibly defined as a dogma of the Church by Blessed Pius IX in 1854.

The wise way this holy Pope defined the dogma shows that in fact it means that Mary was redeemed from the first instant of her existence, that is, at her conception. This is important when explaining this truth to non-Catholics. They imagine that we are teaching that Mary had no need of redemption. What we are saying is that the anticipated merits of Christ crucified were the means of her redemption, of the baptismal grace that she enjoyed as soon as she existed. She needed to be lifted out of, or exempted from, fallen humanity. The power of the redemptive act of Christ transcends all time and space, so could be applied to her before he was crucified at a point in history, when she was nearly fifty years old. That too is an interesting "spin off" of this rich dogma. Another timely "spin off" is making her conception the instant she first existed as a human being, which has implications in pro-life ethics, in terms of the personhood of the foetus.

The logic of the Immaculate Conception is set out in the Catechism of the Catholid Church no. 490, citing the Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 56. To become the mother of the Saviour, Mary "was enriched with gifts appropriate to such a role". This rests on the term used by the archangel in Luke 1:28 - kecharitomene, "full of grace". The greeting assumes that she is already graced by God. In the development of doctrine, the Church takes this further and traces the graced nature of Mary back to the moment she began to exist. To this is added, by consequence, impeccability throughout her life, meaning that Our Lady committed no actual sins. But that does not mean she enjoyed full knowledge of everything or that she participated in the Beatific Vision during her earthly life. Nor does it mean that her sinlessness preserved her from suffering; indeed I would argue it only made her suffering more intense, the suffering of wounded innocence.

But we notice something very important. As with all the Marian dogmas, the real focus is not Mary but her Son Jesus. He is his Mother's Redeemer. She is only Immaculate so as to be his real human Mother.

MOTHER OF GOD

The Council of Ephesus (431 AD) gave Mary the title "Theotokos", the God-bearer. It is rendered in English as "Mother of God". This title upsets some people who imagine that we are making an absurd or blasphemous claim that the omnipotent uncaused God could have an eternal mother. Of course, in strict terms of philosophy and theology it is impossible to posit the notion that God has a mother. If God has a mother then that mother would be God. It is also ridiculous to imagine some cosmic conception and birth process, which in turn would raise a paternity question, and that would lead back to another God.

But the title "Mother of God" refers only to what happened in this world, the Incarnation. This title affirms that, at a point of time, God created and chose a human Mother so that he could take flesh on this planet and literally be her divine and human son.

The title is really about Jesus Christ. It refers to him as God and Man in one Person. Mary is the Mother of the whole Christ, not just his human nature. At the Council of Ephesus, the title was set out to take precedence over another legitimate title "Mother of Christ", because at that time was being used to argue that Mary is simply the mother of the human Christ. That leaves open the way to the heresy of adoptionism, meaning that Mary brought forth a perfect human being, Jesus, who later became the Son of God when he was "adopted" by the Father, either at his baptism in the Jordan or when he rose from the dead.

The integrity of the Person of Jesus Christ, God and Man, is maintained when we refer to Mary as the Mother of God.

THE PERPETUAL VIRGINITY

The Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that Mary is a Virgin before, during and after the birth of her Son (CCC 496-499).

To defend this truth we need to cite a strong and continuous sacred Tradition. In itself, that step is a sharp reminder that the Second Vatican Council insisted on Tradition as the other source, with Scripture, of the one Word of God. This is where we Catholics take a different position both to biblical fundamentalists and to liberal or modernist biblicists. Both groups press for a "sola scriptura" position, that is, everything must either be proved by or drawn from "Scripture alone", that is, only fom the Bible. Fundamentalists "prove" all kinds of bizarre things by their literal or simplistic interpretation of every word in the Bible. Modernists explain away the supernatural elements in the Bible and jettison Christian essentials, so they also end up believing in bizarre things. Not a few of yesterday's Modernists are today's "new age" disciples.

However, there is a continuous tradition in East and West: (a) that Mary had no other children than Jesus; (b) that her marriage to Saint Joseph was chaste; (c) that she was a Virgin not only before and after the birth of Christ, but during that event. The Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 699 cites the Greek title for Mary, aeiparthenos, ever-Virgin

The fundamentalist first attacks this title "ever-Virgin" by saying that in the Gospels Jesus is referred to as the "first born son". We reply that this was used for any first born male whether or not he had siblings. Then the fundamentalist says that the "brothers and sisters" of Our Lord were children of Mary. A little research reveals that there was no term for "cousins" in Christ's culture, and our Lord himself called his disciples the "brethren".

In Mark's Gospel, where there is no account of the Virginal conception and birth of Christ, we find Jesus described once as "the son of Mary" (Mark 6:3). That was not an acceptable title in the Jewish social context when legitimate children were known after their father. The other Gospels refer to him as the son of Joseph. Yet this expression in Mark at least may be a hint of a mystery about his paternity, or it may be Mark's subtle allusion to Mary as the Virgin Mother. Another family mystery was the way the dying Saviour entrusted his mother to a disciple (John 19: 26-27). This also indicates that there were no brothers and sisters around to fulfil the required duty of caring for their mother.

But Marian apologetics in favour of the perpetual virginity of Our Lady is also directed against Modernists who want to make this a "symbolic" doctrine, at best. They like to reduce every dogma to the safe "symbolic" level. We control a doctrine's meaning once we make it "symbolic", and Modernism is all about controlling religious meaning. But I believe Modernists also have problems with concrete realities, especially the human body. Note how they slide easily into dualism (a sharp separation of body and soul) or docetism (Jesus only seemed to have a real body) when they water down the Resurrection of Jesus and make it "spiritual" or a "faith experience". This probably comes from their failure to come to terms with the scandal of the Incarnation: that God literally took our frail flesh, and lived and died and rose again in that frail human flesh in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth. In the field of ethics Modernists also have problems with body-focussed morality, especially the Church's teaching against artificial contraception and certain themes in sexual ethics, which they reject as "biologism".

However, the perpetual virginity of Mary is about her body, about biology, meaning that it includes a literal virginal integrity. At the same time, there is much rich symbolism in this doctrine, but it rests on the prior reality of the virginal integrity of Mary, who is the "hortus conclusus", the closed garden. Mary holds in herself the two great glories of womanhood, virginity and maternity. In a world which scorns virginity, where pressure is exerted on young women and young men to lose their virginity as soon as possible, we need to proclaim Mary ever-Virgin from the housetops. In a world that mocks maternity and presses for contraception, sterilization and abortion, this greatest of all Mothers shines forth in her resplendent purity and integrity.

THE BODILY ASSUMPTION

Sacred tradition is again our source for the Church's solemn teaching that Mary was taken body and soul into the glory of heaven, the dogma proclaimed in 1950 by Pope Pius XII. What needs to be made clear again is that the Church is not just teaching something "symbolic" or "spiritual" about Mary going to heaven. What is being taught is that the material body of Our Lady was raised up into the glory of heaven together with her immortal soul. To simplify it, Mary already enjoys a total resurrection. She follows her Son who has imparted to her his own bodily resurrection into glory.

My late father, an Anglican vicar, strongly defended the Assumption. He would say, "Well, if Our Lady is not in heaven, where is she?" and "The first person Christ would call to share in his resurrection would be his own mother."

Indicating some Biblical parallels of bodily assumptions, may be useful when speaking to fundamentalists, for example, Elijah was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire in 2 Kings 2:11. But that will cut little ice with modernists who do not believe in chariots of fire and have problems with heaven and may quibble over whether Elijah ever existed! One way of gentle influencing this kind of objector might be to point to the providential timeliness of the definition of this dogma. Pope Pius XII taught infallibly in 1950, just after the Second World War, the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is, just after an era of unparalleled violation of the bodies of millions of innocents. It was a time when questions of life, death and eternity were raised in a dramatic way that still haunts our new century. It was a time when human bodies were treated like trash to a degree unparalleled in history.

However, he history of the doctrine of the Assumption is a better way for the apologist to follow. Fifty years ago, Pope Pius XII used references from the Fathers in the document containing the definition. The celebration of a "dormition" or "falling asleep" of the Virgin goes back to the early centuries in the Christian East.

The logic behind the dogma proposes that Mary shared in the Resurrection and became a sign of our future hope, the heavenly glory of the Church, the final coming of Christ's Kingdom. It also rests on the Immaculate Conception, that the very mortal remains of the Immaculate One would "not see corruption" in a tomb. In his apostolic preaching, at Pentecost, Saint Peter used this reference from Psalm 15:10 to proclaim the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (cf. Acts 2: 27)

An interesting aspect of the dogma is that the question of whether Mary actually died has been left open by the teaching Church. One argument says that she did not die because death is caused by original sin. But the prevailing view is that she did die, because her sinless Son suffered death, and that she was buried, probably at Ephesus. The legendary accounts of her assumption all concur with this latter view.

Associated with the Assumption is also an unusual fact. Nowhere does anyone claim, or it seems has anyone ever claimed, to have relics of the body of the Blessed Virgin. There are supposed relics of her veil, her belt, etc. but no first class relics. This is remarkable in itself if we go back to the early centuries when there was such a great quest for the bodies of the apostles and saints, when churches were built over them and they were transported here and there. In Ephesus they built a great church in honor of Mary, but it contained no relics.

MARY, QUEEN OF HEAVEN

Referring to Mary as "Queen of Heaven" is hotly opposed by biblical fundamentalists. Some gleefully point to an Old Testament text, which they quote out of context, ignoring its historical meaning, that is, an idolatrous practice denounced by Jeremiah, offering "sacrifices to the queen of heaven" Jeremiah 14: 17, 25. In fact this refers to the worship of the pagan godess, Astarte, who was called "queen of heaven" and identified in some places with the planet Venus. It has nothing to do with the Blessed Virgin or her title. It shows the fundamentalist sliding indiscriminately backwards and forwards from Old to New Testament sources.

But is there any scriptural basis for referring to Mary with the exalted title, "Queen of heaven"? The key is found in a strange and hidden place. In the greeting of Elizabeth to Mary at the visitation, we find her addressing Mary as a queen. She says, "Whence is it the Mother of my Lord should come me?" In Middle Eastern royal courts that title "Mother of my Lord" was reserved for one person, the queen mother, the mother of the king, who often ranked immediately after him in court protocol. What is remarkable here is that the older woman addresses a teenage girl with this senior regal title. She only does this because she is inspired by God to recognize that the virgin of Nazareth is pregnant with the Messiah, the King of Israel, Jesus the anointed One, the "Christ". But also note that she does not call him "the Lord", the title Luke also uses because it arose among the earliest Christians as the title of the risen triumphant Jesus, Kyrios, Lord of life and death. Elizabeth says "my Lord", the language of courtiers in any royal court of the time when referring to their monarch. Mary's queenship thus points directly to her Son, and is derived only from him. She is not a consort, but a Queen mother.

The other scriptural justification for the Marian title "Queen of heaven" is in Revelation 12, where we see the vision of the woman clothed with the sun, the moon beneath her feet, crowned with twelve stars. This is a complex double image - Mary, for she brings forth the Messiah child - and the Church, for she is persecuted by the devil, a dragon in the vision. Nonetheless, Mary is depicted as the queen of the universe.

It is also interesting that perhaps the oldest painting of Mary, in the Roman catacombs, shows her enthroned with her Son on her lap as the Magi approach. In the Fifth Century this was carved on the door of the basilica of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill in Rome but now the throne has a set of steps. This imagery reappears and develops in many later paintings, mosaics and statues up to our own times. Recently a special rite of crowning an image of the Blessed Virgin was authorised by the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship. The "Virgin enthroned" or the crowned Virgin is Mary the Queen. Later there were many depictions of her Son actually crowning her, although this symbolic art is derived equally from the doctrine of her assumption into heavenly glory, that is her triumph and that of the Church.

MARY, OUR MOTHER

Some of our fellow Christians are offended when they hear us refer to Mary as "our" Mother, or "Mother of the Church". The apologist's basic reply is simple. He or she can point to those poignant moments at the cross recorded in John 19: 26-27. We are all familiar with this passage, "Mother, behold your son. Son behold your mother." Then we are told that this beloved disciple took Mary to his own home, by reliable tradition, ultimately to a home in Ephesus. To develop that event at the cross effectively means taking a non-fundamentalist direction with the Scriptures. The entrustment of Mary to John was not simply a considerate domestic arrangement. Saint John was inspired to record the care Christ commanded him to give to Mary in order to convey her relationship, not only to him, but to all Christ's faithful disciples, to all the members of the Church.

But the motherhood of Mary ultimately rests on the experience of those who know and love her. It is an area where rational arguments can only take us so far. We end up challenging our objector to take the risk of asking Mary to be his or her mother, in prayer. That is a great risk, because it usually ends up in conversion to Catholicism - and I can speak from my own experience, a journey that began at the age of eleven.

MARY, OUR ADVOCATE

When we describe Mary as "our advocate" we refer to her intercessory power as the specific way she exercises her motherly care for us. This needs to be set in the broader context of (a) the Communion of Saints, which we profess in the creed, and (b) what flows from this, namely, praying to the saints or, to be more precise, addressing them to seek their prayers for us.

Devotion to Mary as the greatest intercessor among the saints is ancient, inspired no doubt by Saint John's account of the marriage at Cana, where Mary intercedes for the new wine of the Kingdom (John 2: 3-4). Christian archaelogy offers us good evidence for the antiquity of invoking Our Lady. The early Christians prayed to Mary. Some of the grafitti scratched on a wall at the original tomb of Saint Peter include Marian invocations, and these probably go back to the Second Century. Old ikons in East and West show her praying, with hands extended in the traditional orantes position, the Virgo orans. The oldest Marian prayer seems to be the "Sub tuum": "We flee to your protection, O holy Mother of God". A Fourth Century Greek fragment seems to be an early form of this prayer. In the following century, inspired by the Council of Ephesus, devotion to Mary as one who prays for us flourished.

However, this historical case, which can be developed in finer detail, makes no sense if it is not (a) placed in the broader context of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, and (b) backed by an accurate description of what praying to a saint really involves. This act is joining our prayers to a fellow Christian who has gone before us, a person who is now deeply in the presence of God in a way we are not. Moreover, when we use the term "advocate" to refer to Mary, it only makes sense in terms of her lesser role within the all-sufficient universal work of her Son, our one Mediator and Advocate. We are not running to Mary because Jesus will not give us what we want.

SPECIALIST AREAS OF MARIAN APOLOGETICS

Before I conclude with some comments on specialist areas in Marian apologetics, I would sound a note of caution about the language we use about the Blessed Virgin because it can put good people off. At times, in poetic or devotional enthusiasm, we can say exaggerated things about our dear Mother. People who love someone often do that! But there are limits, and the skilled Marian apologist knows them. It is difficult to explain to a non-Catholic the meaning of expressions such as "all her actions let us worship" or "remind thy Son that he has paid the price of our iniquity". The first is poetic license and rests on a subtle meaning of "worship" which has vanished in modern English. The second is theological nonsense - as if Jesus could forget the Redemption! But it is also a case of poetic license, and has been corrected in one modern version of "Hail, Queen of Heaven".

Other titles, such as "mediatrix" and "co-redemprix", call for more precise explanation. As the Second Vatican Council reminded us, they must not detract from the unique and all-powerful mediatorial role of Jesus Christ. Nor are these titles central to Marian apologetics. Until the Church gives supreme magisterial approval to these titles in doctrinal terms, I believe they belong more to a "specialist" department, for discussion, as it were, within our own Catholic family, and "not in front of the neighbors".

A further specialist department, largely but not entirely within the family, is putting the case for or against Marian apparitions and messages. General Marian apologetics certainly leaves open the role of Mary intervening in history according to the divine plan of salvation, as happened at Fatima. But, within the Church, we should never let this area intrude too far into our defence of Mary, because it detracts from the central case for Mary. I am disheartened and embarrassed when I hear Catholics arguing about apparitions and messages in front of non-Catholics, who find this kind of thing incomprehensible, even bizarre. We need to be sensitive and not put people off by raising our own particular interests. Our primary evangelistic and apologetical mission is surely to stick to the essentials, and that is what I have endeavoured to do in introducing some aspects of Marian apologetics.




SOME USEFUL BASIC REFERENCES FOR MARIAN APOLOGETICS

Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, chapter 8.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

The Catholic Encyclopedia

The Catholic Answer, magazine, USA

The new version of Sheehan's Apologetics and Christian Doctrine, Austin Press, London, edited by Fr. Peter Joseph, available in 2001.