Mother of the Church

Later this year will mark the 60th anniversary of Pope Saint Paul VI's brave action in adding Mother of the Church to the long list of the Blessed Virgin Mary's devotional titles. I call it "brave" deliberately, because - like so much else in the Church's life in those years - it got caught up in the factional politics of those turbulent times. The times are still turbulent (albeit in both similar and different ways) and the Church is still torn by factionalism, but Mary's title as Mother of the Church is well established devotionally, and this day, the Monday after Pentecost, has now been celebrated liturgically under that title since 2018.

Back in 1964, Yves Congar worried that "there is a connection at least temperamentally between the OVER-exaltation of Mary, and that of the Pope" (My Journal of the Council, November 12, 1964). Whether that is completely the case the way Congar imagined can be debated. As a factual matter, Mary has been exalted in the Church for centuries. Popes have been most especially over-exalted in the modern period - in part as a consequence of modern media of communication and travel which have made Popes and their pronouncements so much more accessible, in part because modern nationalism's threat to local Churches has required of the Church a strong universal center as a counterweight, and in part because of the contemporary cult of celebrity which attaches to successful leaders, religious no less than secular. Thus, the Church's government is more centralized than ever before. The Papacy, despite having long ago lost the Papal States it clung to so ferociously for so long, is more powerful spiritually than ever before. And the Pope is more of a world-wide celebrity than ever before. This celebrity mode has been especially evident in the recent papacies of Pope Saint John Paul II and Pope Francis. That said, it still seems something of a stretch to suggest that Pope Francis' inauguration of today's liturgical celebration of Mary as Mother of the Church was, as Congar might have interpreted it, a "political" over-exaltation of either Mary or the Pope.

Mary is especially united with the Church in the mystery of Pentecost, which undoubtedly accounts for the celebration of Mary as Mother of the Church on Pentecost Monday.  "When the liturgy turns its gaze either to the primitive Church or to the Church of our own days it always finds Mary. In the primitive Church she is seen praying with the Apostles [cf. Acts 1:14]; in our own day she is actively present, and the Church desires to live the mystery of Christ with her." (Pope S. Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation Marialis Cultus, 11). 

In their 1973 Pastoral Letter on the Blessed Virgin Mary, Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith, the U.S. Bishops devoted an entire chapter to Mary's role as Mother of the Church. "Her union with the risen Lord has added to Mary's motherhood of the Church a new effectiveness, as she shares in the everlasting intercession of our great High Priest "(116),

And, for all his earlier preoccupation with Mary's possible over-exaltation, Yves Congar himself elsewhere acknowledged "the deep bond that exists between the Virgin and the Spirit, and consequently of a certain common function despite the absolute disparity of the conditions." Specifically, he recognized "a deep relationship between Mary, the Mother of God, and the Holy Spirit... [which] derives from the mystery of salvation, the Christian mystery as such" (I Believe in the Holy Spirit, tr. David Smith, 2016 ed., Volume 1, pp, 163-164). Congar concluded his reflection on the special relationship between Mary and the Holy Spirit by citing Paul VI's use of Saint Idelphonsus of Toledo's seventh-century, doctrinally powerful prayer of supplication: "I beg you, holy Virgin, that I may have Jesus from the Holy Spirit, by whom you brought Jesus forth. May my soul receive Jesus through the Holy Spirit by whom your flesh conceived Jesus ...  May I love Jesus in the Holy Spirit in whom you adore Jesus as Lord and gaze upon him as your Son" (Marialis Cultus, 26).

Mary's particular title Mother of the Church is not explicitly mentioned in the Bull of Indiction for the forthcoming Jubilee Year, recently promulgated by Pope Francis on the traditional date, Ascension Thursday. Yet, focused in a special way on the virtue of hope, that Bull, Spes Non Confundit, contains a section on how "Hope finds its supreme witness in the Mother of God." There, the Pope highlights how "popular piety continues to invoke the Blessed Virgin as Stella Maris, a title that bespeaks the sure hope that, amid the tempests of this life, the Mother of God comes to our aid, sustains us and encourages us to persevere in hope and trust," and the Pope encourages "all pilgrims to Rome to spend time in prayer in the Marian shrines of the City, in order to venerate the Blessed Mother and to implore her protection." In this regard, the Pope's personal special fondness for the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore among Rome's four patriarchal basilicas (and Jubilee pilgrimage sites) is well known.

Photo: Altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary adorned with May Crown, Saint Paul the Apostle Church, NY. The altar was designed by the famous Gilded Age architect Stanford White.