Marian Devotions

An Anti-Catholic blogger - linked in this Mark Shea post - pointed to this article by Arturio Vasquez as an example of "inappropriate Mariolatry."  Writing about his experience with the tradition of devotion to "the Virgen Moreno" (the Dark Virgin"), Vasquez observes:

It is perhaps the lack of a Catholic imagination that can sometimes lead American Catholics to shake their heads at the "Christo-paganism" that goes on in other places. American Christianity tends to be exclusionary and deeply suspicious of the historical imagination. This goes back to the founding Puritan myths that have all been ingrained in us from elementary school forward, and they inform how we tend to see the person of Jesus Christ. The American Jesus is a-historical; our relationship to Him is one of a "personal Lord and Savior." The American Jesus is isolated, iconoclastic, and deeply independent, not at all given to hollow sentiment toward tradition or the customs of family.

And:

Thus, to be Catholic is not simply to become grafted into an institution in the here and now, but it is also an assent to the being of the Church as it comes down to us from history. In the experience of the Christian people, the motherhood of the Virgin Mary given to us by Christ on the Cross is not a sentimental add-on to the Faith, but part of its very essence. Mary takes care of us like any mother does. She has held back hostile armies, cured the sick, or perhaps just found us work. There is no apostolic Christianity where Mary is not present, no ancient Church where prayers to her are not said. A dream of Christianity sans Mary is like a dream of Christianity without the Cross. For without her, there would have been no Body to be offered on it for the life of the world.

This is an interesting observation.  To us Americans, Jesus is quinessentially American.  There is nothing foreign or atavistic about our American Jesus.  He understands us, and so undoubtedly doesn't really mean that stuff about remarriage after divorce being adultery.  So for followers of the American Jesus, the idea of remarried individuals living the Christian life is simply not an issue. 

I bring up that issue because I have recently finished reading St. Augustine's "De Fide et Operibus" ("On Faith and Works") where St. Augustine addressed those who would allow the remarried to be baptized because, in their view, all that was necessary for salvation was "Faith Alone."  St. Augustine was adamantly opposed to the baptism of the remarried and to the idea of "faith alone" as the sine qua non to salvation (which comes as a surprise in light of the constant depiction of St. Augustine as a kind of proto-Protestant among academics and Protestant apologists.)

It is amazing how the same issues recur throughout history.

The American Jesus, and American Christianity is deracinated, singularly without history or tradition. In American, it is our sovereign right to reinvent ourselves as we wish, free from any overriding tradition, except the tradition of believing that we are radically free from history, a tradition we celebrate every New Years by making resolutions. Then we spend the rest of the year proving that history and tradition have an inertia that we are not free to remake as we will, unless we are assisted by a singular grace.

On the subject of tradition, a post in the comments - offered in response to the trope that "Catholics worship Mary" - offers one of the best apologies for Marian devotion, I've seen:

Latreia has a very specific meaning. Latreia is not just "whatever is higher than hyperdulia." It is very clearly, specifically "ministerial service," (see any Greek lexicon) and it refers to the service of the altar - to sacrificial worship.


For Protestants, who have ejected the concept of sacrifice from their acts of worship, one act of reverence and devotion blends with another - prayers, catechesis, song. It is not so among us Catholics, because we have the Eucharist - not merely a memorial, but a re-presentation, a re-manifestation, a re-engagement - of Christ's self-sacrificial oblation. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the act by which Christ worshiped the Father, and it is the act by which Catholics and the Orthodox worship the Father, because it is the way that he instructed us to do so (). That is latreia, and it is reserved for God the Father alone, in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Singing, prayers, preaching - those are nice, but they aren't what we mean by latreia. At the Mass and in the rest of our lives, they build up to the latreia. That's what they are for, but they are not the "source and summit" of our life - rather, they draw us closer to God. That is why we can devote them safely to the saints - because the saints draw us closer to God as well. It is impossible to learn about their lives and to attempt to imitate them without growing closer to God... because the saints are saints precisely because of their closeness with God.

Mary is the greatest saint because she was the closest to God. She was so close to him that she bore him nine months in her womb, and many more in her arms. He surely followed her example as a child, and she followed his as an adult. She restrained him when adolescent exuberance would have launched his ministry too early, and prodded him before it was too late. She followed him around as he preached, and she met him on the Way of the Cross as he died. She alone among women is named as among those present in the Upper Room at Pentecost - surely not at the periphery of the Apostles, but at their center as the one who knew Him best. The Holy Spirit descended upon her to conceive in her the Messiah of Israel, and descended upon her and the Apostles to bring the Messiah out to the world.

Whoever would denigrate such a relationship has either not thought it through. She is not one among many Christians or saints - she is absolutely unique among God's creatures. If we honor our mothers with dulia, surely something higher is owed the Mother of God.

It seems that even in discussions between the separated strands of Western Christianity - with our neighbors, actually - we can't lose sight of the deep traditions that we retain, perhaps without any conscious reflection.