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    Mary: The Church at the Source
    Mary: The Church at the Source
    Mary: The Church at the Source
    Ebook205 pages3 hours

    Mary: The Church at the Source

    By Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger

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    About this ebook

    Two great theologians endeavor to recover the centrality of Marian doctrine and devotion for the contemporary Church, offering a spiritually rich approach to Mariology that brings into new relief the Marian contours of ecclesial faith. Ratzinger and von Balthasar show that Mary is both the embodiment of the Church, and the mother who co-operates in giving birth to the Church in the souls of believers.
    At once profound and yet readily accessible, Mary: The Church at the Source offers a theologically balanced and biblically grounded presentation of traditional and contemporary thought on Marian doctrine and spirituality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIgnatius Press
    Release dateJan 6, 2011
    ISBN9781681493312
    Mary: The Church at the Source
    Author

    Hans Urs von Balthasar

    Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) was a Swiss theologian widely regarded as one of the greatest theologians and spiritual writers of modern times. Named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II, he died shortly before being formally inducted into the College of Cardinals. He wrote over one hundred books, including Prayer, Heart of the World, Mary for Today, Love Alone Is Credible, Mysterium Paschale and his major multi-volume theological works: The Glory of the Lord, Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic.

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      Book preview

      Mary - Hans Urs von Balthasar

      FOREWORD

      The name of the Virgin Mary occurs in the middle of the Apostles’ Creed, which says that she conceived the Son of God by the Holy Spirit. The name Pontius Pilate, although it likewise attests to the historicity of Jesus’ earthly life, appears only in the later Nicene Creed. The Virgin Birth is, as one would expect, primarily a christological statement: Jesus is the Son of the eternal Father in such a unique sense that he could not have a second, earthly father. This austere, sober claim about the Son does not immediately suggest any special veneration of the Mother, and such veneration is not the motive for her insertion into the Creed. In the course of the Church’s history, this devotion to the Mother of Jesus, which arose on account of her unique place in the work of salvation, experienced an enormous flowering and occasionally took on exuberant forms. It is therefore salutary to keep constantly in mind its simple, christological starting point—not in order to abolish it, but in order to situate it properly. God has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden in order to do in her those great things that he promised to Abraham and to his posterity, as Mary herself says in her paean to grace. But for this very reason, her Yes to the angel recapitulated (while raising to a new level) the whole Abrahamic faith of the Old Testament, together with the hope that it entails. It thereby signaled the incorporation of the Old Testament into the New, of Judaism into the Church. Moreover, this is necessary if God’s saving work is to maintain its unity without suffering any internal division. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, sings Mary in the Magnificat, thereby opening great vistas of hope that God will accomplish the work of the world’s salvation through Israel-Church. The Woman of the Apocalypse (Rev 12), who bears the Savior in the pains of childbirth, is the indivisible unity of God’s entire community of salvation: Israel-Mary-Church. It is within this overarching framework that we must resituate every esteem for, and veneration of, the Virgin who conceives of the Spirit.

      Hans Urs von Balthasar

      JOSEPH CARDINAL RATZINGER

      I

      MY WORD SHALL NOT RETURN TO ME EMPTY!

      Reading: Isaiah 55:10-11

      Gospel: Matthew 6:7-15

      Dear brothers in the episcopate,

      Dear brothers and sisters in the Lord!

      My word shall not return to me empty! When the prophet Isaiah spoke these words, he was hardly stating the obvious. Rather, he was contradicting what were most likely the expectations of his listeners. The verses of the reading belong in the context of Israel’s history of sorrows, in which God repeatedly calls his people in vain, in which his word remains fruitless, in which God appears on the stage of history—but not as a victor. All the signs he has performed—the miracle at the Red Sea, the inauguration of the royal period, Israel’s return from exile—come to nothing. God’s seed in the world seems ineffectual. The word God speaks in today’s text thus comes in the midst of a cloud of darkness as an encouragement to all who still believe in God’s power; who believe that the world is more than rocky ground in which the seed finds no room to take root; who believe that the world is still something more than shallow soil where the sparrows of banality immediately peck away any seed that falls into it (cf. Mk 4:1-9).

      For us Christians, these words are a promise of Jesus Christ, in whom the Word of God really penetrated the earth and became bread for us all. He is the seed that bears fruit through the centuries, the fruitful answer in which God’s speech has taken living root in this world. The mystery of Christ is almost nowhere so palpable and intimately connected with the mystery of Mary as in the perspective of this promise. When the text says that the word, or the seed, bears fruit, it means that, unlike a ball that hits the ground and bounces back up, the seed actually sinks into the earth, assimilates the earth’s energies, and changes them into itself. It thus brings about something truly new, for now it carries the earth in itself and turns the earth into fruit. The grain of wheat does not remain alone, for it includes the maternal mystery of the soil—Mary, the holy soil of the Church, as the Fathers so wonderfully call her, is an essential part of Christ. The mystery of Mary means precisely that God’s Word did not remain alone; rather, it assimilated the other—the soil—into itself, became man in the soil of his Mother, and then, fused with the soil of the whole of humanity, returned to God in a new form.

      The Gospel, by contrast, seems to be talking about an entirely different subject. The text speaks of how we should pray, of the right form and content of prayer, of the right way of acting, and of the right kind of interiority in prayer. It speaks, in other words, not of what God does, but of what we men do in relation to him. The truth of the matter is that there is an intimate connection between the two readings. One could even say that the Gospel explains how men can become fruitful soil for God’s Word. They can become this soil by providing, as it were, the organic elements in which life can grow and mature; by drawing life themselves from this organic matter; by becoming themselves a word formed by the penetration of the Word; by sinking the roots of their life into prayer and thus into God.

      Our Gospel reading thus has a point of contact with the initiation into the mystery of Mary that Saint Luke gives us when he says in several passages that Mary kept the words in her heart (2:19; 2:51; cf. 1:29). Mary was, so to say, the confluence of the streams of Israel; in prayer she bore the misery and grandeur of its history and so enabled it to become fertile soil for the living God. Of course, prayer, as the Gospel tells us, involves considerably more than prattling, than mere talk. To be soil for the Word means that the soil must allow itself to be absorbed by the seed, to be assimilated by the seed, to surrender itself for the sake of transforming the seed into life. Mary’s maternity means that she willingly places her own substance, body and soul, into the seed so that new life can grow. When Luke says that a sword shall pierce her soul (Lk 2:35), he means much more than some kind of torment. He means something much more profound and much greater: Mary makes herself entirely available as soil; she lets herself be used [brauchen] and used up, in order to be transformed into the One who needs [braucht] us in order to become the fruit of the earth.

      Today’s Liturgy of the Hours says that we must become a longing for God. The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God. In Mary this petition has been granted: she is, as it were, the open vessel of longing, in which life becomes prayer and prayer becomes life. Saint John wonderfully conveys this process by never mentioning Mary’s name in his Gospel. She no longer has any name except the Mother of Jesus.¹ It is as if she had handed over her personal dimension, in order now to be solely at his disposal, and precisely thereby had become a person.

      In my opinion, the connection between the mystery of Christ and the mystery of Mary suggested to us by today’s readings is very important in our age of activism, in which the Western mentality has evolved to the extreme. For in today’s intellectual climate, only the masculine principle counts. And that means doing, achieving results, actively planning and producing the world oneself, refusing to wait for anything upon which one would thereby become dependent, relying rather, solely on one’s own abilities. It is, I believe, no coincidence, given our Western, masculine mentality, that we have increasingly separated Christ from his Mother, without grasping that Mary’s motherhood might have some significance for theology and faith. This attitude characterizes our whole approach to the Church. We treat the Church almost like some technological device that we plan and make with enormous cleverness and expenditure of energy. Then we are surprised when we experience the truth of what Saint Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort once remarked, paraphrasing the words of the prophet Haggai, when he said, You do much, but nothing comes of it (Hag 1:6)! When making becomes autonomous, the things we cannot make but that are alive and need time to mature can no longer survive.

      What we need, then, is to abandon this one-sided, Western activistic outlook, lest we degrade the Church to a product of our creation and design. The Church is not a manufactured item; she is, rather, the living seed of God that must be allowed to grow and ripen. This is why the Church needs the Marian mystery; this is why the Church herself is a Marian mystery. There can be fruitfulness in the Church only when she has this character, when she becomes holy soil for the Word. We must retrieve the symbol of the fruitful soil; we must once more become waiting, inwardly recollected people who in the depth of prayer, longing, and faith give the Word room to grow.

      At this Holy Mass, we commemorate Cardinal Josef Frings, long-time President of the German Bishops’ Conference, who departed this life last Advent. He died in the Advent season, which since ancient times has been the Church’s true Marian season. It seems to me that this circumstance expresses the course and direction of his life. Cardinal Frings entrusted the Church of God in Germany to Mary’s maternal care. He consecrated her to Mary. In the midst of a rising tide of activism, he wanted to place the Church under the law of humble fruit-bearing for the Word. At the Council, when the liturgical, christological, and ecumenical movements opposed the Marian movement, and the two parties threatened to become irreconcilable alternatives, he addressed an imploring appeal to the Fathers to find the common center. He emphatically rejected a shortsighted, hasty either-or, as if the Church now had to decide whether to become modern, biblical, liturgical, and ecumenical or to remain old-fashioned and Marian. It was his personal concern to join the two streams together, to give the liturgy the heartfelt intensity of Marian piety and to open to Marian piety the breadth of the liturgical tradition. This was one of the most personal appeals that he addressed—moved by the passion of faith—to the Council Fathers. This appeal stands before us—especially at this hour—as a guidepost, pointing the way to a renewed acknowledgment and acceptance of the mystery of the earth, so that the Word may thus bear fruit in us. Amen.

      II

      THOUGHTS ON THE PLACE OF

      MARIAN DOCTRINE AND PIETY IN

      FAITH AND THEOLOGY AS A WHOLE

      I.  The Background and Significance of the

      Second Vatican Council’s Declarations on Mariology

      The question of the significance of Marian doctrine and piety cannot disregard the historical situation of the Church in which the question arises. We can understand and respond correctly to the profound crisis of postconciliar Marian doctrine and devotion only if we see this crisis in the context of the larger development of which it is a part. Now, we can say that two major spiritual movements defined the period stretching from the end of the First World War to the Second Vatican Council, two movements that had—albeit in very different ways—certain charismatic features. On the one side, there was a Marian movement that could claim charismatic roots in La Salette, Lourdes, and Fatima. It had steadily grown in vigor since the Marian apparitions of the mid-1800s. By the time it reached its peak under Pius XII, its influence had spread throughout the whole Church. On the other side, the interwar years had seen the development of the liturgical movement, especially in Germany, the origins of which can be traced to the renewal of Benedictine monasticism emanating from Solesmes as well as to the eucharistic inspiration of Pius X. Against the background of the youth movement, it gained—in Central Europe, at least—an increasingly wider influence throughout the Church at large. The ecumenical and biblical movements quickly joined with it to form a single mighty stream. Its fundamental goal—the renewal of the Church from the sources of Scripture and the primitive form of the Church’s prayer—likewise received its first official confirmation under Pius XII in his encyclicals on the Church and on the liturgy.¹

      As these movements increasingly influenced the universal Church, the problem of their mutual relationship also came increasingly to the fore. In many respects, they seemed to embody opposing attitudes and theological orientations. The liturgical movement tended to characterize its own piety as objective and sacramental, to which the strong emphasis on the subjective and personal in the Marian movement offered a striking contrast. The liturgical movement stressed the theocentric character of Christian prayer, which is addressed through Christ to the Father; the Marian movement, with its slogan per Mariam àd Jesum [through Mary to Jesus], seemed characterized by a different idea of mediation, by a kind of lingering with Jesus and Mary that pushed the classical trinitarian reference into the background. The liturgical movement sought a piety governed strictly by the measure of the Bible or, at the most, of the ancient Church; the Marian piety that responded to the modern apparitions of the Mother of God was much more heavily influenced by traditions stemming from the Middle Ages and modernity. It reflected another style of thought and feeling.² The Marian movement doubtless carried with it certain risks that threatened its own basic core (which was healthy) and even made it appear dubious to passionate champions of the other school of thought.³

      In any case, a council held at that time could hardly avoid the task of working out the correct relationship between these two divergent movements and of bringing them into a fruitful unity—without simply eliminating their tension. In fact, we can understand correctly the struggles that marked the first half of the Council—the disputes surrounding the Constitution on the Liturgy, the doctrine of the Church, and the right integration of Mariology into ecclesiology, the debate about revelation, Scripture, tradition, and ecumenism—only in light of the tension between these two forces. All the debates we have just mentioned turned—even when there was no explicit awareness of this fact—on the struggle to hammer out the right relationship between the two charismatic currents that were, so to say, the domestic signs of the times for the Church. The elaboration of the Pastoral Constitution would then provide the occasion for dealing with the

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