Sunday, July 3, 2022

Catholics against Mariolatry

Protestants, like my grandfather, protested the Church in part for her "Mariolatry". This is excessive veneration of the Bearer of Christ - for my grandfather, I admit, this extended to any veneration. I detect within the Church herself some parallel uneasiness.

We'll leave aside, here, the Monarchian tendency of Cyril of Alexandria and of his acolytes in the had qnoma. The Latin Church still has yet to address this - she venerates the Mother Of God, and even allows Cyril as a Saint! We'll also leave aside why the Church prays to begs the intercession of Mary as "Our Lady" with or without "Theotokos". More important to the Latin Church has been to clamp down on enthusiasms as have attempted to ride Mary's stature to support their own causes, usually political.

The internal Latin counters, which I see thus far, involve venerating Mary in public whilst constraining what she is. For instance: take Jerome's doctrine of Mary as "ever-virgin". This ensures that nobody can claim female descent, like the Taiping rebels in the nineteenth century, or - for Late Antiquity - like the Ebionites of Saint James (and one wonders about the Fatimiya in "Islam" . . .). For another instance: the Assumption. This means Mary cannot deliver apocalypsis from Hell. (Like that other Fatima: again, no occasion of sainthood for me.)

I pick these dogmata because they (1) are ex cathedra and (2) go beyond the (canon) Gospels or even contradict them. But, to secure our faith, against Montanisms here, the Gospels have to be weighed in this balance.

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