May 4, 2015
Father Bruce Nieli, CSP
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption. As proof that you are children, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying out “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. (Galatians 4: 4-7)
Recent years have witnessed renewed devotion to Mary in the spiritual lives of Catholics. Such devotion has included not only traditional prayers asking for Mary’s intercession and popular responses to Marian apparitions, but also lively interest in what the Bible says about Mary. With this in mind, what might be the role of Mary in contemporary Paulist spirituality?
Paulist founder and Servant of God Father Isaac Thomas Hecker was named by his confrere’s during his years as a Redemptorist, “Father Mary.” He apparently lived in a deep way traditional Marian piety and, as an example, prayed the rosary frequently. Yet such devotion may very well have been a contributing factor to an evolving ecclesiology and theology of mission that would bear prophetic fruit in his life as a Paulist.
Former Paulist Press editor Richard Payne, who developed the Classics of Western Spirituality series, states that Mary undoubtedly provided for Isaac Hecker an “incarnational grounding” for his approach to spirituality. This, of course, would separate him from his Transcendentalist colleagues, whose spirituality tended to be less concrete and more ethereal. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his famous Harvard Divinity School address, had claimed that Christianity was too centered on one person – Christ. Focusing of Jesus impelled the young Hecker to see that true spiritualities, religions and philosophies in the world were indeed “all included in Christ, the God-Man.”
It was Mary, of course, who provided flesh for the Word, becoming the very instrument for the Word made Flesh, the “God-Man.” It was Mary who contributed humanity to the Incarnate Word. As such, Mary, according to Payne, is the very “progenitor of humanism, which rests on human freedom.” It was her fiat, her “be it done to me according to your word,” freely expressed, that gives us a model for freedom in the Spirit and human liberty as well. This response was due directly to the Holy Spirit that overshadowed her. To Emerson’s belief that Jesus would absorb the whole human race, the young Hecker answered that through Jesus the whole human race first becomes human. We humans become free by allowing the Holy Spirit to overshadow us and, like Mary, by responding with a resounding “Amen!” to his promptings.
Jesus makes the human race more truly human through his Church. It is an integral part of the mission of the Church to make the world more truly human. Mary’s free acceptance of the will of God is not only a model for human freedom but also a launching pad for the Church as, in St. Paul’s phrase, the “Body of Christ,” or, in Isaac Hecker’s term, the “expansion, prolongation, and perpetuation of the Incarnation.” In this spirit, Paulist Father Eugene Burke would declare at a convocation of his religious community: “The Catholic Church manifests the Incarnation in both its totally human and totally divine ways.” The Spirit continues to enflesh the Word as the Church of Jesus Christ, beginning with Mary’s enfleshment of the Word. Her Spirit response to the present moment of her time serves as an example for all time. She is the model of the Spirit-filled disciple of Jesus. She is the icon of holiness.
It is Mary who models the pro-life mission of the Church by carrying the Child in her womb in visitation of her kinswoman Elizabeth and her yet to be born infant son John the Baptist, and who is present at the horrible execution at Calvary. It is Mary who models the justice mission of the Church by carrying him as a tiny immigrant to a foreign land, undoubtedly without recourse to proper documentation. It is Mary who models the teaching mission of the Church by instructing her Son in the Torah and the Hebrew Scriptures, the vocation of the Jewish mother whose Son is subject to her. It is Mary who inaugurates the sacramental mission of the Church by asking for more wine at the wedding feast of Cana. It is Mary who inspires evangelization as the essential mission of the Church by her prayerful presence with the Apostles at the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost. It is indeed Mary who will forever be “the Mother of the Church.”
And it is also Mary who is the model of the contemplative Church. Mary “kept all these things in her heart” as she prayerfully initiated Jesus into thirty years of the quiet, simplicity and humility of the Holy Family of Nazareth, as Payne points out. Isaac Hecker was a true contemplative, a true mystic. As he writes, “Man is a mystic fact. The interiormost is ever mystical, and we should ever be in the center of the circle of the mystic life.” Thus an integral part of Paulist spirituality is the contemplative, the “tranquil abiding in the presence of God,” to quote Karl Rahner, and the mystical, a falling in love with God. This describes Mary. This also describes Isaac Hecker. It also describes the Paulist, who, according to Hecker, must embody “personal perfection” in order to live out “zeal for souls.”
Mary is, finally, in Payne’s words the “Mother of all.” As Mother of the Mystical Body of Christ, she is by that fact the Mother of the diverse members of the one Body. She would therefore undoubtedly give a resounding “Amen!” to the original motto of the United States, e pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” a phrase that is both Catholic and American. Hecker’s passion was to promote the Catholicity, the universality of the Church, and connect this with the political and sociological infrastructure, the unity amidst diversity of the United States. This connection would create a contemporary “light to the nations,” with Catholic Christianity becoming an integrating, guiding spirituality for pluralistic America, in Hecker’s words a “North Star.”
This is precisely the message of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mother of America, who could really serve as the very embodiment of genuine Marian devotion within Paulist spirituality. It is she who came from heaven to earth out of compassion, in her words, “for all the inhabitants of these lands.” In his post-synodal exhortation Ecclesia in America (The Church in America), Pope John Paul II states: “In America, the mestiza face of the Virgin of Guadalupe was from the start a symbol of the inculturation of the Gospel, of which she has been the lodestar and the guide. Through her powerful intercession, the Gospel will penetrate the hearts of the men and women of America and permeate their cultures, transforming them from within.”
Father Hecker was proud of the fact that Divine Providence had placed him in contact with “all classes” of people. Toward the end of his life he would write: “But the discerning mind will not fail to see that the (American) republic and the Catholic Church are working together under the same divine guidance, forming the various races of men and nationalities into a homogenous people, and by their united action giving a bright promise of a broader and higher development of man than has been heretofore accomplished.”
With the intercession of Mary of Guadalupe, and following the example of Mary of Nazareth, may this be done to us servants of today, overshadowed by and submissive to the Holy Spirit, according to God’s word.
Father Bruce Nieli, CSP, is a Paulist missionary based in Austin, Texas.