Six reasons not to forget Mary, according to Joseph Ratzinger

Six reasons not to forget Mary according to Ratzinger

The reasons not to forget Mary proposed by Joseph Ratzinger continue to shape contemporary Mariology. These reasons not to forget Mary show that Marian devotion is a sign of a fully Catholic and ecclesial faith.

Mary and Christianity 

On the occasion of the International Mariological Congress held in Loreto (March 22-25, 1995), the then Cardinal Ratzinger agreed to deliver the opening lecture on the article of the Creed: “Et incarnatus est de Spiritu sancto ex Maria Virgine“. In this keynote lecture he states that:

“Without Mary, the entrance of God into history would not reach its end. What matters in the confession of faith would not be attained: that God is a God with us and not merely a God in Himself and for Himself. Thus the woman who described herself as lowly, that is, as an anonymous woman (Lk 1:48), is placed at the center of the confession of the living God, who cannot be thought of without her”.

In unequivocal terms, Mary is placed at the essential core of faith and of history, as the woman who introduces God into the unprecedented situation of the incarnation. Through her, God reveals Himself not as a God shut up in the cloister of heaven, but truly as Emanuel, God with us. A necessary theological consequence: Mary enters into the concept of the living God at work in history, to such a point that one cannot think of Mary without referring to her active maternal collaboration.

After having interpreted the phrase of the Apostles’ Creed “as a synthesis of the three great biblical testimonies to the incarnation of the Son: Mt 1:18-25. Lk 1:26-38. Jn 1:13ff“, the cardinal focused on the dwelling of God as the consequence and purpose of the incarnation and states that Jesus is the true shekinah, through whom God is among us, if we are gathered in His name. Although the holy places are the permanent guarantee of the entrance of God into the world, the most important reality is Mary’s yes, which opens to the Word the space where He can pitch His tent, because God is, and is not bound to stones, but is bound to living persons.

A revealing icon of the God involved in the dynamic of the incarnation, Mary remains anchored in the history of her people. This is what the cardinal again emphasized in Loreto on March 7, 1988, in the lecture “You are full of grace. Elements for a biblical Marian devotion”, given during the regional congress of pastoral updating. He presents the figure of Mary as paradigmatic for the Christian and for man, according to true anthropology, inasmuch as she is not isolated from her people and at the same time is open to the salvation of all humanity:

“Mary is Zion in person, and this means: she lives everything that is meant by ‘Zion’. She does not constitute a closed individuality that depends on the originality of the ego. She does not want to be merely this human being who defends and protects her ego […] She lives in such a way as to be ‘habitable’ for God, to live in such a way as to be a place for God”.

For Ratzinger, Mary is a person “in a vital relationship with God“, and it is precisely from this sense of the grace that fills her: “You are full of grace“, this also means that Mary is a totally open human being, who revealed herself fully, who gave herself courageously and without limits, without fear of her destiny, into the hands of God.

Since this openness is designated by Scripture with the word “faith“, “it follows that, as in the ancient Covenant we find Abraham the father of those who believe, so” at the beginning of the new people “we find Mary” the mother of those who believe.

The “pure and sublime figure” of Mary is specified, for Ratzinger, in an interior work to which Luke bears witness when he states that Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart (Lk 2:19). Despite the transcendence of the mystery, it is a matter of “gathering” with a unifying gaze the particular within the whole, and at the same time of keeping it and faithfully preserving it “throughout” the phases of life, even when the sword strikes her at the moment of the passion.

Therefore, after having interiorized the word, “she can give it again to the world: Mary is a prophetess”. The Magnificat is a “prophetic prayer woven with threads from the Old Testament” that invites us to magnify the Lord, that is, to “give Him space, so that He may be more present in the world”.

Six reasons not to forget Mary

In a synthesizing overview, the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, interviewed by the journalist Vittorio Messori in 1985, lists six reasons not to forget Mary, which in turn presuppose an essentially unitive and communal function of the Virgin in relation to the mysteries of faith, to the Bible and Tradition, to the Old and the New Testament, to reason and the heart, to man and woman.

First point. To recognize the place that dogma and Tradition attribute to Mary means being firmly rooted in authentic Christology.

The Second Vatican Council states: “The Church, piously meditating on the Virgin and contemplating her in the light of the Word made man, penetrates more deeply, full of reverence, into the unfathomable mystery of the Incarnation, and conforms herself more and more to her Spouse” (Lumen Gentium n. 65).

Moreover, it is in the direct service of faith in Christ, and therefore not primarily out of devotion to the Mother, that the Church proclaimed her Marian dogmas: first the perpetual virginity and the divine motherhood, and then, after a long maturation and reflection, the conception without the stain of original sin and the assumption into heaven.

These dogmas protect authentic faith in Christ as true God and true man: two natures in a single Person. They also safeguard the indispensable eschatological tension, indicating in Mary Assumed the immortal destiny that awaits us all. And they also protect the faith, threatened today, in God the creator who (among other things, this is one of the meanings of the truth, more misunderstood than ever, about the perpetual virginity of Mary) can also intervene freely in matter. In short, as the Council likewise recalls: “Mary, through her intimate participation in the history of salvation, brings together and makes resound, as it were, the greatest data of faith” (Lumen Gentium n. 65).

Ratzinger follows this first point, of an essentially Christological order, which places Mary in relation to authentic faith in Christ, true man and true God, so that she becomes the touchstone of orthodoxy, with a second point. This consists in fusing the Word of God and ecclesial Tradition, for the figure of the Virgin Mother, in her deepening over the centuries, concentrates the biblical data and the progress in the knowledge of the mystery brought about in the Church.

Second point. The Mariology of the Church presupposes the right relationship, the necessary integration, between the Bible and Tradition.

The four Marian dogmas have their indispensable basis in the Scriptures. But here there is, as it were, a seed that grows and bears fruit in the warm life of Tradition as it is expressed in the liturgy, in the intuition of the faithful people and in the reflection of theology guided by the Magisterium.

The third point concerns the intermediate and unifying position of the Virgin of Nazareth, who historically stands at the summit where the ascending movement of the people of Israel converges and from which the Christian movement sets out, spreading through the world by the evangelizing work of the Church.

Third point. In her person as a young Jewish woman who became the mother of the Messiah, Mary vitally and inextricably unites the old and the new people of God, Israel and Christianity, the synagogue and the Church.

Mary is the point of juncture without which faith (as happens today) risks losing its balance, whether in the Old Testament or only in the New. In the Virgin we can experience the synthesis of the whole of Scripture. The unitive function of the Virgin is manifested in the devotion of the people of God toward her: she unites reason and feeling, rationality and affection, preserving or freeing Christianity from the snares of intellectualism and sentimentalism, both of them sterile.

Fourth point. Proper Marian devotion guarantees to faith the coexistence of the indispensable “reason” with the equally indispensable “reasons of the heart”, as Blaise Pascal would say.

For the Church, man is neither reason alone nor feeling alone; he is the union of these two dimensions. The head must reflect with lucidity, but the heart must be warmed: devotion to Mary (“free from any false exaggeration, but also from a narrowness that does not consider the singular dignity of the Mother of God”, as the Council recommends) ensures faith its full human dimension.

Ratzinger also adds a fifth reason, particularly timely, almost an echo of a similar thought of his colleague Hans Urs von Balthasar. With her femininity and motherhood Mary effectively contributes to humanizing the face of the Church, keeping it from falling into bureaucracy, abstract formalism and the legalism of the letter that kills the Spirit.

Fifth point. To use the very expressions of Vatican II, Mary is the “figure”, the “image” and the “model” of the Church. 

Thus, by looking to her, the Church is shielded from the masculinist model that looks at the Church as the instrument of a socio-political program. In Mary, her figure and model, the Church rediscovers her face as Mother; she cannot degenerate into an involution that turns her into a party, an organization, a pressure group at the service of human interests, even noble ones. If Mary no longer finds a place in certain theologies and ecclesiologies, the reason is simple: they have reduced faith to an abstraction. And an abstraction does not need a Mother.

The sixth and last reason not to forget Mary in our time is her example for all, especially for women. She illumines their path by pointing to the vocation and the mystery that come from God, while at the same time offering the example of a synthesis between interiority and evangelical proclamation, consecration and mission, courage and availability.

Sixth point. Mary, with her vocation as Virgin and Mother, continues to illumine what the Creator willed for woman in every age, including our own time.

Indeed, perhaps especially in our own time, in which, as we know, the essence of femininity is threatened. The virginity and motherhood of Mary root the mystery of woman in a most lofty destiny from which she cannot be detached. Mary is the intrepid herald of the Magnificat. But it is also She who makes silence and hiddenness fruitful. She is the One who is not afraid to stand beneath the cross, who is present at the birth of the Church. But she is also the one who, as the evangelist repeatedly underlines, “keeps and ponders in her heart what happens around her”. A creature of courage and obedience, she is (again and always) an example to which every Christian, man and woman, can and must look.

To condemn to oblivion a person as significant in the history of humanity as Mary is not to enrich oneself, but to impoverish oneself spiritually, to deprive oneself of a woman who gave a positive course and a sure direction to the human journey, and who thus became an irreplaceable paradigm for the revelation of God and for the maturity of the disciples of Christ.

To go deeper into the theological reasons not to forget Mary, see the encyclical Redemptoris Mater of John Paul II, on the maternal presence of Mary in the life of the Church.

Deepen your studies: explore Mariology, Marian Theology, Marian apparitions and the Postgraduate Program in Mariology.

In sum, the reasons not to forget Mary gathered by Ratzinger help the faithful to rediscover the Virgin as mother and model. Read more about Mary in the faith of the Church in Redemptoris Mater.