POPE BENEDICT AND MARIAN DOCTRINE

Pope Benedict on the Church's Marian Doctrine

Friday October 15, 2010

On Monday, October 11, 2010, at the opening session of the Seventh General Congregation of the Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a rare unscripted homily that may well be seen by future generations as one of the defining moments of his pontificate. In just under 2,200 words, the Holy Father demonstrated the depth of his theological understanding, explaining in simple terms the Church's Marian doctrine, Her understanding of the historical centrality of the Incarnation, the role of the Church throughout history, the false gods of the past and the present who stand in the way of the Church as She attempts to fulfill her mission, and the source of the Church's strength that will ultimately lead to Her triumph.

The homily is so rich that I intend to examine it in parts over the next few days. We'll begin, as Pope Benedict did, with his exposition of the Church's Marian doctrine.

October 11 was, in the traditional calendar, the feast of the Divine Maternity of Mary, and Pope Benedict noted that, when Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council on this day in 1962, he "wanted to entrust the entire council to the motherly hands, to the motherly heart of the Virgin Mary." The feast was introduced by Pope Pius XI to commemorate the declaration, at the Council of Ephesus (431), that the term Theotokos—Mother of God—was properly applied to the Virgin Mary. In this declaration, "the Council of Ephesus had summarized the entire doctrine on Christ, on Mary, the entire doctrine of the redemption."

God became man, through the humble and loving action of the Virgin Mary in accepting God's will. In allowing God to become incarnate in her, the Mother of God was "drawn by the Lord into himself, and so all of us with her."

But Mary's role in the divine plan of salvation did not end with the birth of Christ. As Pope Benedict notes, at the end of the Second Vatican Council, "Pope Paul VI acknowledged the Virgin Mary with the title 'Mater Ecclesiae'" (Mother of the Church):

Because Christ was not born as an individual among others. He was born to create a body for himself: he was born - as John says in chapter 12 of his Gospel - to draw all things to him and in him. He was born - as the letters to the Colossians and to the Ephesians say - to recapitulate all the world, he was born as the first-born of many brothers, he was born to reunite the cosmos in himself, such that he is the head of a great body. Where Christ is born, there begins the movement of recapitulation, the moment of the calling, of the construction of his body, of the holy Church. The Mother of "Theós," the Mother of God, is Mother of the Church, because she is Mother of the one who came to reunite all in his risen body.

We can see how the two titles, Theotokos and Mater Ecclesiae, are really one and the same, the Holy Father says, by examining the "parallelism between the first chapter of [Saint Luke's] Gospel and the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which repeat the same mystery on two levels." In Luke 1, Mary accepts the will of God at the Annunciation, and Christ is conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 1, Mary is in the Upper Room with the disciples at Pentecost, "imploring the cloud of the Holy Spirit": And so from the believing Church, with Mary at the center, is born the Church, the body of Christ. This twofold birth is the one birth of the Christus totus, of the Christ who embraces the world and us all.