The one creature who said yes to God so completely that the Word took flesh in her — honored above all saints, worshipped as none of them.
The Marian Dogmas
Catholic teaching about Mary is anchored in four solemnly defined dogmas, each of which is finally a statement about her Son. The first and oldest is Theotokos, "God-bearer" or Mother of God, defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The title is Christological before it is Marian: because the one she bore is a single divine person, she is truly the mother of God-made-man, not merely of a human body later joined to divinity. The second is her Perpetual Virginity — that Mary remained a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Christ, a belief held from the early church and shared with Eastern Orthodoxy.
The third and fourth were defined only in modern times. The Immaculate Conception, proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854, holds that Mary was preserved free from original sin from the first moment of her own conception, by a singular grace anticipating the merits of Christ. (It is often confused with the virgin birth; it refers instead to Mary's own conception in her mother's womb.) The Assumption, defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950, teaches that at the end of her earthly life Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory — a foretaste of the resurrection promised to all the faithful in The Four Last Things.
The Titles
From these dogmas flows a litany of titles that has grown for two millennia. She is Queen of Heaven, Mother of the Church, Our Lady of Sorrows, the New Eve whose obedience undoes the first woman's disobedience, and the Ark of the New Covenant. She is Mediatrix and Advocate, the Theotokos of the East and the Madonna of the West. The rose and the lily belong to her, as do the blue mantle, the crown of twelve stars from the Book of Revelation, and above all the rosary — the meditative chain of prayers that walks through the events of Christ's life with Mary as companion. The Catholic Saints & Figures index catalogues her iconography alongside the wider communion.
The Apparitions
Marian devotion is intensely tied to particular places where the faithful believe Mary appeared. Guadalupe (Mexico, 1531), where an image of Mary as a mestiza woman was imprinted on the cloak of the peasant Juan Diego, became the spiritual heart of Catholic Latin America and a symbol of the indigenous and European worlds meeting. Lourdes (France, 1858), where the girl Bernadette Soubirous reported eighteen visions and a spring emerged that became the world's most visited healing shrine. Fatima (Portugal, 1917), where three shepherd children reported apparitions delivering prophetic messages, penance, and the famous "secrets." These three are the most widely recognized of the many apparitions the church has judged worthy of belief, though it holds that no such private revelation adds to the public deposit of faith closed with the apostles.
Veneration, Not Worship
The distinction that governs everything Catholicism says about Mary is the difference between worship and honor. Worship in the strict sense — latria, adoration — belongs to God alone. The honor given to the saints is dulia, veneration. Mary receives hyperdulia, the highest veneration due to any creature, but still infinitely short of the worship reserved for God. She is honored not as a rival to Christ but as the first and greatest of the redeemed, whose entire glory is derived from him. Protestant traditions, and the Reformed in particular, regard even this elevated honor as perilously close to idolatry, and strip Marian devotion back to the gospel narratives; the divide is one of the sharpest between the communions. For Catholics, to honor the mother is always to be pointed toward the Son — her last recorded words in scripture are "Do whatever he tells you."
Related
- Catholicism — Collection index
- The Holy Trinity — The Son she bore
- The Communion of Saints — The fellowship she heads among creatures
- Catholic Saints & Figures — Her titles and iconography
- The Four Last Things — Her Assumption as foretaste of resurrection
- Gabriel — The archangel of the Annunciation
- Calvinism — The Reformed critique of Marian devotion