The Virgin Mary across Cultures

Devotion among Costa Rican Catholic and Finnish Orthodox Women (Open Access)

Elina Vuola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351607353
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia mariana

This book examines women's relationship to the Virgin Mary in two different cultural and religious contexts, and compares how these relationships have been analyzed and explained on a theological and a sociological level. The figure of the Virgin Mary is a divisive one in our modern culture. To some, she appears to be a symbol of religious oppression, while to others, she is a constant comfort and even an inspiration towards empowerment.

Drawing on the author's own ethnographic research among Catholic Costa Rican women and Orthodox Finnish women, this study relates their experiences with Mary to the folklore and popular religion materials present in each culture. The book combines not only different social and religious frameworks but also takes a critical look at ways in which feminists have (mis)interpreted the meaning of Mary for women. It therefore combines theological and ethnographic methods in order to create a feminist Marian theology that is particularly attentive to women's lived religious practices and theological thinking.

This study provides a unique ethnographically informed insight into women's religious interactions with Mary. As such, it will be of great interest to those researching in religious studies and theology, gender studies, Latin American studies, anthropology of religion, and folklore studies.

1 Blessed among women

Various teachings on Mary

Mariology, theological study of the Virgin Mary, is central to Christian theology, integrally related to its central teachings. Mary’s importance is not limited to the dogmas the Christian traditions share. Whereas the theological weight given to Mary varies from denomination to denomination, some central ideas and common threads can be found in all Christian theology and spirituality. In the Protestant churches, this shared tradition ceased to develop in both theology and practice after the connection with the Roman Catholic Church was severed. The Virgin Mary is not prominent in Protestant liturgies, spirituality, prayers, or church celebrations. Even if the Virgin Mary remained important to the spirituality of the reformer Martin Luther, who continued to hold Mary in high regard as an exemplary Christian, the ensuing Protestant generations have become alienated from Mary, to the point of considering any references to Mary as heretical or as signs of heresy. The Church of England is an exception among Reformation churches in this regard (Nazir-Ali & Sagovsky 2007; Tavard 1996).¹ In this chapter, of the Protestant churches, I concentrate on the Lutheran tradition, which I know best and which is the closest mirror to my Orthodox interviewees in Finland.

In the following, I will briefly outline the central teachings about the Virgin Mary. I will address both the ecumenical teachings shared among Christian denominations, and the areas where the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran teachings differ. I will also make brief observations on Mary’s role in Judaism and Islam.²

Mary has a significant position in Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, both of which celebrate Mary on several fixed occasions during the liturgical year. Catholic theology holds Mary as the most noteworthy member of the church, an embodiment of humanity, a co-redeemer and a mediator of grace. These functions of Mary have been declared official church teaching in the ecclesiological documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965, Constitutio Dogmatica de Ecclesia). In the Orthodox churches – and in part also in the Lutheran tradition – Mary stands out as the exemplary believer and paradigm of faith. She is the mother of all believers and the embodiment of the church that gathers all her dispersed children. For Orthodox Christians, Mary is the exemplary human being filled with the Holy Spirit, through whom grace is mediated. She is the Most Holy (Panagia), above all other saints and holy people. Regardless of the many historical differences between them, Orthodox and Catholic Christians are closer to one another in this regard. Both of them honor Mary in many ways in both practice and theology, visible on all levels from popular piety to liturgy and doctrine. Importantly, however, in none of them is Mary worshipped, but respected, venerated and the object of devotion. This distinction is important in order to avoid divinizing Mary: she and the saints deserve respect and devotion as special human beings. Only God deserves worshipping (latria), not humans. Mary can, however, be the object of the respect and veneration belonging to the saints (dulia) in its highest form (hyperdulia), restricted only for her.

What, then, is the role of Mary in the Lutheran tradition? There is ambiguity about this. For instance, praying to or with Mary is not considered heretical in the Lutheran tradition but in practice hardly happens, and it is not recommended or even given much thought, at least in public. What happened to Mary in the Lutheran tradition, and why? Mary is familiar to Lutherans from holy days and a few liturgically designated days, from visual arts and music, the names of flowers, women’s first names, and poetry. Clarissa Atkinson has pointed out Mary’s broad-ranging impact on all Christian understanding of motherhood (Atkinson 1991). Mary is thus both present and hidden in Western culture, including in Protestant countries.

Mariology as its own branch of theology has principally developed in the Catholic tradition from Late Middle Ages. In the seventeenth century, Marian theology flourished in the Catholic Church. The following Marian renaissance can be said to stretch from the 1850s to the present day. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Catholic Church declared a new dogma about Mary and thus set itself apart from other Christian churches concerning her theological status. The late Pope John Paul II, known for his Marian piety, contributed to the reinvigoration of Marian devotion in our times. Some of the most notable apparitions of Mary have taken place in the last 150 years, such as Lourdes, France, in 1858, and Fátima, Portugal, in 1917.

The cult of the Virgin Mary has been studied extensively from different perspectives and disciplines. My aim here is merely to give some background to my own research, which is not covered previously. Thus, my limited presentation of the various teachings on Mary serves my broader argument here about the possibilities of a more cross-cultural and ecumenical Marian devotion, in which her figure might serve as a bridge rather than a barrier.

Apparitions of Mary

The two best-known European apparitions of Mary, Lourdes and Fátima, have been confirmed by the Catholic Church. Both are popular destinations for pilgrims. Millions of people annually visit these sites to pray and to show their respect to Mary. At Lourdes, according to the tradition, the Virgin Mary appeared to a teenage girl named Bernadette Soubirous several times in the spring of 1858. The legend tells us that Bernadette was picking up firewood near a cave in Massabielle, when a young woman appeared, dressed in white, asking the girl to return another day. During the apparitions, Bernadette found a fountain in the cave. On March 25th, the day of the Annunciation to Mary (Annuntiatio), the woman in white told Bernadette that she was the ‘Immaculate Conception’. The apparitions happened four years after the Catholic Church had approved the dogma about Mary’s Immaculate Conception (to which I will return). Today this place, with its enormous church building, draws people from all corners of the world who want to visit the fountain that is believed to mediate healing miracles. Bernadette herself was canonized in 1933 and is today the patron saint of the sick and the poor.

In Fátima, Portugal, Mary appeared several times to three peasant children in 1917. Similarly to the apparitions in Lourdes, it was the young Mary dressed in white who appeared to rural children. The apparition in Fátima had a clear ideological and political content: Mary warned the children about the dangers of communism and urged Christians to pray for the conversion of Russia and world peace. The political context of the apparitions was the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Our Lady of Fátima is believed to effect miracles, too. She was particularly important for Pope John Paul II who attributed his survival of an attempt on his life in 1981 to her intervention.

Apparitions of Mary are a common occurrence in Catholic experience, even if the church has not officially accepted all of them. They are also a global phenomenon. Generally, the apparitions bear many similarities: Mary appears almost without exception to ordinary humble and poor people, offering a clear message, often with a specific request, such as to build a church in her honor. Further, the sites of her apparition often comprise caves, rocks, water and even celestial bodies – stars, the sun, and the moon. As the importance and the reputation of the apparition increase, miraculous and healing powers are attributed to the site.

Regardless of the similarities, the apparitions differ greatly in different locations. An individual may feel affinity to or find meaning in one apparition more than in another. One reason for this is that the apparition often becomes highly significant locally and nationally. These local(ized) Marys are incarnations of the Virgin Mary in a particular context, which is also why they are often declared as the patronesses of the nation states where the apparition first occurred. The same religious symbol, Mary, is interpreted differently from one cultural context to another.

Pilgrimages to a multitude of sites of Marian apparitions and otherwise important places of devotion are an old form of Christian piety, extending to our times and covering different geographical areas (e.g., Hermkens, Jansen & Notermans, eds. 2009).

Who is Mary?

The devotion to Mary and the theological teaching concerning her began to develop in the fourth century C.E. Prior to that, it is mostly found in commentaries on the New Testament. The juxtaposition and parallelizing of Mary and Eve, in which Mary is presented as the New Eve, is among the oldest material pertaining to Marian theology. I will return to this later in the book. In the Bible, Mary appears and is mentioned by name only rarely. In addition to the narratives of Jesus’s birth and childhood, the New Testament mentions Mary among the followers of Jesus, at his cross, and as a member of the early Christian community. Due to this meagerness, the connection between the biblical Mary and the later doctrines concerning her is often difficult to create, which is one of the main reasons for the Protestant critique of the status of Mary especially in Catholic theology.

In Mary – as well as in Eve – everything that Western and Christian culture associates with femininity becomes crystallized. Scratching the surface of the images and ideas about Mary brings out and makes visible rich, ambiguous, ancient but still influential perceptions about gender, differences between women and men, and concomitant assumptions on femininity and masculinity. Through Mary, both the patriarchal image of women as submissive and secondary to men and conceptions of womanhood as the fundamental power of being and source of life become visible.

In theological discourses, the feminine and woman can represent the soul, the spirit at its purest, but also its opposite, the body and the flesh. In this light, it is not at all surprising that these two aspects of human life are personified in two female figures, Mary and Eve. We need to remember, however, that religious ideas and symbols are not identical with ordinary maleness or femaleness. Obviously, there is a connection between them on some level, but since ideas about what is ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ vary at different times, we cannot assume any direct equivalence between, for example, medieval and contemporary ideas about gender. In the course of history, the Virgin Mary has been associated with a variety of different ideas considered feminine, but their connection to actual women is complex and versatile. Still, the Mary symbol is perhaps the most influential factor that has shaped Western, Christian images of women and femininity for a long time.

The Virgin Mary has a significant position in the theologies of both East and West. There are two ecumenical dogmas on Mary, which are accepted in both the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions. These two dogmas are about Mary’s title as Theotokos, the Mother of God (from 431), and her perpetual virginity (from 681). In addition, the Roman Catholic Church has two other dogmas that are not accepted by the Orthodox or the Protestant churches: Immaculate Conception (1854) and Assumption (1950). I will present all these dogmas in detail later in this chapter.

In some apocryphal gospels, left outside the biblical canon, Mary is more present than in the canonical texts of the New Testament. Particularly the Gospel of James (also called the Infancy Gospel of James or the Protoevangelium of James) includes narratives from Mary’s childhood and life before the birth of Jesus, most of them, according to scholars, with little if any historical basis. In the Middle Ages, these apocryphal texts and the thirteenth-century Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea) became more important sources and inspiration for the intensified Marian devotion than the New Testament.

Because much of Western art and popular piety concerning Mary draws from the Gospel of James, I will briefly introduce its central content (e.g., Hock 1995). In the Byzantine tradition, this gospel formally has a more important status than in the West. According to the narrative, Mary’s parents Joachim and Anna suffered from infertility, but then Anna conceived in her old age. In visual art, there is an abundance of depictions of Anna and Joachim meeting each other after an angel has told each of them the news about the forthcoming child. The tender encounter between Anna and Joachim has often been understood as an illustration of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. The Gospel of James narrates Mary’s early childhood, including her first steps at the age of six months. According to the gospel, Anna and Joachim gave their daughter to be raised at the temple, where she lived from age three till twelve. At that point, a widower named Joseph was appointed as the girl’s guardian.

The narrative of Mary’s conception of Jesus in the Gospel of James basically follows Luke’s New Testament narration about the apparition of an angel, another common theme in visual art. The oldest artistic depictions of the Annunciation originate from the fifth century. In art, the Annunciation can be presented both realistically, faithfully to the biblical story, and more mystically or indirectly as a union of the divine (heaven) and the human (earth), accentuating God’s maleness and Mary’s femaleness. The Angel Gabriel can even be presented as a spokesman of a sort, who proposes to Mary on behalf of God, making Mary an actual bride of God (Sponsa Dei). This erotically charged theme is particularly expressed in poetry.

The beginning of the most common prayer to Mary, Ave Maria, consists of the Angel Gabriel’s greeting of Mary, from the New Testament. The latter part of the prayer was added much later, in the sixteenth century.

Ave Maria, gratia plena	Hail Mary, full of grace
Dominus tecum	The Lord is with you
benedicta tu in mulieribus	Blessed are you among women
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus.	and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei	Holy Mary, Mother of God
ora pro nobis peccatoribus	Pray for us sinners,
nunc et hora mortis nostrae.	now and at the hour of our death.

Unlike in the New Testament, the Gospel of James narrates the broader social context of Mary’s pregnancy. Joseph feels guilty about neglecting his responsibilities as Mary’s guardian, while also being afraid that the community would accuse him of getting her pregnant. Mary has to defend her innocence and her exceptional pregnancy in tears. This theme of Mary’s shame and obligation to defend her purity has prevailed for example in the Finnish oral folklore about Mary (see Chapter 5). In the Gospel of James, both Joseph and Mary are examin...