Anna Krohn
Record Contributer
The magnificent re-opening of the newly restored St Mary’s Cathedral in Perth this week marks a truly red-letter day for Australia and for the entire Christian world.
However very few people (apart from dedicated locals) know that the Cathedral is dedicated to Our Lady under her title of The Immaculate Conception. This, of course, explains why this remarkable event is taking place on December 8th, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
It was the pioneer Spanish Benedictine Bishop of Perth, Joseph Benedict Serra, who was so strongly inspired in the immediate wake of the First Vatican Council, by the 1854 promulgation of this definitive Catholic teaching, that he re-named his Cathedral (from St John the Evangelist) to Our Lady’s new title only year later in 1855. (I imagine that of all the saints, St John, who tradition suggests took the Mother of God into his care, would not be miffed by the Bishop’s change.)
The Feast also highlights the enduring fact that The Immaculate Conception is one of the least understood and unappreciated of all Catholic doctrines.
Firstly, there is widespread confusion, that the title refers to the Christian belief in the virginal conception of Jesus Christ – the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. This leads to the endlessly tiresome and often offensive books, plays (there is one showing in theatres now) and even stupidly erroneous references to “virgins” in the secular culture. But it is not only non-Catholics who are confused. Many Catholics in our time have really no idea what it means to believe that Our Lady was “immaculately conceived.”
Secondly, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, defined it seems so late in the Church’s long history, has created difficult misunderstandings with our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran communions. For even the most sophisticated of their theologians baulk at what appears to them a Catholic foible that is neither authentically Scriptural nor liturgical.
And thirdly, although contemporary humanisms and feminisms have not fulfilled anything like their platforms of “liberations” from Christian tradition, they nonetheless have trained us to be suspicious of the type of iconography of the Immaculate Conception, which depicts our Mother Mary, the model Christian and woman, as wan, passively otherworldly, wafted along on a cloud of cherubs and pastel roses.
After all we moderns seem to believe that a little (or great) bit of vice or sin makes us more authentic, more human, more truly ourselves. Pope Benedict XVI muses on this deluded fascination with sin and God-autonomy often: “we suspect that one who doesn’t sin must be really boring..”
Attached to this, even for the most loyal Catholics, is the fear that Mary’s “immaculate” character is as Father Paul Mankowski SJ says (in one of his many memorable homilies), “so remote from the moral sweatiness and squalor in which our own personal struggles occur” and leads to our alienation from her. We imagine her to be scarcely human, a mythical ideal more than a person, and impossible dream rather than our historically real Mother in flesh and faith.
However, if we learn to re-read and re-pray the Virgin Mary’s great victory hymn of the Magnificat (look it up in St Luke’s Gospel, 1:46-55) putting aside our prejudices and fears, we see how closely aligned the great doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is to Scripture and to a complete and thoroughly three-dimensional account of faithful womanhood.
Our Lady was is not a passive and weak woman but the “strong woman”(mulier fortis) and “daughter-leader” prophesied in the Old Testament. Her receptivity to “the strength of His arm”, begins with at the earliest moments of her conception (her parents Anna and Joachim were holy but flesh and blood spouses and parents). She sings in these verses, not of her own virtue but of the fiery transformation that receiving God’s grace brings about at the core of human existence and society.
In her hymn, she declares that everything, her life and her holiness are utterly blessed “gifts” from the Father, she the “hand-maid” and mother to the most “starving” and needy of humanity.
As she does this, she is not primly humble, but wise; her ‘tiny’ “yes” explodes into history with God’s descending merciful love (His misericordia) and the appearing of His Redeeming Power.
Mary also knew that being full of grace does not remove her from history or squalor. She was a displaced mother, a pregnant refugee, a disciple of the wandering preacher Christ (there were no buses about Galilee) and the mother of our crucified Lord. Like the (smaller stars) Saints Francis, Catherine of Siena and Teresa of Calcutta, “the closer we are to God, the closer we are to man” (Pope Benedict XVI again). For Mary, her intimacy with God pulled every fibre of her being and heart into the suffering exposure of the love of Christ.
It is little wonder that Pope John Paul II sees Our Lady as the model of “true feminism” and Pope Benedict says that the Immaculate Conception is the Feast of Mary’s challenge to be close to her while she urges us: “Have courage to dare with God. Try it.”