TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/123091/1230610.000

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                                                                                RELIGION, Page 62

COVER STORIES

Handmaid Or Feminist?


More and more people around the world are worshipping Mary --
and it's led to a holy struggle over what she really stands for

By RICHARD N. OSTLING -- With reporting by Hannah Bloch/New York,
Greg Burke/Medjugorje, Robert T. Zintl/Rome, and other bureaus


    When her womb was touched by eternity 2,000 years ago,
the Virgin Mary of Nazareth uttered a prediction: "All
generations will call me blessed." Among all the women who have
ever lived, the mother of Jesus Christ is the most celebrated,
the most venerated, the most portrayed, the most honored in the
naming of girl babies and churches. Even the Koran praises her
chastity and faith. Among Roman Catholics, the Madonna is
recognized not only as the Mother of God but also, according to
modern Popes, as the Queen of the Universe, Queen of Heaven,
Seat of Wisdom and even the Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

    Mary may also be history's most controversial woman. For
centuries Protestants have vehemently opposed her exaltation;
papal pronouncements concerning her status have driven a wedge
between the Vatican and the Eastern Orthodox Church. Conflict
surrounds the notions that she remained ever a virgin, that she
as well as Jesus was born without sin and that her sufferings
at the Crucifixion were so great that she participated with her
son in the redemption of humanity.

    Yet even though the Madonna's presence has permeated the
West for hundreds of years, there is still room for wonder --
now perhaps more than ever. In an era when scientists debate
the causes of the birth of the universe, both the adoration and
the conflict attending Mary have risen to extraordinary levels. A
grass-roots revival of faith in the Virgin is taking place
worldwide. Millions of worshippers are flocking to her shrines,
many of them young people. Even more remarkable are the number
of claimed sightings of the Virgin, from Yugoslavia to
Colorado, in the past few years.

    These apparitions frequently embarrass clerics who have
downplayed her role since the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.
"It's all the fashion," sniffs Father Jacques Fournier of Paris,
reflecting skepticism about the populist wave of sightings. The
hierarchy is wary about most of the recent claims of miraculous
appearances; only seven Marian sightings in this century have
received official church blessing.

    Church concern has served to highlight the most
interesting aspect of the growing popular veneration: the
theological tug-of-war taking place over Mary's image.
Feminists, liberals and activists have stepped forward with new
interpretations of the Virgin's life and works that challenge
the notion of her as a passive handmaid of God's will and
exemplar of some contested traditional family values. "Mary
wants to get off the pedestal," says Kathy Denison, a former nun
and current drug-and-alcohol counselor in San Francisco. "She
wants to be a vital human being."

    Whether they hold to those views or not, people the world
over are traveling enormous distances to demonstrate in person
their veneration of the Madonna. The late 20th century has
become the age of the Marian pilgrimage. Examples:



    At Lourdes, the biggest of France's 937 pilgrimage
shrines, annual attendance in the past two years has jumped 10%,
to 5.5 million. Many new visitors are East Europeans, now free
to express their beliefs and to travel. Despite the inevitable
attraction of Lourdes for the ill and aged, one-tenth of the
faithful these days are 25 or younger. "We also have new kinds
of pilgrimages," reports Loic Bondu, a spokesman at the site.
"They dance, they sing, they praise out loud. They're more
exuberant."



    In Knock, Ireland, where 15 people saw the Virgin a
century ago, the lines of the faithful lengthened dramatically
after Pope John Paul II paid a visit to the shrine in 1979.
Since then, attendance has doubled, to 1.5 million people each
year. To handle the influx, a new international airport was
opened at Knock in 1986.



    At Fatima, Portugal, the shrine marking the appearance of
Mary before three children in 1917 draws a steady 4.5 million
pilgrims a year from an ever widening array of countries. One
million devotees turned out last May when John Paul made his
second visit.



    In Czestochowa, Poland, attendance at the shrine of the
Black Madonna has increased to 5 million a year, rivaling Fatima
and Lourdes, since John Paul's visit in 1979. Last August the
Pope spoke there to 1 million Catholic youths.



    In Emmitsburg, Md., attendance has doubled in the past
year, to 500,000, at one of the oldest of 43 major Marian sites
in the U.S., the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes.



    The boom at such long-established sites is almost
overshadowed by the cult of the Virgin that has developed
through new reports of her personal appearances, most
spectacularly at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. Before Yugoslavia's
civil war erupted and travel became much more difficult last
September, more than 10 million pilgrims had flocked to the
mountain village since the apparitions began in 1981. Six young
peasants there claim that the Virgin has been imparting messages
each evening for 10 years. Hundreds of ailments have been
reported cured during visits to the region where the visitations
take place. None of them have been verified, however, by the
meticulous rules applied at Lourdes.

    Paradoxically enough, the Medjugorje apparitions are a
headache for the local Roman Catholic bishop, Pavao Zanic. He
flatly asserts that "the Madonna has never said anything at
Medjugorje." Our Lady, he snaps, has been turned into "a tourist
attraction" and "a bank teller." The Vatican has intervened to
determine whether Medjugorje is a fraud. Rome is officially
noncommital while the case remains open but advises bishops not
to sponsor pilgrimages to the site.

    Less spectacular appearances by the Virgin have attracted
streams of the faithful in locales from Central America to the
Slavic steppes. In Nicaragua, President Violeta Barrios de
Chamorro is a strong believer in a series of visitations by the
Madonna in the small town of Cuapa, where Mary was witnessed by
a church caretaker several times from May through October of
1980. During a 1981 Mass celebrated at the spot by the
Archbishop of Managua, with some 30,000 people in attendance,
believers say the sun changed colors. In Hrushiw, Ukraine, tens
of thousands of people gathered in 1987 after a 12-year-old
claimed to see the Madonna hovering over a church that had been
shut down by the ruling communists.

    More recently, the Madonna has been seen in the U.S.
Devotees by the thousands have been flocking to the Mother
Cabrini shrine near Denver, where Theresa Lopez, 30, says the
Virgin has appeared to her four times in the past seven weeks.
Marian apparitions were reported by parish coordinator Ed Molloy
at St. Dominic's Church in Colfax, Calif., for 13 weeks in a row
last year, and there was a surprise reappearance six weeks ago.
In Our Lady of the Pillar Church of Santa Ana, Calif., Mary's
image has been seen by Mexican immigrant Irma Villegas on the
mosaics each morning since October, boosting attendance at 7
a.m. Mass enormously. Says Villegas: "Mary told me to talk to
people about it so I did."

    This being the late 20th century, Americans participating
in these epiphanies are doing something about it: networking.
Says Mimi Kelly of Louisiana's Mir ((Peace)) Group: "People
come back with a burning desire to do something good for
mankind." Some 300 groups of Medjugorje believers exist across
the U.S., publishing at least 30 newsletters and holding a dozen
conferences a year. There are 70 telephone hot lines that
feature the Virgin's messages from Yugoslavia: in Alabama dial
MOM-MARY. Over the past 16 months a Texas foundation has put up
6,500 billboards inspired by Medjugorje. The huge signs say the
Virgin appeared "to tell you God loves you."

    No one can take more satisfaction in the growth of faith
in the Virgin -- or feel more unease at some of the pathways it
has taken -- than John Paul II. Devotion to Mary was ingrained
in the Pope in his Polish homeland, where over the centuries the
Madonna has been hailed for turning back troops of the Muslim
Turks, Swedish Lutherans and, in 1920, Soviet Bolsheviks. The
precious Black Madonna icon was a mobilizing symbol for the
country's efforts to throw off communism, and is still a
unifying image for the entire nation.

    When he was made a bishop in 1958, John Paul emblazoned a
golden M on his coat of arms and chose as his Latin motto "Totus
Tuus" (All Yours) -- referring to Mary, not Christ. Once he put
on St. Peter's ring, John Paul made Mary's unifying power a
centerpiece of his papal arsenal. He has visited countless
Marian shrines during his globe trotting, and invokes the
Madonna's aid in nearly every discourse and prayer that he
delivers. He firmly believes that her personal intercession
spared his life when he was shot at St. Peter's Square in Rome
in 1981; the assassination attempt occurred on May 13, the exact
anniversary of the first Fatima apparition.

    Moreover, John Paul is firmly convinced, as are many
others, that Mary brought an end to communism throughout Europe.
His faith is rooted in the famed prophecies of Mary at Fatima
in 1917. According to Sister Lucia, one of the children who
claimed to see her, the Virgin predicted the rise of Soviet
totalitarianism before it happened. In a subsequent vision, she
directed the Pope and his bishops to consecrate Russia to her
Immaculate Heart in order to bring communism to an end.

    According to Lucia, papal attempts to carry out that
consecration failed in 1942, '52 and '82. John Paul finally
carried out Mary's directive correctly in 1984 -- and the very
next year Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to power inaugurated the
Soviet collapse. Says Father Robert Fox of the Fatima Family
Shrine in Alexandria, S. Dak.: "The world will recognize in due
time that the defeat of communism came at the intercession of
the mother of Jesus."


    With such a powerful institutional presence behind the
effort to revive Mary's influence, it was to be expected, at
least to some degree, that her popularity would grow. What was
far less predictable was the outpouring of new interpretations
of the Virgin's message for believers. In his writings, the
Pope has given a conservative tilt to the meaning of Mary's
life. The Pontiff's 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem
(On the Dignity and Vocation of Women), citing positions taken
at Vatican II, declared that "the Blessed Virgin came first as
an eminent and singular exemplar of both virginity and
motherhood." He extolled both states as ways women could find
their dignity.

    John Paul's traditionalist leanings find their most
pointed expression in the Pope's continued refusal to consider
the ordination of women as priests. The Vatican's argument is
that if Christ had wanted women priests or bishops, Mary above
all would have become one. On the other hand, John Paul does not
argue that women must shun careers just because Mary was a
homebody. Although the Pope lauds Mary for her submissiveness,
it is in relation to God, not to male-dominated society.

    But a much more aggressive view of Mary is emerging from
feminist circles within the church, emphasizing her autonomy,
independence and earthiness. Old-fashioned views of the Virgin,
complains Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a Fordham University
professor of theology, "make her appear above the earth, remote
and passive," with "no sex and no sass." She adds, "There's
still a strong element of that in the present hierarchy."

    The revisionist views of the Madonna claim her as an
active heroine who was variously an earth mother and a crusader
for social justice. Mary, says Sister Lavinia Byrne, who works
with non-Catholic groups in Britain, stood by loyally during
her son's crucifixion while all but one of his male disciples
ran away. Her agreement to bear the Son of God, argues Ivone
Leal of Portugal's Commission on the Status of Women, was the
act of "a strong woman. She followed her son's adventurous
life, which was known to be doomed to failure, and always
sustained him." Says French writer Nicole Echivard: "The Mother
of God is the one from whom women are created in their
preference for love and for people, rather than for power or
machinery. Mary is the most liberated, the most determined, the
most responsible of all mothers."

    Others emphasize the political dimension. "Mary stood up
for the poor and oppressed," says Sister Mary O'Driscoll, a
professor at the Dominican order's Angeli cum university in
Rome. She and others point out that in the Magnificat (Luke 1),
the pregnant Mary declared that God "has put down the mighty
from their thrones and exalted those of low degree; he has
filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent
empty away."

    The activist interpretations do not necessarily run
counter to Vatican teaching. Back in 1974 Pope Paul VI portrayed
Mary as a "woman of strength who experienced poverty and
suffering, flight and exile." John Paul II has said much the
same thing, referring to Mary's "self-offering totality of love;
the strength that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows;
limitless fidelity and tireless devotion to work."

    But some other views strike dangerously close to
fundamental Catholic truths. Among them:



    Virginal Conception. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke state
that Mary was a virgin and that Jesus was conceived
miraculously without a human father. This belief is also
included in the ancient creeds, and traditional Christians
insist upon it. Some liberal Catholic scholars, however,
increasingly follow liberal Protestant thinkers and doubt that
this was literally true. Father Raymond Brown, the leading U.S.
Catholic authority on the Bible, has declared the issue
"unresolved." Jane Schaberg, who chairs the religion department
at the University of Detroit, goes further. She contends, to
traditionalist scorn, that the unwed Mary was impregnated by a
man other than fiance Joseph and that she was a liberated woman
who was "not identified or destroyed by her relationship with
men."



    Perpetual Virginity. A Catholic and Orthodox tradition 15
centuries old holds that Mary was ever virgin, meaning that she
and Joseph never had sex and that the "brothers" of Jesus
mentioned in the Bible were cousins. This idea consolidated the
tradition of celibacy for priests and nuns. Protestants reject
the belief as antisexual and lacking in biblical support.
Liberal Catholic theologian Uta Ranke-Heinemann of Germany
contends that the notion of a celibate clergy demeaned women by
robbing Mary of sexuality and normal motherhood. This is,
Ranke-Heinemann declares, "a monstrous product of neurotic
sexual fantasy." Responds a Vatican official: "The church
doesn't have problems with sex. The world does."



    Immaculate Conception. This tenet holds that Mary was
conceived without original sin. The concept was popular for
centuries but was not defined as Catholic dogma by the papacy
until 1854, partly in response to popular pressure stirred up
by Marian apparitions. Unofficial belief adds that Mary lived
a perfect life. Protestants insist the Bible portrays Jesus as
the only sinless person. Marina Warner, author of Alone of All
Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, contends that
Rome's dogma artificially sets Mary apart from the rest of the
human race.




    There is yet another kind of rethinking of Mary going on.
Protestants see no biblical basis for praying to her for favors,
and they believe veneration of her can slide into worship that
is due to God alone. They also reject the idea that human
beings, Mary included, can contribute to humanity's salvation.
Nonetheless, some Protestants are softening aspects of their
hostility. Church of England theologian John Macquarrie has
proposed revisions of such dogmas as the Assumption of Mary into
heaven, which could then be seen as a symbol of the redemption
that awaits all believers. Theologian Donald Bloesch of the
University of Dubuque says fellow conservative Protestants "need
to see Mary as the pre-eminent saint" and "the mother of the
church." Similar convergences will receive a thorough airing in
February, when U.S. Catholic and Lutheran negotiators issue an
accord, years in the making, on Mary's role.

    The shift in the debate over Mary represents a delayed
backlash against the influence of the Second Vatican Council,
which made Mary emphatically subordinate to her son in church
teachings. Prior to Vatican II, Popes had proclaimed Mary the
Co-Redeemer with Jesus. During the council, bishops were under
pressure from the faithful to ratify the Co-Redeemer doctrine;
instead they issued no decree on Mary at all. Rather she was
incorporated into the Constitution on the Church, a move that
placed the Virgin among the community of believers in Christ
rather than in anything resembling a co-equal position.

    The effects of that downplaying have rippled through the
observances of the church to the point that Mary's statues have
been removed from some sanctuaries and Catholic parishes have
gradually reduced the traditional novena devotions to the
Virgin. John Paul clearly thinks the reconsideration went too
far, and his fellow venerators of Mary agree. In Eastern Europe,
says Warsaw priest Roman Indrzejczyk, enthusiasm for Mary is no
less than a "a reaction to the matter-of-fact religiousness of
the West."

    Behind Vatican II's reconsideration of the Virgin and some
of the uneasiness expressed over her populist revival, say
feminists, is a concern over making Mary into a competitive
divinity, a tradition common to many of the pagan religions that
Christianity superseded. Remarks Warner: "The great terror is
that she will be worshipped above her son."

    Even for feminists who have no desire to go that far, the
idea of a return, however marginal, to that notion of
supernatural feminine power is alluring. Says Sandra Schneiders,
a professor at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley:
"There has been a stupendous upsurge in goddess research and the
feminine divinity as an antecedent to the male god. It's not
unrelated that the Virgin Mary's popularity has also increased.
Judeo-Christianity has been exclusively male, leaving a gap that
cries out for feminine divinity."

    It seems clear, though, that the world is crying out for
many things from Mary, and in some fashion is receiving them.
Devoted mother or militant, independent female or suffering
parent, she remains one of the most compelling and evocative
icons of Western civilization. Renewed expressions of her
vitality and relevance are signs that millions of people are
still moved by her mystery and comforted by the notion of her
caring. Whatever aspect of Mary they choose to emphasize and
embrace, those who seek her out surely find something only a
holy mother can provide.