Une Minute avec Marie
Faire connaître et aimer Marie
It is evident that Marian devotion has become marginalized in contemporary culture - at least in the way it portrays itself. While Lourdes and other Marian shrines continue to draw large crowds, these are not events to be talked about or even discussed in a rational way while eliciting strong reactions.
Some Catholics, believing that excessive attention given to the Mother can obscure the Son - are partly responsible for this repression. This is a narrowmindedness both of piety and of the intelligence of the faith, and of intelligence in general. To understand why, we need to read Fr. Louis Bouyer (1913-2004), one of the finest French theologians of the twentieth century. A former Lutheran minister who became a Catholic priest, he was once on high alert for any form of "mariolatry". The book in question has a rather esoteric title: Le Trône de la Sagesse (The Throne of Wisdom). It was published in 1957, but reissued by Cerf in 2009. The subtitle is significant: Essai sur la signification du culte marial (An Essay on the Significance of Marian Devotion).
From the very first pages, the author explains that the prototype of humanity as God our Father desires it in His love is not Christ, His eternal Son made man in history, but His Mother, the one whose flesh He took, who freely consented to it, and whose "yes" remains the reference point and matrix of our faith - making her on the spiritual level the Mother of all believers.
As the first to have been preserved from sin and death, she never ceases to invite us to do what she herself did and advised the servants at the wedding feast in Cana to do: "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5). And not content with encouraging us to do so, she takes us on as her Son's adopted brothers and sisters, as he asked her to do from the Cross, in the person of his beloved disciple (John 19:28-27).
Dr. Jean Duchesne
Emeritus Professor of English at Condorcet College in Paris. A founder of the French edition of Communio, he was Cardinal Lustiger’s Special Adviser and is now his literary executor. He is part of the Oasis Scientific Committee and of the Observatory for Faith and Culture of the Episcopal Conference of France, and directs the Catholic Academy of France.