Six Reasons to Love the Mother of God

as theologians and exegetes:

...In the book The Ratzinger Report, in which he is interviewed by Vittorio Messori, we some of the highest Mariology expressed by the then Cardinal Ratzinger. He sees Mary as the remedy for the crisis in the Church today. Our Lady shows the Church what it means to be pure and chaste and what it truly means to be "woman." In this way she is the remedy against immorality and radical feminism. Also at this point in his life, Ratzinger sees the truth in the statement that he had such a hard time professing in his youth; Mary is the conqueror of all heresies:

Now—in this confused period where truly every type of heretical aberration seems to be pressing upon the doors of the authentic faith—now I understand that it was not a matter of pious exaggerations, but of truths that today are more valid than ever … it is necessary to go back to Mary if we want to return to that "truth about Jesus Christ," "truth about the Church" and the "truth about man" that John Paul II proposed as a program to the whole of Christianity (29).

It is urgent that we rediscover the Marian dimension of faith in order to safeguard orthodoxy.

Only the Marian dimension secures the place of affectivity in faith and thus ensures a fully human correspondence to the reality of the incarnate Logos. … This affective rooting guarantees the bond ex toto corde—from the depth of the heart—to the personal God and his Christ and rules out any recasting of Christology into a Jesus program, which can be atheistic and purely neutral (30).

A proper Mariology leads to a proper Christology! "Only when it touches Mary and becomes Mariology is Christology itself as radical as the faith of the Church requires. The appearance of a truly Marian awareness serves as the touchstone indicating whether or not the Christological substance is fully present" (31). This is the first of six reasons Cardinal Ratzinger gives for not forgetting Mary. These six reasons provide a summation of his entire Mariology and show the extent to which Mary has become a vital and important part of his theological outlook.

The second reason he proposes is that "the Mariology of the Church comprises the right relationship, the necessary integration between Scripture and Tradition" (32). He insists that the four Marian dogmas are grounded in Scripture, yet not all in an explicit manner. Rather the Word of God serves as a seed for Marian truths that grow and develop through the Tradition of the Church in her liturgy, the sensus fidelium, and the discernment of the theological reflection of the Magisterium.

His third reason is that within the person of Mary subsists the unity of between the Old and the New Testaments.

Wherever the unity of Old and New Testaments disintegrates, the place of a healthy Mariology is lost. Likewise this unity of Testaments guarantees the integrity of the doctrines of creation and of grace. In modern times, however, the loss of typological exegesis (seeing the cohesion of the one history in the many histories) has actually led to the separation of the Testaments, and by isolating the doctrine of grace it has at the same time increasingly threatened the doctrine of creation (33).

Mary ensures the complete unity of Sacred Scripture guarding against Judaism’s rejection of the New Testament and a Marcionist hermeneutic that throws out the Old.

The fourth reason we must not forget Mary, Ratzinger argues, is that with correct Marian devotion, consisting of head and heart (reason and faith), the full human dimension of faith is assured. "For the Church, man is neither mere reason nor mere feeling, he is the unity of these two dimensions" (34). In this way, Mary becomes the model for true devotion and prayer. She also, "who cherished the living Word in the recollected quiet of her heart and thus was privileged to become the Mother of the incarnate Word, is the abiding pattern for all genuine worship, the Star which illuminates even a dark heaven and shows us the way" (35). Above all, the Blessed Virgin shows us the importance of humility in worship. We see this clearly in the Gospel of Luke with Mary’s Magnificat. Following St. Ambrose, Ratzinger tells us that "to magnify the Lord" doesn’t mean to add anything to God (which is impossible). On the contrary, it means:

not to want to magnify ourselves, our own name, our own ego; not to spread ourselves and take up more space, but to give him room so that he may be more present in the world. It means to become more truly what we are: not a self-enclosed monad that displays nothing but itself, but God’s image. It means to get free of the dust and soot that obscures and begrimes the transparency of the image and to become truly human by pointing exclusively to him (36).

Mary, thus, is the most truly human, because she points to God perfectly, beyond any other human. By having proper devotion to Mary, we strive to imitate this humility. We also enter into the mysteries of Scripture in fulfilling Our Lady’s prophecy that "all generations" shall call her blessed. We must always remember that "the Church neglects one of the duties enjoined upon her when she does not praise Mary. She deviates from the word of the Bible when her Marian devotion falls silent. When this happens, in fact, the Church no longer even glorifies God as she ought" (37). Yet, "in order to praise Mary correctly and thus glorify God correctly, we must listen to all that Scripture and tradition say concerning the Mother of the Lord and ponder it in our hearts" (38).

Ratzinger’s fifth reason is that Mary is the image of the Church. "The Church learns concretely what she is and is meant to be by looking at Mary" (39). Like the Blessed Virgin, the Church is meant to be the dwelling place of God. "He is a person, and the Church is a person. The more that each one of us becomes a person, person in the sense of a fit habitation for God, daughter Zion, the more we become one, the more we are the Church, and the more the Church is herself (40). Mary reminds the Church that she is a Mother whose purpose is to lead her children to the heavenly glory of the Father. The Church cannot be used as, Ratzinger reminds us,

a program of social-political action … and cannot degenerate into the complexity of a party, an organization or a pressure group in the service of human interests, even the noblest. If Mary no longer finds a place in many theologies and ecclesiologies, the reason is obvious: they have reduced the faith to an abstraction. And an abstraction does not need a Mother (41).

The sixth and final reason Ratzinger gives for not forgetting Mary is of immense importance for the world today. The reason is that Mary is the exemplar of true femininity. She contains within herself pure virginal chastity and at the same time possesses motherhood in its fullest reality. The Blessed Virgin Mother is the counterweight to today’s culture which promotes immorality and licentiousness, and encourages women to kill their own children. She provides the true meaning of "woman" which our culture has cast aside leading to the masculinization of women and the ambiguity of gender.

Through her virginity and her motherhood, the mystery of woman receives a very lofty destiny from which she cannot be torn away. Mary undauntedly proclaims the Magnificat, but she is also the one who renders silence and seclusion fruitful. She is the one who does not fear to stand under the Cross, who is present at the birth of the Church. But she is also the one who, as the evangelist emphasizes more than once, "keeps and ponders in her heart" that which transpires around her. As a creature of courage and of obedience she was and is still an example to which every Christian—man and woman—can and should look (42)...