To: bprlist@egroups.com
Subject: [bprlist] Mary: Mother ... and savior?
From: owner-bpr@philologos.org
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 09:05:21 -0000

Mary: Mother ... and savior?
Jan Jarboe Russell / New York Times News Service

http://webserv5.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-
bin/article?thisSlug=MARY06&date=06-Jan-2001

"The world of today is in desperate need of a mother," whispered
Prof. Mark Miravalle as he sat behind his desk at Franciscan
University in Steubenville, Ohio, carefully fingering a string of
rosary beads.

Half a world away, inside the Vatican, yet another enormous box
arrived filled with petitions asking Pope John Paul II to exercise
his absolute power to proclaim a new and highly debated dogma: that
the Virgin Mary is a co-redeemer with Jesus and cooperates fully with
her son in the redemption of mankind.

Miravalle, 41, began the petition drive four years ago from his
obscure position as a professor of Mariology -- the study of Mary --
at one of the most conservative Catholic universities in the nation.
Since then the pope has received more than 6 million signatures from
148 countries asking him to give the Virgin Mary the ultimate
promotion.

In addition to ordinary Catholics, Miravalle has received support
from 550 bishops and 42 cardinals, as well as from Cardinal John
O'Connor and Mother Teresa. Along the way, his movement has laid bare
a deep-seated conflict between wildly popular devotion to the Virgin
Mary and the efforts of the established church to keep that devotion
in check.

If Miravalle's campaign succeeds and John Paul proclaims the Virgin
Mary as a co-redeemer, she would be a vastly more powerful figure,
something close to a fourth member of the Holy Trinity and the
primary female face through which Christians experience the divine.
Specifically, Roman Catholics would be required to accept three new
spiritual truths: that Mary is co-redemptrix and participates in
people's redemption, that Mary is mediatrix and has the power to
grant all graces and that Mary is "the advocate for the people of
God," in Miravalle's words, and has the authority to influence God's
judgments.

For the millions of Virgin Mary devotees who have signed Miravalle's
petitions, these are an accepted part of their daily spiritual lives.
They represent what theologians call popular piety, practices that
are widely accepted by ordinary religious people over the learned
objections of the establishment. Indeed the idea has been present in
Catholicism at least as far back as the 14th century. There is also
historic precedent for petition campaigns like Miravalle's. Two other
Marian dogmas -- the dogma of the Assumption in 1950, which declared
that Mary was taken up, body and soul, to heaven after her death, and
the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of 1854, which established
that Mary was preserved from original sin -- were both preceded by
floods of petitions. Yet within the Vatican, the dogma that Miravalle
advocates has touched off a private holy war.

Although it has the support of at least 12 cardinals in Rome, others
fear that its acceptance would cause a major schism among Catholics
and set back all efforts at ecumenism. Because the dogma would be an
infallible proclamation by the pope, it would trigger a renewed
debate over the role of the pope's power in modern society.

"It seems to put her on an equal footing with Christ," said the Rev.
John Roten, director of the International Marian Library in Dayton,
articulating the primary reason for opposition. "That just won't do."
The Rev. Rene Laurentin, a French monk and a leading Mary scholar,
agrees. In a fax, Laurentin said that the proposed dogma would be the
equivalent of launching "bombs" at the Protestants and would deepen
the breach between the Vatican and the Eastern Orthodox church. "Mary
is the model of our faith, but she is not divine," he said. "There is
no mediation or co-redemption except in Christ. He alone is God."

'Totus tuus'

Pope John Paul has made no secret of his devotion to Mary. He has the
phrase "totus tuus" (which in Latin means "totally hers") as his
papal motto and credits the Virgin Mary with saving his life during a
1981 assassination attempt and for the fall of communism. He has used
the phrase "co-redemptrix" six times in his papacy to describe Mary,
which has led Miravalle and his petitioners to hope that during his
lifetime the pope will proclaim her co-redeemer.

Miravalle has visited privately with the pope several times, but he
would not say what happened during his meetings. "All I can tell
you," Miravalle said fervently, "is that I am personally confident
that the holy father will make this solemn definition of the mother
of Jesus at the most appropriate time. It's not a question of if.
It's only a question of when."

Responding by e-mail in Italian, Joquain Navarro-Valls, spokesman for
the Vatican, said "There is no proclamation of a new dogma on the
Madonna under study either by the holy father or by the International
Theological Commission," repeating a statement that the Vatican made
in 1997. Miravalle's argument is that the Virgin Mary literally gave
Jesus the body that he in turn gave for humankind, that she was
present at the important moments in his ministry and that she
suffered with him during his death on the cross. "As a mother, she
shared in the birth, suffering and death of her son," he said. "That
makes her suffering not only valuable but redemptive."

But does that make her equal to Jesus Christ? Miravalle insists that
the answer is no. He claims the use of the Latin prefix "co" in co-
redeemer means "with," not "equal to." "We do not want to place Mary
on a level of equality with her son," he said.

"He alone paid the price of our sins, but what we are saying is that
Mary offered something that no one else could offer -- the bone of
her bone, the flesh of her flesh -- and that cooperation was so great
it amounted to a collaboration of our redemption."

In 1997, 23 of the world's leading Mary scholars, Catholic and
Protestant, met in Poland and voted unanimously against the proposed
dogma. The concern that the dogma would be construed as making Mary
equal to Jesus was an underlying reason for the opposition. "The
titles are ambiguous and could be understood in very different ways,"
said the panel of experts in a brief report that added that the idea
would worsen "ecumenical difficulties."

Leaders of other denominations oppose it for other reasons as well.
It gives the Virgin Mary a lot more power than most religious
authorities are willing to give, and it is a reminder that to
Catholics the pope is all-powerful.

Heretical view

The Rev. Paige Patterson, president of the conservative Southern
Baptist Convention, the largest denomination of Protestants in the
United States, is horrified at the mere suggestion that Mary might be
a co-redeemer. "Such a view is clearly heretical," he said. "In order
to be a redeemer, it would require a person to be perfect. It would
require a person to be God. We certainly don't believe she was God."

Some liberal Protestants have long argued that the Catholic Church
has used the symbol of the Virgin Mary to restrict women's
possibilities by keeping women obedient to the teachings of the
church. Retired Bishop John Spong, one of the most controversial
figures in the Episcopal Church, says that Christians need a feminine
symbol for God, but said such a symbol needed to be created by women,
not "a bunch of men sitting around in Rome in their frocks."

Miravalle said he was unfazed by the objections from both ends of the
spectrum. In some ways, the idea of the mother as hero and savior has
been the defining theme of his life. He was born in San Francisco in
1959 to parents who were lifelong Catholics, but who later divorced
because his father was a gambler and alcoholic. His mother, Nora,
worked as a secretary to support him and his two siblings. The year
that his father left, his elder sister died of leukemia.

"There was never enough money, and yet mother just affirmed us so
much," Miravalle said. "If we needed shoes, she always found a way to
cough up the money."

He was a pietistic boy. When his sister died, he reasoned that she
was "taken by God" and that it was somehow for the best. He attended
Catholic schools, made good grades and took pleasure in studying the
lives of the saints.

He remembers times when his mother's migraine headaches were so
debilitating that she would have to pull off the side of freeways so
that she could vomit and then sleep for a while until she felt well
enough to drive. Despite her infirmity, he said: "I always felt very
protected by my mother's love. She was my first hero."

He, in turn, became a man worthy of his mother's sacrifices. In high
school, he was one of the few boys in his class who always went to
weekly mass. He went to a Jesuit-run college and majored in theology.
He agonized over whether he was meant for life as a priest.

One day in 1980 he went to church to pray for guidance about a
career. As he was leaving, he literally ran into a pretty, dark-
haired woman named Beth, who was on her way into church. They stopped
to talk, and before they parted, Miraville asked her for a date. "I
took that as a clear, extraordinary sign that I was not meant to be a
priest," he said.

The two married in 1981, and Miravalle continued his theological
studies in Rome. In 1984, shortly after the birth of their first son,
they went on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, a small mountain village in
Bosnia, which has been revered by Catholics since 1981 as the site
where the Virgin Mary appears each evening at 6:40 to a small group
of visionaries. To date, an estimated 25 million people, Catholic and
non-Catholic alike, have visited the village.

Messages from Mary

Miravalle's visit was the beginning of his emergence as a leader in
the popular Marian movement. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on
the messages that the Virgin Mary gave the Bosnian children who first
saw her. She reportedly told the children that she opposes abortion,
birth control, female priests and communism. To Miravalle, the three
cornerstones of her messages are prayer, penance and fasting.

Since 1984 Miravalle has published five books on Mary. At the back of
each, he placed postcards that readers could cut out and send along
to the pope, supporting the proposed dogma. Now the postcards and
petitions average about 10,000 a month. He also puts out an
international monthly news bulletin, sponsors conferences on the
subject and regularly appears on Mother Angelica's television
program, which reaches more than 55 million homes.

Whether or not his campaign is successful and the pope decides to
declare Mary a co-redemptrix, the popular devotion to Mary as a
healer, comforter and female symbol for the divine will undoubtedly
continue. The world, it seems, will always need its mother.

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========
To: bprlist@egroups.com
Subject: Re: [bprlist] Mary: Mother ... and savior?
From: john sapieha
Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:01:30 -0200

A great report!

Can anyone provide the url(s) for the John Roten and Rene Laurentin items
below?

Many thanks in advance!

John Sapieha
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

owner-bpr@philologos.org wrote:

> Mary: Mother ... and savior?
> Jan Jarboe Russell / New York Times News Service
>
> http://webserv5.startribune.com/stOnLine/cgi-
> bin/article?thisSlug=MARY06&date=06-Jan-2001

>
> "It seems to put her on an equal footing with Christ," said the Rev.
> John Roten, director of the International Marian Library in Dayton,
> articulating the primary reason for opposition. "That just won't do."
> The Rev. Rene Laurentin, a French monk and a leading Mary scholar,
> agrees. In a fax, Laurentin said that the proposed dogma would be the
> equivalent of launching "bombs" at the Protestants and would deepen
> the breach between the Vatican and the Eastern Orthodox church. "Mary
> is the model of our faith, but she is not divine," he said. "There is
> no mediation or co-redemption except in Christ. He alone is God."

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========
To: bprlist@egroups.com
Subject: [bprlist] 'Demon' woman dies during exorcism
From: owner-bpr@philologos.org
Date: Mon, 08 Jan 2001 09:08:44 -0000

'Demon' woman dies during exorcism
08jan01

http://theadvertiser.com.au/common/story_page/0,4511,1587809%
255E912,00.html

WELLINGTON: A woman with a skin pigment problem likened to that of=20
pop star Michael Jackson has died after an exorcism.=20

The pastor of the Auckland religious group involved in the exorcism=20
says her death is a "miracle" and "God's will".
The decomposing body of the Korean woman, 37, was found by police in=20
an Auckland home on December 15 and detectives are investigating the=20
death and whether any charges =96 such as manslaughter =96 should
be laid.=20

The group's leader and pastor, Luke Lee, said a type of exorcism,=20
which the group calls "deliverance", was carried out on the woman,=20
whom police believe may have been a tourist, by members because she=20
"had demons inside".=20

It is understood hands were placed on the woman's body, including her=20
chest and neck.=20

Mr Lee said members of the group, a small Korean Christian sect=20
called Lord Of All, did not use great force.=20

Members said they believed she would return to life.=20

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