A talk given at the Society of Mary and ESBVM Study Day on April 28th 2001 at St Silas, Kentish Town.

AM VERY grateful for this opportunity-an opportunity I have never had before-to develop some thoughts about Mary into an extended talk. As one who has lived on the edge of Oxford-first figuratively as a member of staff at St Stephen's House recruited in from parish work and now more literally (my episcopal residence is a few miles outside Oxford)-I am very honoured by the opportunity to appear on the same platform as a pair of very distinguished Oxford scholars, Bishop Kallistos Ware and Fr Ted Yarnold SJ. I should also say that I have belonged for years and years to the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary and no doubt would benefit from belonging to the other two societies sponsoring today.

To set my stall out, I want to talk this afternoon:

§ first about having a proper Christian regard for Mary
§ then about the conflicting or complementary ideas of Mary as Mother of the Church and symbol of the Church,
§ finally about an approach to praying to and with Mary.

I shall not pretend that Mariology is an academic specialism of mine and I shall be talking, therefore, devotionally and from my own experience. In speaking of the development of my own ideas, I shall be slightly more dependent on material from the 1960s and 1970s than might be expected: this was the time when some of my thinking in this area covered most ground. I shall also be speaking from a very Western view-point. I am less familiar than I should be with the great Eastern tradition and will not be so discourteous to Bishop Kallistos as to attempt to represent that tradition. I would just say, however, that the Orthodox are so much better at integrating Mary and Christian Prayer than are we in the West. For instance, I was looking the other day at part of the Easter Canon as translated by Hugh Wybrew in his new collection of Orthodox prayers Risen with Christ. (p. 33). Suddenly, in the midst of it all, we have a burst of prayer to Mary:

Pure Mother of God,
who gave birth,
in way beyond telling,
to the Father's eternal Word,
open my mouth, holy Lady,
and lead me to praise you,
that I may exalt you,
crying out to you, the fountain:
Hail, fount of delight ever-welling…

…and so on.

It is probably worth us reminding ourselves that reflections on Mary are not an inevitable part of being Anglican. Harry Williams, in an essay mentioned later, quotes Newman as saying in Apologia pro vita sua: 'Devotional manifestations in honour of Our Lady…are suitable for Italy, but they are not suitable for England'. I am not sure, mind you, that St Silas', Kentish Town, is a typical English parish church or that anything could be described as 'not suitable for England' in these days of dizzy diversity. Harry Williams himself described 'the average Anglican attitude' as 'treating [Mary] as a poor relation it is tactful not to mention.' (Soundings p. 98f) Since not every Church of England bishop would want to talk extensively about Mary on an occasion like this it is not inappropriate to approach the subject of Mary and Christian Prayer by looking first at what might be 'a proper Christian regard for Mary'.

1. A Proper Christian Regard for Mary
In my more combative days, when evangelical Christians asked me if I had a living relationship with Jesus, I sometimes replied: 'Yes: I also have a living relationship with Mary. Do you?' This relationship - the one with Mary - like all relationships, has had its ups and downs. I remember being very upset with some of my school friends who mocked the idea that Mary had no other children than Jesus.

All that was part of growing up and part of learning that others, in all sorts of ways, see things differently. One of the most colourful episodes in this living relationship with Mary-developing a proper Christian regard for Mary - was discovering in the nineteen-sixties what Harvey Cox had to say about her. Harvey Cox was writing as a Baptist minister and a professor of Divinity at Harvard. One chapter of The Secular City, called 'Sex and Secularisation', made an enormous impression on me. He wrote of America's cult of 'The Girl', 'the omnipresent icon of consumer society' (The Secular City p. 204).

'Just as the Virgin appears in many guises-as our Lady of Lourdes or of Fatima or of Guadalupe-but is always recognisably the Virgin, so with The Girl' (The Secular City p. 204).

'If men sometimes sought to buy with gold the Virgin's blessings on their questionable causes, so The Girl now dispenses her charismatic favour on watches, refrigerators, and razor blades-for a price' (ibid p. 206)

Professor Cox the Baptist saw that 'The Girl' needed to be rumbled for what she was, an idol. She was the unattainable temptress, displaying her unpurchasable wares in the Playboy magazine. An unmentioned prejudice of Harvey Cox's might have been that the Virgin, no less than 'The Girl', had also functioned in times past as an idol. But the most penetrating part of Cox's analysis-at least to the twenty year old reader that I then was-was that 'The Girl' had taken hold on society because Protestantism, a very masculine form of Christianity, had banished the Virgin and all devotion to her. I was grateful to Harvey Cox-and remain grateful to him-because, thanks to him, I have seen 'The Girl'-ever since-as the 'anti-Madonna'. For instance, when buying a car, I have become more accomplished than would have been otherwise the case at not looking at 'The Girl' on the bonnet of the car but at the car's own horsepower and upholstery. As Cox says,

'[The Girl] reverses most of the values traditionally associated with the Virgin-poverty, humility, sacrifice…The Girl has nothing to do with filling the hungry with "good things", hawking instead an endless proliferation of trivia on TV spot commercials. The Girl exalts the mighty, extols the rich, and brings nothing to the hungry but added despair' (ibid p. 206)

I have quoted Harvey Cox at some length because he makes the case very well-better perhaps than he himself realises - for having what I am calling a proper Christian regard for Mary. At any rate, he was a formative influence on me and, of course, much of his analysis of secularisation remains relevant. In the context of Cox's remarks, a living relationship with Mary is counter-cultural not least because it is anti-consumerist. The one who has a living relationship with Mary will as cheerfully charabanc to Walsingham as others clear off to Clacton or the Cotswolds. The one who has a living relationship with Mary will give up a Saturday to spend some time thinking about her at St Silas', Kentish Town. And, of course, the one who has a living relationship with Mary has this relationship entirely within the framework of Christian Prayer. There is no other relationship with her to be had.

Another essay made its mark on me at much the same time as I was reading Harvey Cox. It was the contribution of Harry Williams to Soundings, written a few years before The Secular City. Like everyone else at that time I was interested in Freud. And, not surprisingly, there were a couple of sentences of Harry Williams which have stayed with me for over thirty years:

'Freud would certainly not have believed in the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. But he did show us that a man fully and perfectly developed would have to have had a perfect mother. For Freud no such man had ever existed. Christians have always believed that Our Lord went through a normal human development, and that in him manhood came to its full and perfect expression.' (Soundings p. 101)

It became clear to me that, the more we know about motherhood and nurture, the greater the importance of Mary. As has been often remarked, she provided the Son of God with at least half of his genetic material. She nursed him and watched over what, humanly speaking, were his formative years. Harry Williams distanced himself from theological speculation about the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception-about which there is continuing theological disagreement between Catholics and Orthodox, largely of quite a technical kind-but embraced the underlying psychological meaning of the doctrine.

That position led me at the time of reading Soundings to speculate whether the Marian doctrines which are not immediately demonstrable from scripture are not, in some sense, a legendary or mythic penumbra. The Marian events-of which we have no historical record - protect the historical core events of Christ's birth, death and rising and, thus, the central mysteries of the Incarnation, the Cross and the Resurrection are safeguarded. The problem with liberal theology-which would disallow the Marian stories and approach the Christ stories themselves as legends - is that, rather like a baked potato in the oven, the longer you keep going with the cooking and the thicker the skin becomes, the less there is edible potato left inside. But if the Virginal Conception of Christ is foreshadowed by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin herself and the promise proclaimed by the Resurrection of Christ is fulfilled by the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven, then the Faith is on a sure doctrinal foundation. Or to put all that another way, a proper Christology is possible only with an adequate Mariology. That was what I learnt, I think, from reflecting on Harry Williams and Soundings. Since then I have tended, more simply, to accept the Marian events and the accompanying theological explanations as the teaching of the Church, teaching to be accepted because it is the teaching given. But back to the late 1970s, for one more episode.

There are those who see Marian piety not as a female enrichment of what would otherwise be a very masculine religion but as a denial of true feminist ideas of God. To quote from a little book of Rosemary Radford Ruether,

'official Mariology validates the twin obsessions of male fantasies toward women, the urge to both reduce the female to the perfect vehicle of male demands, the instrument of male ascent to the heavens, and, at the same time, to repudiate the female as the source of all that pulls him down to bodiliness, sin and death. Mariology exalts the virginal, obedient, spiritual feminine, and fears all real women in the flesh.' (Mary-The Feminine Face of the Church, p. 4).

I remember a stage at which I myself was arguing that Mary is a mother for celibates and womanhood made accessible for gay men. I developed a wholly conventional disregard for Mary and campaigned, equally conventionally, for the recognition of Mary Magdalene and the promotion of her day in the calendar from the rank of memoria to that of feast. And yet, though I fell for Harvey Cox in the late 1960s, I withstood the wiles of feminist Marian theology from the late 1970s onwards. It is hard to dismiss in a word a whole set of feminist theologies and it is unfair to try. But I never really bought the idea of Mary as bulwark of male domination. I have always been far more impressed by the idea of Mary as 'our tainted nature's solitary boast'. As for the equality of the sexes, the First Letter of Peter may refer to woman as the weaker vessel but it also calls husband and wife 'joint heirs of the grace of life' (3:7). Christianity has led the way in honouring women: supremely in the honour given to Mary by Catholic and Orthodox Christians. It is the most naïve piece of anachronism to read past ages through the prism of our own agenda of sexual equality. Instead we should read our own Western preoccupations with equality and human rights as distortions of doctrines and freedoms pioneered by the Church as she has sought to interpret natural law and proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

I would identify two principal weaknesses of the feminist critique of Mariology. First, when it complains that a 'virgin Mother' is a model which is oppressively out of reach for females, it neglects to recognise that Christ the perfect Man presents an even more unattainable standard of behaviour for males. Who could live up to the standard of the Son of God? Second, when feminists claim that male and female characteristics are out of kilter if the male ones are ascribed to God whilst Mary, a mere creature, has the female ones, we have to ask if Christianity is not therefore irreducibly a patriarchal religion. In other words, the feminist critique, pursued to its logical conclusions, means either that feminism and Christianity part company or that the Christian Faith has to be substantially re-drafted. As one of the Provincial Episcopal Visitors in the Church of England, my job is to represent those who, like me, worry that the Christian Faith is being substantially re-drafted. Old sy mbols are being cast aside. New ones are being found. Most disturbing of all, the very Godhead is being re-imagined by those who think that none of the patriarchal language of the biblical record or Christian tradition is intrinsically revealed. God himself, in his very essence, is beyond gender but we cannot easily set on one side his revelation of himself as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was the Son of God. That language has to remain normative, at least as regards sacrament and symbol.

I hope that that quick tour of how my thinking about Mary developed-and I am not pretending it was any more than the conventional musings of the time-has established the importance of having a proper Christian regard for Mary. My own formation has made me convinced that the living relationship we have with Mary in and through Christian Prayer is not a bit of Catholic added value but truly basic and that we must encourage our brothers and sisters from other denominations and traditions to explore this further. This can be quite hard. In my experience, if there has been an issue when, for instance, theological students have shared in an inter-collegiate Eucharist, it has not been candles or incense or even prayer for the dead and the sacrifice of masses, it has been the odd florid phrase fervently addressed to Mary. That, for many of our Christian brothers and sisters, remains idolatry and disobedience to what Catholics and Lutherans call the second half of the first of the Ten Commandm ents and what Orthodox, Calvinists and Anglicans call the second commandment.

2. Mary as Mother of the Church and Symbol of the Church
A living relationship with Mary is inescapably a relationship that takes place within the framework of Christian prayer. Sometimes we seem to be praying to Mary. Sometimes we seem to be praying with Mary. To put that theologically, sometimes Mary is Mother of the Church and Mother of Christians, a mother to whom we pray. Sometimes Mary is the embodiment or symbol of the Church, a mother in whose prayers we join. When we pray with the Church-how can we pray otherwise?-we join with her in praying to God.

We need to explore in our spiritual lives something of that paradox: Mary as Mother of the Church and Mary as symbol of the Church. We need also to explore some of the limits that must not be transgressed in our thinking and our praying. As St Bernard says, 'The royal virgin has no need of false honour' (see Schillebeeckx, E and Halkes, C, Mary Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow p. 19).

The Dutch theologian, Edward Scillebeeckx, (see Schillebeeckx, E and Halkes, C, Mary Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow p. 14), recounts for us some of the Mariological tensions in the Second Vatican Council. One of these tensions was the unsuccessful plan for a dogmatic constitution on Mary separate from Lumen Gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church. Another of these tensions led to a vote on 29 October 1964 declining to use the title 'Mary, Mother of the Church'. The title, 'Mary, Mother of the Church' had been used in mediaeval times but was unknown in the first thousand years of Church history. No doubt the Second Vatican Council was sensitive to the wider ecumenical context and keen to avoid further developments in Marian doctrine-it was less than fifteen years since the pronouncement of the doctrine of the Assumption. Pope Paul VI, on his own authority, decided to declare Mary 'Mother of the Church' and, in so doing not only satisfied the conservative minority but also, it coul d be argued, demonstrated the balance between papal and conciliar authority, complementing the conciliar emphasis of the Second Vatican Council with the monarchical emphasis of the First.

When, devotionally, we encounter Mary as our Mother-for instance in the Salve Regina-'Hail Holy Queen, Mother of mercy, to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve…'-we are praying directly to her. Some would say that such praying would be more appropriately addressed to God. They would say this, either because of Jesus' teaching about the intimate relationship with God our Father, an intimacy which makes it pointless to use any creaturely intermediary, or because our approach to holy Motherhood should be an approach to the Holy Spirit who gives birth to the New Age within a re-imaged Trinity.

I think the charge about God as the Father whom one can approach intimately carries more substance and I shall return to it later. As for the Motherhood of God, I should hate to do battle with the Lady Julian who writes most movingly of 'Jesus our Mother'. I should hate too to do battle with faithful souls who find female imagery a helpful way of re-imagining and approaching God. But to re-state an earlier point, we need to realise, as the new inclusiveness gains greater and greater sway, that there are dangers in up-setting the delicate balances in scripture and tradition. There are balances between the Lord and Israel, the Lord and the faithful Daughter of Zion, the Bridegroom and the Bride, Christ and the Church, Jesus and Mary. There is the filial relationship between the Mother and the Beloved Disciple solemnised at the cross and drawing us in. And what use is this image if she is not my mother too as I try to be a beloved disciple? And how else is this relationship pursued and s ustained other than within the life of Christian Prayer? As Pope John Paul II has said, 'Devotion to Our Lady therefore is not opposed to devotion to her Son. Rather it can be said that by asking the beloved disciple to treat Mary as his mother Jesus founded Marian devotion' (quoted in Arthur Burton Calkins' essay "Mary's Spiritual Maternity" in ed. McLoughlin and Pinnock, Mary is for Everyone, p. 79).

If this Mother of mine stands at the Marriage Feast and points to her Son, telling me, 'Do whatever he tells you', am I not then in relationship with her? My own observation of others suggests to me that Marian mothering is simply crowded out when Mother God imagery really takes hold and, as I have already said, this is too important an area for us to be spiritually negligent.

Mary as symbol of the Church-our corporate female response to the Lord and Bridegroom-is vulnerable to attack by Feminism but the image survives other perils well. It is not an un-English notion - there remain legions of parish churches which have been under the patronage of Our Lady St Mary since mediaeval times. No charge of idolatry is relevant.

Responding with Mary to the Lord is not incompatible with approaching a God who is closer than breath itself and who wishes to be known intimately as 'our Father'. No wonder the Vatican fathers were so attracted to restating the ancient truth that Mary is symbol of the Church, the personification of the corporate response of the People of God to their Lord.

There is scope for much further reflection-but there is no time to do it here. Instead we shall move on to the final part of this talk and suggest an approach to praying to and with Mary.

3. An Approach to Praying to and with Mary
Speaking from the Anglican tradition-though in some ways not very representative of that tradition - one would have to say that Anglicans are a bit diffident about Mary. For instance, there has been no prayer addressed to Mary within the whole of the official liturgical literature of the Church of England since Reformation times. There is the whole tradition of Tractarian reserve-with clergy ringing the Angelus bell but reciting the words silently so as neither to alarm the faithful nor break the canonical promise to use only what was contained in the Book of Common Prayer. Those of us with more ultramontane inclinations have regarded Anglican diffidence and Tractarian reserve with some suspicion. How do the faithful learn if the mysteries of doctrine-whether Marian or, for that matter, eucharistic-are treated as the arcane business of the clergy? Largely through the colourful antics of Anglo-papalists, certain Marian devotions - the Ave Maria, the Rosary, the Final Antiphons and so o n-have become very common amongst Church of England people, and Anglicans world wide, but none of this is official. (The inclusion of the Salve Regina in Celebrating Common Prayer was sufficient indication that this was an unofficial publication).

In an essay on Marian music in a volume of essays edited by Martin Warner, Say Yes to Mary, (p. 171) Colin Baldy points to a revival of such music in the Church of England. It has to be said, though this is undoubtedly as true of Marian music as it is of mass music to Latin texts, the repertoire is not originally Anglican-not even using the word 'Anglican' in a wider sense to include, say, the wonderful flowering of Marian antiphons we find in the pre-Reformation Eton Choirbook, of which more in a moment. And yet the rediscovery of so many of the riches of the Marian musical repertoire in recent years has undoubtedly enhanced devotion to her. When I was a musician I twice conducted performances of the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Nottingham area and came back to Oxford for a tutorial on authentic performance practice with the late Professor Denis Arnold. The beauty of Monteverdi's setting of the Ave Maris stella and the pathos of the petitions in the Sonat a Sopra Sancta Maria would move the stoniest heart to filial piety. Few cathedral or church choirs would attempt the 1610 Vespers but there are many who will sing the eight-part Ave Maria of Victoria, the Spanish Renaissance priest-musician, or Bruckner's setting of the same text , or Gorecki's ravishing setting of Totus tuus. Here is a romanticism that is born of prayer and the object of whose praying, inescapably, is the Mother of God herself. This highly emotional praying to Mary is, so to say, a 'right hemispherical' praying, an intense engagement with the wonder of the Incarnation.

A more 'left hemispherical' approach would be that of the Protestant protesters at the Anglican National Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Walsingham. This annual protest is a vivid reminder that for some Church of England people (though nowadays not so many as formerly), Marian devotion and praying to Mary are signs of popery. They are seen as a wandering away from the doctrines that Christ alone is our advocate, mediator and redeemer. These Walsingham protesters have never been enthralled by Monteverdi or Victoria, Bruckner or Gorecki. They are concerned only that others are not enthralled by the Queen of Heaven.

Talking of Walsingham, here is a prayer of Erasmus as printed in The Walsingham Pilgrims' Manual:

'What shall I call thee, O Full of Grace? Heaven, for of thee arose the Sun of Righteousness; Paradise, for thou hast budded forth the Flower of Immortality; Virgin, for thou didst hold in thy embrace the Son who is God of all: Pray thou to him that he will save our souls.

Mother of God, we fly to you, our shade and shelter on our pilgrim's way. Look kindly on our prayers, and turn not from us in our time of need. But free us from the dangers that beset us, radiant and holy Virgin.

O alone of all women, Mother and Virgin, Mother most happy, Virgin most pure, now we, impure as we are, come to see thee who art all-pure; we salute thee; we worship thee as how we may with our humble offerings. May thy Son grant us, that imitating thy most holy manners, we also, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, may deserve spiritually to conceive the Lord Jesus in our inmost soul, and once conceived, never to lose him. Amen.'

It would be very bad form-and entirely incorrect - to try to claim that Erasmus of Rotterdam was an Anglican, though people would know what one meant were one to say that Erasmus was a kind of Anglican. But Erasmus' Prayer to Our Lady of Walsingham in 1511 has a typically Anglican moderation. 'What shall I call thee, O Full of Grace?' is very Anglican in its diffidence. The conclusion of the prayer too is a bit Anglican: by now the energy of the prayer is entirely directed to Mary's Son and the prayer is that 'we also, by the grace of the Holy Ghost, may deserve spiritually to conceive the Lord Jesus in our inmost soul'.

I notice that the 'Ecumenical Office' published by the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary (published in Macquarrie, John, Mary for All Christians, p. 139) includes an address to Mary in a hymn by J R Peacey and addresses Mary with scriptural quotations in the antiphons to 'Bless the Lord' and Magnificat. Half a dozen of the devotional texts for optional use at the end of the Office are addressed to Mary but the Office as a whole could be used by those who would be uneasy about addressing Mary except within the poetic conventions of a hymn or a scripturally-derived antiphon. So far, I think, we are praying with Mary, and seeing her as a symbol of the Church that prays.

How much further can we go? John Macquarrie, in his little book Mary for All Christians, the fruit of several talks to the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary, quotes Louis de Montfort (p. 133), of whom Macquarrie says 'There have been few devotees of Mary so enthusiastic. These are de Montfort's words:

'I avow, with all the Church, that Mary, being a mere creature that has come from the hands of the most High, is in comparison with his infinite majesty less than an atom; or rather, she is nothing at all, because only he is He Who Is…Jesus Christ, our Saviour, true God and true Man, ought to be the last end of our devotions, else they are false and delusive. If then we establish solid devotion to our blessed Lady, it is only more perfectly to establish devotion to Christ…When we praise her, love her, honour her or give anything to her, it is God who is praised, God who is loved, God who is glorified and it is to God that we give, through Mary and in Mary'.

The emphasis on God being glorified whenever Mary is praised is a typical explanation of much Marian iconography. The Mother always points to her Son. Unsurprisingly, there will be those who find prayer to the Mother much more possible if the Child is on her knee than if she stands alone. As Sarah Boss says,

'It is evidently the case that Mary's physical motherhood does not provide a visual focus for meditation or devotion in the iconography of either Lourdes or Guadaloupe…[T]he mediaeval representation of the Virgin as physical mother and bearer of God have been gradually supplanted in Catholic devotion by images of a prayerful young woman whose body had no ostensible association with maternal functions' (Boss, Sarah Jane, Empress and Handmaid, p. 40).

Is Boss's 'prayerful young woman' a goddess in the making, an idol in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, one to whom it would be dangerous to pray? The question is hard to answer for none of can see into other people's hearts. For me-and for each of, I guess - there is' I suppose, a 'so far and no further'. Sometimes I realise that I am at the edge of what I can manage, emotionally. Some of the stories of Marian appearances take me to that edge. And yet I never find myself over-faced by the older iconography and devotional material.

Who could not pray, with the Gaude flore Virginali, especially as it is sung to the music of Hugh Kellyk in the Eton Choirbook*:

'Rejoice that you are so united in the bond of will
and the embrace of love with the Most High
that you obtain the promise of whatever virgin prayer you make of your sweetest Jesus'

or, indeed, with John Browne's setting of O Maria Salvatoris Mater from the same source?*:

'We have a mother ready at those times to help us:
Lo! How graciously Mary ever stands by us.
Let us make our prayer also to Frideswide,
to Magdalene, to Catherine learned in philosophy…'

But the question still has to be faced whether recourse in prayer may be had to Mary with that kind of direct intimacy and spontaneity of which Jesus speaks in the Gospels when he teaches us how to pray to the Father in our own closet. The answer that Catholic and Orthodox-and, indeed, Anglo-Catholics - have always given is 'yes' and the explanation has always been that all such prayers are within the Communion of Saints. That is to say, such prayers are within the theological framework in which, as O Maria Salvatoris Mater exemplifies, we can invoke the help of the saints-Frideswide, Magdalene, Catherine, whomsoever. In itself a properly nuanced doctrine of the Communion of Saints is no more a defence against a popular polytheism than a properly nuanced doctrine of Justification by Faith is a defence against suffocatingly conventional social behaviour. There is always a need for popular practice to be challenged and refined by doctrine and that is as true of Protestant and Evangelica l piety as it is of Catholic and Orthodox.

Speaking personally once more, I find myself very seldom stringing words of my own together when I am speaking to Mary. The one exception is when I am looking for a parking space. Perhaps this restraint is the remains of an earlier view of mine, that Marian doctrine and devotion surrounds and protects the core of Christian doctrine and worship. My prayer to Mary is largely conducted through the antiphons, hymns, motets, prayers and responsories that with which the Church has provided us.

My final stop in this somewhat self-indulgent excursion is to look at the topic of 'Mary and Christian Prayer' in The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Quoting Lumen Gentium, Vatican II's dogmatic constitution on the Church, the Catechism says that

'From the most ancient times the Blessed Virgin has been honoured with the title of "Mother of God", to whose protection the faithful fly in all their dangers and needs…This very special devotion…differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration.' (CCC 971)

More succinctly, in the recently published The Faith of the Catholic Church-a Summary, edited by David Konstant, Question 414 reads:

'Does the Blessed Virgin Mary enter into our life of prayer?'

The answer is so good that I think I should finish with it:

'Because of Mary's unique co-operation with the action of the Holy Spirit, the Church loves to pray in communion with her, to praise with her the great things the Lord has done for her and to entrust our requests and praises to her.'

+Andrew Burnham

The Bishop of Ebbsfleet
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