No talk of Catholic prayer can advance very far without coming upon the topic of the Virgin Mary. And there is no topic, not the papacy, nor the Mass itself, that arouses greater consternation, not to say scandal, among non-Catholics. Where, pray (goes the question), did the Catholic Church get all of this about the Virgin? Surely, continues the inquiry, what we witness in our trips to traditionally Catholic countries can only be called Mariolatry? La Virgen! Vive la Vièrge! Die Jungfrau! Salve, Regina! And what is this we hear linked to her cult: Mediatrix? Coredemptrix? Need we go any farther? The truth is out: Rome has, clearly, no less an agenda than to replace the unique mediatorship of Jesus Christ, the one Redeemer of man, with that of the woman.

Five hundred years of tempest cannot be lulled with a few paragraphs. But our task here is to reflect on what it is to be Catholic, to reflect as Catholics first of all on what we do hold and, in the course of doing this, perhaps to clarify things enough so that our interlocutors find themselves addressing what the Church actually teaches.

To be Catholic, then, is to hold the figure of the Virgin Mary in immensely high esteem. This esteem is so high, in fact, that there is a word applied to it in order to distinguish it from the worship that is due to the Godhead alone. Divine worship is referred to in the word latria, from the Greek. Such veneration may be given to no creature, not the burning seraphim themselves, much less to one of us mortals. It is reserved for God alone. At the other end of things we find dulia, which refers to the honor we mortals justly pay to those among us who should be honored: monarchs; heads of state; our elders; our parents; our teachers; heroes; and so forth. Such honor, it may be remarked here, can take on lavish proportions and yet stay clear of idolatry. We need only recall the golden state coach, Windsor grays, arches, plumes, guards, trumpets, ermine, gems, and gold that are brought out to honor the monarch of England; or the ticker-tape parades through Wall Street for astronauts and other heroes; or the rites and observances brought into play in connection with the memory of, say, Martin Luther King or John F. Kennedy. Mere dulia, then, often rises to sumptuous heights: but we do not call it idolatry, even though foolish people may indeed “idolize” such venerable figures. But the display itself is just and fitting, we claim.

Between latria, the worship of God, and dulia, the honor we pay to honorable men, we find a category, hyperdulia, applied to the honor that belongs, says the Catholic Church, to the one among us mortals whose glory is unique. Hail! said an angel from heaven. Highly exalted! Blessed! said Elizabeth. All generations shall call me blessed! says this one herself. She is, says the Orthodox Church, “beyond compare more glorious than the seraphim”.

How so? She is only a lowly maiden. These ancient churches have made too much of her. Scripture itself leaves her in humble obscurity.

Not altogether, says the Church. There is a great vision in the Apocalypse of a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and with a crown of stars on her head. Like all of St. John’s apocalyptic visions, this one has manifold significance, and the Church sees here both the Bride of Christ, in the sense of the Church herself, and also the figure of the woman whose particular role in the drama of redemption is extolled there. Is it Eve? Is it Sarah? Miriam? Deborah? Anna?

Who? There is so patently only one candidate here that the point needs no laboring. For of course all those women bore witness to the Word, as did Abel and Noah and Abraham and Moses and all the kings, patriarchs, prophets, and apostles. They all bore witness to the Word. This woman bore the Word.

No other creature in heaven or earth has ever been drawn into the mystery of God himself as has this woman. No seraph has ever borne offspring to the Holy Ghost. No archangel has ever suckled the Second Person of the Trinity. No heavenly grandee has reared the Messiah. This participation in, and cooperation with, the most secret reaches of the mystery of redemption is reserved for one among all creatures in heaven and earth.

The eye of faith sees in the young woman of Nazareth that figure. Christian faith grows ardent when it begins to contemplate the role given to this woman by the Most High. There are theologies, and forms of Christian piety, that demur here. This woman, they urge, was the merest vehicle, expendable forthwith, by which necessary details of the Incarnation were to be accommodated. Let us speak no more of her. Her modest role was finished, really, as of that night in the stable—or, if we wish to stretch things a bit farther, let us allow that she, with her husband, looked after the growing boy until he was twelve, at which point he seems in any case to have declared his independence of all that Nazareth could bring to the matter. We wish to remain faithful to Scripture alone, say such theologies. The woman has very, very few lines in the script. She is seldom on stage: only brief glimpses; and in every case, she is clearly in a subordinate role.

It may, paradoxically, be in this very subordination that Catholic vision sees the particular glory that attaches to Mary in the mystery of human redemption. It is worth pondering the matter, since great confusion over the role, and hence the dignity, of this woman arises frequently when the matter has not been given sufficient attention.

What word better catches the true relation between the Most High and the whole of his creation than the word subordination? Ordered under; arranged, destined, appointed under. Therein lies the dignity of the creature. The mightiest powers in creation, the seraphim, hide their faces and cover their feet as they incessabili voce proclamant Holy! before the Most High. For us mortals, the word subordinate often seems stained with the tincture of slavery, obsequiousness, and sycophancy. We hear only with great difficulty how it rings in the heavens with joy and honor. Subordination down here in this vale of tears is freighted with the sad freight of the curse: toil; burdens; bondage. But heaven unfurls the reality of which our worldly notion is a poor travesty. It knows that there is no dignity so inestimable as the dignity of the creature—angel, man, or woman—who can bow and offer his particular dignity at the footstool of the Living One from whom all dignity flows.

One creature demurred on the point and fell like lightning from heaven. Lucifer, the Light-bearer himself, despised this august subordination and ruined the universe. We, in thrall here on earth, in the realm of this Prince of Darkness, find ourselves also inclined to demur. Non serviam: I will not serve.

I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. So say we in our folly.

But this woman—the Second Eve, according to the early Church—what will she say? Fiat mihi. Be it done unto me according to thy word. And in that utterance we glimpse the true dignity of the creature in comparison with which the strutting and preening of popinjays and egoists of all sorts (I, alas, among them) clatter dismally. In her Fiat we may find the particular and authentic dignity that attaches to the creature. The creature, and in this case the woman, is exalted by the Divine Munificence insofar as she receives the divine approach with these words. All other honor is a fraud. All other dignity is specious. The strutting and preening find their origin in hell, and like hell they are a travesty of what is true.

In the Incarnate Word himself we find the principle of subordination also at work. How can this be? He is God and no creature. There is nothing in heaven or earth before which he must bow.

Nevertheless, “he made himself of no reputation . . . and became obedient unto death” and cried out, “Not my will but thine be done.” Therefore “God has highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things on earth, and things under the earth.”

In the very Holy Trinity itself, then, we may contemplate, over against all common sense, and against all of our poor vanity, this mystery of subordination. The Son, while equal with the Father, is nevertheless, in a mystery that eludes us, “subordinate” to the Father. It is at that fountainhead that the Church draws her awareness of the great paradox of honor-from-subordination. In the obedience the Son of God exhibited in his life among us here on earth, faith sees a mystery that reaches much deeper than to the merely sociological details of his having been born to an obscure and indigent peasant couple in a Judaea subservient to Caesar. What we see is a true glimpse into the life of the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: it is not a precarious triumvirate, like Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey, eyeing each other nervously lest any one of the three begin to inch ahead of the other two. Rather, we find ourselves at the eternal Source from which the great river of Love rushes, where primacy and subordination, and the bond uniting the two, dwell in living bliss. It has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the drab and gritty accounts kept by politics and logic.

All of this appears to have taken us far afield from the topic of the Virgin Mary. But the Church would refer us to this source in the trinitarian mystery itself, from which Love proceeds, in answer to our scandalized inquiry as to how this lowly young woman can possibly have found a place of such glittering honor. That is how it is, the Church would urge. That is the law of the City of God. God has highly exalted his Son “because” (see Phil 1:16) of his Son’s humility and obedience. And all of those “in Christ”, the Virgin Mary most expressly, are to have a share in that exaltation. What else does the Divine Love do with our mortal obedience but to stretch out its hand and say Arise!

But you are reading too much into the biblical account, a non-Catholic might volunteer at this point. You seem to be deriving an entire Mariology from silence.

The protest brings us yet one step nearer the center of the Marian mystery. Silence. She has been called “a woman wrapped in silence”. Not a syllable is heard from her lips after the wedding at Cana. We glimpse her in two or three tableaux. But Scripture only nods briefly in her direction, it seems. Certainly there would seem to be little trace of an inchoate Mariology in its pages.

It would seem so—unless. Unless this silence is itself the veil shrouding a mystery worth guarding from profane eyes.

To be Catholic is to be acquainted already with the realm of faith, in which events of great consequence may find themselves wrapped in obscurity. To foresee a great nation when all we have is the dried loins of an old man would be one such instance: but Abraham’s faith and ours relies on the promise, against all plausibility. Or again, that the Infant in this obscure straw here is to be believed to be God defies all credibility: but faith kneels with the shepherds. And yet again, to count on the raggle-taggle in this Upper Room as the cadre that will override the Caesars soon enough would seem madness; but once more, faith is at home with such a reckoning.

It is thus, for Catholics, with this woman. The written account of her is scant, but the vision that, over the centuries, has come to behold such plenitude adumbrated in the scant outlines in the Gospel finds an early spokesman in Ignatius, bishop in Antioch and himself a disciple of John the Apostle. On the very point before us, here is his comment: “Mary’s virginity and giving birth, and even the Lord’s death escaped the notice of the prince of this world: these three mysteries worthy of proclamation were accomplished in God’s silence” (CCC 498).

This is an avenue not frequently explored in non-Catholic theologies. But to be Catholic is to suppose that the silence that guards so much of what God does in the mystery of redemption is not a less teeming silence than the silence that seems to prevail among the stars. Who has ears to hear?

The Church reflects slowly on the Gospel mysteries. First she had the apostles’ preaching and teaching, then the apostolic letters, then the Gospels themselves. But even when the written record had been completed, her grasp had scarcely encompassed it all. It took several centuries, for example, for her to spell out explicitly the mystery of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, and of the two natures of our Lord Jesus Christ, even though he was worshipped from the first as Son of God and Son of Man. What corresponding wealth of meaning might be guarded by the silence that surrounds the figure of the Mother of the Lord was something that the Church grasped only gradually.

One thing was clear: Mary was unique among all creatures in that she alone had been chosen for a cooperation with the Most High that went far beyond bearing witness to the Word, as had been the office of the patriarchs, the law-giver Moses, and the Prophets. She was to bear the Word. The narrative of the Annunciation is simple: but in those few lines lies a mystery far exceeding the whole of the Old Covenant. It is a thing worth pondering, said the Church. What might it mean, that this woman was chosen to be Theotokos, the God-bearer? This is a title not often heard in non-Catholic and non-Orthodox circles: but it goes back to the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), when, by way of securing a clear notion of the deity of Jesus Christ, the Church said that it is appropriate to speak of his Mother as “Mother of God”, not by way of implying that she is a universal sky-mother who spawned God the Father at some point, as some Middle Eastern religions might have it, but rather of asserting that that which was born of her was God, and not merely a most excellent man or prophet or even a demi-god.

If this seems to exalt her too highly, the Church would remind us that Mary herself, speaking prophetically, said, “He that is mighty hath magnified me”, and that Gabriel had hailed her as “highly exalted”. It is Scripture, in its record of her own words and those of Gabriel, that is the fountainhead of the exaltation of the Virgin Mary. To be Catholic is to have one’s piety suffused with this vision.

Again, to be Catholic is to hear the Virgin’s Fiat as a word uttered, in a mystery, in behalf of us all. “In a mystery”: the phrase is not an idle one. Wherein lies the solidarity of us mortals? How are we “in” Adam and Eve in their sin? The mystery of our very humanity itself seems rooted in this solidarity. And, said the Church in her reflection on the Gospel, there came a Second Eve, as there came a Second Adam, and, as our first mother opened the gate to death for us all, so this second mother opened the gate to life, the first one by her disobedience, the second by her obedience. An aspect of the matter may be put this way: Mary’s Son is the Redeemer: Mary is the type of the redeemed humanity. We are “in” her insofar as we share with her the dignity of having been created in the image of God but, beyond this, in that her obedience is the obedience asked, eventually, of all of us if we are to receive the approach of the Divine Mercy and be saved. God “needed”, as it were, her Fiat in order to inaugurate the great event of the Incarnation and, thus, of our salvation.

God needed. No. That is carrying things too far. He needs nothing. Who hath been his helper? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? The objection is apt, if what we are trying to do is to guard God’s sovereignty and omnipotence. No one may share his exclusive and unique glory. . . .

Or may they? This sovereign and omnipotent Lord has crowned us mortals with glory and honor, says the psalmist. We are heirs of God and joint heirs with his Son, says St. Paul. We will be given praise, honor, and glory when our redemption is complete. We have been made kings and priests unto God.

No one, of course, may step in and siphon off for himself some quantity of the divine glory. Lucifer tried. On the other hand, it seems to be a property of that glory, not only to share itself by glorifying the objects of its love, but also to place itself “in debt to” its creatures—to “need” our participation. We may recall Noah and the Ark here: God could have saved the remnant by his own Fiat, but he was pleased to draw Noah into the scheme and to require a boat at Noah’s hands, a boat that God could have cobbled up with a word. Or again, we may recall Moses and Joshua and Rahab and Deborah and Barak and Saul (even Saul) and Elijah and the whole host of the faithful in Israel: there was nothing that any one of them did that could not have been done with infinitely greater dispatch by a simple word from the Sapphire Throne. The covenant unfolded slowly, almost imperceptibly, and even agonizingly, because of this peculiar property of the Divine Munificence, that it not only gives itself but places itself in the hands of its servants, so to speak.

The supreme case in point of this sort of “instrumentality”, if we may marshal such a cold word, is, of course, the Messiah’s own “Lo, I come: in the volume of the book it is written of me, to do thy will, O God.” And linked intimately with that “Lo” is the Virgin’s Fiat. Why it should be that the Omnipotence should carry things forward in such an apparently circuitous, and even vulnerable, way is an aspect of the mystery of his Will that we can only contemplate but scarcely grasp. The Virgin Mary is the icon, from among us mortals, of this strange property of the Divine Will, that it chooses to place itself in our debt. In her case, we may say that the incarnate Word received human flesh, the very agent of the redemption, from his Mother. And this was made possible—again, always acknowledging the mystery—by her Fiat. And further, it is insofar as the rest of us make ourselves one with her Fiat that we begin to participate in salvation. The Will of God will not override my will. The august mystery of freedom with which we mortals have been mantled means that the Omnipotence waits to hear my Fiat. If Non serviam is what I reply, then I place myself outside the pale of joy.

This line of reflection brings us to a point that is perhaps the most alarming of all for non-Catholics when it comes to the topic of the Blessed Virgin. They hear the Church speaking of her as “Coredemptrix” and as “Mediatrix of all graces”. Surely Rome has, as we suspected, subtly edged the one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, over to one side and has juxtaposed the figure of his Mother there with him.

No. Jesus Christ alone is the Savior. He is not “Co-redeemer”. He, and he alone, is the one looked for with such yearning by patriarchs and prophets. Peter says, “you were redeemed . . . with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet 18-19). No one, not even the great Mother of the Lord herself, may claim to add something to the efficacy of that Precious Blood. It is his blood alone of which we drink at the Eucharist, not the blood of the martyrs, for example. The blood that gilds the Cross is his. Scripture and the Church have never for one moment allowed the smallest notion to be put forward to the effect that the blood of Jesus was not quite sufficient for our salvation and that hence we must look about for added merit. This is very far from being implied in speaking of the Virgin as “Coredemptrix”.

What is implied in that title is, rather, the notion that we have already been pursuing in these pages, namely, the profound sense in which Grace draws its objects into its work. All is gift: that is patent. And part of that gift is this drawing-in. Only Jesus can save: but the blood of the martyrs, for example, turns out to be precious in its heroic testimony to the Savior and, by that testimony, to be, in God’s will, instrumental in drawing many to the Cross. Shed blood: it is as though God says to the martyrs, and to us all: I will save you, not by a mere edict, nor yet by a legal fiction by which I see you “in” Christ when really you are wholly outside of him. No. It is my will, not merely to see you by a legal fiction “in Christ”, but to place you in him, to plant you in him, to unite you with him, in his death, Resurrection, Ascension, and glory. These are not juridical fictions. We are speaking of the life of God imparted to man here.

But where does this bring us in our consideration of the question as to the title “Coredemptrix” for the Virgin? To be Catholic is to hear that title as referring to the fact that her “contribution” to the mystery of salvation, namely, the very flesh of that Body that was broken for our salvation—that that contribution was real and not empty. It is not, says the Church, as though God said, “Here: we’ll have to have a body for this enterprise, so let us get on with it as expeditiously as possible and then set that gynecological detail behind us.” Even to fabricate such an idea brings us too close to blasphemy, we feel. The mysteries of our salvation, including certainly the great mystery of the Incarnation, are not nettlesome details to be got through and then sequestered. At every single point we find ourselves hailed with yet another spectacle that thunders over us with significances that our mortal frame cannot sustain.

The title “Coredemptrix” touches on this aspect of things. Mary’s participation in the whole drama of redemption was not only real: it was inestimably significant. The Church ponders this when she ventures to speak of her as Co-redemptrix. Once more, the merit won for us was won by Christ alone—and his Mother was one of the beneficiaries of that merit of his. But the Savior “owed” his flesh to the gift of his Mother, just as she, for her part, owed to grace the very response that enabled her to offer that gift. Her obedience was gift. The flashing back and forth, so to speak, of gift and response itself hints, not only at the bliss that illumines the City of God, but, beyond that, at the mystery of the Trinity, in which the Three Persons know nothing but mutual gift, if we may speak of God as “knowing nothing but”. (We ourselves are vouchsafed a glimpse of this order of things in marriage: the “giving” of the one spouse is gift both given and received; the husband gives himself to his lady and in so doing finds himself to be the beneficiary, and so forth, literally ad infinitum.)

If the Most High himself does not stint to place himself thus “in debt” to his creature the Virgin Mother, who, then, are we to stint in acknowledging our indebtedness to her? None of us has trouble acknowledging his debt to St. Paul or to St. Augustine. But Paul’s and Augustine’s gifts to us pale when we recall the immeasurably greater gift we owe to the woman who, by her obedience, gave us the Savior.

It is this of which the Church speaks when she speaks of the Mother of the Lord as Coredemptrix. The prefix “Co” does not suggest a certain quantity, by which a portion of merit must be subtracted from Christ’s work and attached to that of his Mother, although many non-Catholics fear that just some such arithmetic is indeed at work in the Catholic vision, and no doubt many an ill-instructed peasant supposes that Mary somehow is more approachable than is her Son. Rather, the prefix “Co” points to the great mystery whereby Grace draws us—and most notably, and uniquely, the Virgin—into its munificence and grants us a true share in the work.

By some extravagant extension of things, all of those who are in Christ might be said to be “coredeemers”, in that every one is appointed to be a partaker of Christ and his saving work; but this would be to extend the term so broadly as to make it too diffuse. The title Coredemptrix is wisely applied only to the one of us whose share in redemption was absolutely unique: in her womb was formed and nourished, from her very body, the Body that was offered for our salvation.

To be Catholic is to see all of this, and no more, in the title Coredemptrix.

But then, what about Mediatrix? Again, surely we may not introduce a second figure in priestly garments next to the Savior, who, as High Priest, forever pleads for us before the Sapphire Throne? But we, the Church, do enter into the sufferings of Christ, which are always salvific, for ourselves and, in a mystery, with him in behalf of others. This is the “fellowship” of which St. Paul speaks in Philippians 3:10.

Mary is the first among those who thus participate. A sword will pierce your soul, predicted Simeon at the Presentation in the Temple. The Mother of the Lord stood by the Cross all during her Son’s agony, “pierced” with sorrows unimaginable to us. We may be sure that her sorrows were not wholly occupied with her own loss here but that they were, like her Son’s (and like all Christian suffering), for something. There are no cul-de-sacs in the economy of the Divine Mercy. One is never a mere recipient. One is also a conduit. My sorrow must, eventually, flow on out from me to the Church and to the world. My salvation does not stop dead with me: I am saved in order then to be a conduit of the Divine Mercy to others. I am not saved and then set on one side, among the mere statistics of the saved. I am baptized into Christ’s death and raised from the water with him, not solely for my own soul’s benefit, but so that I may join the Body of which he is the Head and do his work (his work: the offering of himself for others: this becomes my work).

To this extent it may be said that all of us are “mediators” with Christ. He is the Mediator: but insofar as I—or Billy Graham or Mother Teresa or some obscure old woman praying for us all in the solitude of her room in the nursing home—become a conduit of salvation to others, I participate in Christ’s mediatorial office. We do not preempt that office, and we do not diminish that office, and we do not add to that office. But we do share in it.

To be Catholic is to see the Virgin Mary as “Mediatrix” in the sense that her self-oblation (Fiat mihi) gave us the Savior. That is her gift, and her only gift, to us. She was chosen by God to give us Jesus, the Savior. She is there in the pattern of the mystery of Grace, in her unique and irreplaceable role. (It is no good putting forward the notion that God “could have done things” without her. That is idle talk and meaningless. The only script we have is the one in which a woman called Mary has this role to play.)