Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume III– Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood. By Mark P. Shea, Catholic Answers, 2009.
Mark P. Shea concludes his impressive trilogy on Mary’s true role in the Catholic Church and Christian civilization with Mary, Mother of the Son: Volume III– Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood. This volume centers on the enduring legacy of Mary, how her intercession helps Christians in countless ways, and the role of the miraculous in the world. As in the first two volumes of this series, Shea utilizes historical analysis, logic applied to real-world situations, humor, popular culture references, and spiritual insight in order to explain why Christians have no need to fear venerating Mary.
Shea uses an intriguing array of sources for quotes in order to buttress his information. On a couple of occasions he cites from anti-Catholic (or at least Catholic-critical) websites in order to reference their positions or erroneous views, and then provides counterpoints in order to contradict them. Shea is unafraid to state that many of those people who harbor viewpoints contrary to his own (at least on Marian historical/theological matters) are wrong, but he largely avoids the common trap of painting his opponents as fools or deliberate liars. There is a major difference between pronouncing someone’s statements as being incorrect, and impugning someone else’s integrity and intelligence, and for the most part Shea simply references opposing perspectives so he can criticize the ideas and not the people promoting them.
G.K. Chesterton, who Shea describes as one of his heroes, is referenced multiple times in order to explain Catholic doctrine on Mary further. One of the most common allegations against Catholic beliefs and traditions is that they steal from pagan practices, thereby diluting or masking Jesus’s true message. A primary goal of Mary, Mother of the Son, is to refuse such allegations. Sometimes this takes a strictly factual approach, other times a theological, logical, or emotional tactic is utilized. In one instance, Shea quotes from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy in order to explain how Catholicism is more than just paganism with additional trimmings:
“Only the other day I saw in an excellent weekly paper of Puritan tone this remark, that Christianity when stripped of its armour of dogma (as who should speak of a man stripped of his armour of bones), turned out to be nothing but the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light. Now, if I were to say that Christianity came into the world specially to destroy the doctrine of the Inner Light, that would be an exaggeration. But it would be very much nearer to the truth. The last Stoics, like Marcus Aurelius, were exactly the people who did believe in the Inner Light. Their dignity, their weariness, their sad external care for others, their incurable internal care for themselves, were all due to the Inner Light, and existed only by that dismal illumination. Notice that Marcus Aurelius insists, as such introspective moralists always do, upon small things done or undone; it is because he has not hate or love enough to make a moral revolution. He gets up early in the morning, just as our own aristocrats living the Simple Life get up early in the morning; because such altruism is much easier than stopping the games of the amphitheatre or giving the English people back their land. Marcus Aurelius is the most intolerable of human types. He is an unselfish egoist. An unselfish egoist is a man who has pride without the excuse of passion. Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within.”
This quote is used to illustrate Shea’s point that humans require extra help in order to save themselves and keep themselves spiritually sane– there is no shame in needing a little intercession.
A substantial portion of this book consists of explaining the rosary and what it means for proper veneration of Mary. Prayer beads have been used in non-Christian religious practices, but that does not make their use idolatrous or in any way improper. As Shea notes, rosary beads are meant solely as a tool to help the faithful keep track of their prayers. One could pray the rosary on one’s fingers if one likes. The point of the rosary is not to mumble prayers mindlessly, but to use the time and repetition as a guide to direct one’s mind and spirit as one reflects on Marian Mysteries and making oneself stronger, more focused, and purer spiritually. The rosary is not a superstitious bauble, it is a guide to self-betterment and a means to bring oneself closer to God.
My favorite part of this book is Shea’s take on how a political figure like Pontius Pilate would fit into the modern media. Pilate, after all, was a skilled and powerful politician who was one of the most prominent and influential people of his day. Shea imagines a theoretical television interview between Pilate and Barbara Walters, where Pilate is pitched a series of softball questions about his political career, personal life, and where Pilate responds with subtle false modesty about his imperfections and shortcomings, but glosses over it all with a slick narrative about having done the best he possibly can and that all things considered he has done a pretty good job. At the end of the interview, Walters would pronounce, “Pontius Pilate: A Man to Remember.”
Shea’s wry commentary underscores just how ersatz much of contemporary television can be. We see politicians and celebrities speak on-camera with apparent sincerity or weep softly with apparent regret, but the camera can lie. Prominent figures go to great lengths in order to look good on television, win people over, and shape their personal legacy in a way that flatters them best. Pilate almost certainly believed that his name would be remembered throughout the ages, possibly for his strong government or useful infrastructure projects or for general competency. In any case, in today’s society even the most blundering and venal politicians strive to craft lasting pictures of themselves that depict them in the most positive light possible, and it is not to much of a stretch to postulate that the public figures of two millennia ago similarly tried to assure that their historical legacy would be a glowing one.
What Pontius Pilate probably never would have guessed is that two thousand years after his death, he would still be known worldwide, and mentioned publicly thousands of times daily, but not in a positive way. At masses, it is regularly recited that Christ “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Pilate would almost certainly have never dreamed that by far, the most pivotal action of his life would be to condemn a seemingly obscure religious figure to death, and that the ensuing events would overwhelmingly overshadow all of the other political achievements of his career combined.
An appendix of famous Marian apparitions is included at the end of the book. The idea of seeing a miraculous vision of Mary (or any other religious figure) is laughable to many people, even otherwise believing Christians, who contend that such a violation of natural law and is therefore either impossible or demonic. Shea argues that to deny that miracles can happen only serves to make people believe in a God that is smaller, not larger. Shea cites a number of real-life cases of Marian apparitions, ranging from Lourdes and Fatima, to a notorious case where a woman claimed to have seen the face of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. The latter case may be a figure of fun to some skeptics and an embarrassment to some believers, but Shea observes that miracles serve to bring people close to God, and that those who see them are free to reject them.
Shea references the case of a former Catholic of his acquaintance, who impossibly heard a mass that her mother was attending from a long distance away. The woman who heard this miraculous event remains an ex-Catholic, dismissing the miracle as useless to her because it didn’t cure her diabetes or anything like that. As Shea reminds us, God’s grace is a gift that we are free to reject, but he strives to make us wonder why anybody would want to deny themselves something so wonderful.
Shea cites two more cases connected to miraculous cures at Lourdes. In the twin cases of Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who had left Catholicism for atheism, and Emile Zola, the famous writer and public figure and outspoken atheist; both men observed a seemingly impossible act of healing at Lourdes. Zola denied that he had seen any solid evidence of divine intervention, but Carrel, faced with the evidence of his own observations, wrestled with this disruption to his materialistic worldview for the rest of his life, finally reconciling himself to the Church shortly before his death. Grace, Shea declares, acts in ways that we often cannot expect. For it to better us, we must allow ourselves to accept it.
After reading the entire trilogy, it is clear that it was a good decision to divide Mary, Mother of the Son into three parts. If it were published as a lengthy tome, as was originally planned, the thickness of the spine might have put off some readers. Divided into three easy-to-read, topical volumes, the information presented in this work is easily read and digested, without anything being lost in the sheer breath of the study’s scope. Mary, Mother of the Son is a clear, concise, and easy-to-use resource for anyone who wants to understand the Catholic Church’s teachings on Mary better.
–Chris Chan
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