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I spoke to two of the visionaries to whom Mary appeared in Medjugorje in 1981. I took the waters in Lourdes in the place where Mary is said to have appeared in 1858. I visited Marian shrines in countries such as France, Poland and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1994 I published a book called The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. It is believed that this is the place where she lived out her last days. Many of the recent popes have made pilgrimages there. Over the past century, it has become common for Catholics to visit a house on the edge of the ruins of Ephesus, in what is now Turkey, in the belief that this is the place where Mary was taken by John after the crucifixion. He says that Jesus was "born of woman, born under the Law".
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Later in her book, Warner writes: "We were not troubled by questions about the Virgin's personality, about what her life had been, what she had been like … and although we did study the New Testament, we never noticed – it was not indeed called to our attention – how the Virgin is passed over almost in silence."Īs the scholar, Geza Vermes, has written: "The portrait of Mary varies greatly according to the sources." While John's Gospel has Mary at the foot of the cross, and has Jesus asking John to behold his mother and asking Mary to behold her son, thus suggesting that John would take care of Mary, St Paul only refers to Mary once and indirectly. Pamela Rabe stars in Colm Toibin's The Testament of Mary. The opening paragraph of Marina Warner's Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary will be familiar to Catholics: "Invocations to the Virgin Mary marked out the days of my childhood in bells her feast days gave a rhythm to the year an eternal ideal of mortal beauty was fixed by the lineaments of her face, which gazed from every wall and niche." The idea that she was born without the stain of original sin – the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – was officially declared part of Catholic belief in 1854.įor those of us brought up as Catholics, she played a central part in our lives and in the iconography of the church.
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In the next century the belief that she had not been buried in the earth but was assumed body and soul into heaven became part of the Christian belief and, as recently as 1950, this was declared to be dogma, something that all Catholics must believe. At the Council of Ephesus in 431 she was declared to be the Mother of God. Slowly as Christianity spread, her power became official. She was the humble woman who became a queen through suffering, through loss, the mother who was both mortal and then somehow more than mortal.Ĭolm Toibin says his experience of working on The Testament of Mary may have helped him during Ireland's debate on marriage equality. She could thus be re-created with greater force in the imagination of those who prayed to her and who sought her intercession. It is as though her insistent and mysterious power arose precisely from her shadowy presence it is as though the devotion to her grew from this very absence and silence. It is John alone who registers her presence at the wedding feast of Cana and later at the foot of the cross. Matthew and Luke mention her in their Gospels, but mostly her role as the mother of the infant Jesus.
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In the Gospel of Luke she recites the Magnificat, but even there she takes account of her own "lowliness" before declaring, "From this day all generations will declare me blessed". She herself, as she is presented in the Gospels, is mostly silent, and, once Jesus leaves her home, she is mostly absent in the New Testament. Mary, the mother of Jesus, comes to us through many images she does not come in words, unless the words are prayers written to her.