Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion of Saints

Mary in the Plan of God and in the Communion of Saints Alain Blancy and Maurice Jourjon Paulist, $18.95, 162 pp.

Recently, I was a speaker at an ecumenical conference held at Saint Olaf's College in Minnesota. The topic was a theological consideration of Mary in the history of salvation. Speakers ranged from the Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic traditions. How useful it would have been to have this little book from members of the European Dombes group as a starting point for our many fruitful discussions.

The Dombes group, an unofficial gathering of Catholic and Protestant theologians that has met regularly since 1937, was founded by Paul Couturier (1881-1953), a French priest who worked in ecumenical circles when such efforts were not always honored within the Catholic Church. The present volume, the result of work done by the group between 1991 and 1997, sets out a series of propositions on Marian questions, and points to where some agreement has been reached and where genuine disagreements persist. The book is serious, scholarly, honest, and nonpolemical, and it provides a trustworthy overview of current ecumenical thinking concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary.

There are still further reasons to recommend the book. Since Vatican II, there have been attempts to amplify a kind of Mariology the council itself was anxious to rein in, namely, a type of Marian speculation detached from roots in the saving mysteries of Christ. Today, we are hearing in certain quarters about Mary as "mediatrix." There is even an attempt to define Mary as "Co-Redemptrix," although, fortunately, the Roman magisterium conspicuously avoids that term. The latter notion is both ill founded in the tradition and ecumenically dangerous. In this volume, theological discussion of these notions is careful and balanced, as is treatment of Marian apparitions and "sightings."

What I most like about the volume is that it repeatedly anchors the discussion in the biblical, patristic, and contemplative literature of the tradition. This approach helps to keep speculation about Mary from becoming too freeform or devolving into the merely sentimental. There have been any number of recent books on the Blessed Mother, some good and some awful, but few that have been seriously and professedly theological and ecumenical. This book, despite the brevity of its formulations, fills a real gap.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

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