In an essay discussing the doctrine of theosis in light of Catholic liturgy, David W. Fegerberg wrote on the Marian element thereof within Catholicism:
Mary, Liturgical Person
This eschatological aeon is established by the work of Christ alone, but as regards its effects upon humanity, we have a witness: the Virgin Mary. Benedict VI said that sin is saying no to the reditus—that is, no longer desiring the return. Yet, Mary did just the opposite when she offered her fiat to God. Mary said yes wholeheartedly to the reditus, and an untainted appetite was preserved in the New Eve, unspoiled by the fruit that the first Eve had eaten. Mary is the first—she is prototype; she is Mother: Mater Christi and Mater Ecclesia. Salvation is Christ’s accomplishment, but had it not been communicated to another person, what good would it have been? Mary is witness that divinization is no longer out of reach. Christ is a divine hypostasis incarnated. Mary is a human hypostasis divinized.
“To have by grace what God has by nature”: that is the supreme vocation of created beings . . . This destiny is already reached in the divine person of Christ, the Head of the Church, risen and ascended. If the Mother of God could truly realize, in her human and created person, the sanctity which corresponds to her unique role, then she cannot have failed to attain here below by grace all that her Son had by his divine nature. But, if it be so, then the destiny of the Church and the world has already been reached, not only in the uncreated person of the Son of God, but also in the created person of his Mother. That is why St. Gregory Palamas calls the Mother of God “the boundary between the created and the uncreated”. Beside the incarnate divine hypostasis there is a deified human hypostasis. (Vladimir Lossky, “Panagia,” in The Mother of God: A Symposium, ed. E.L. Mascall [London: Dacre Press, 1959], 34)
Jean Corbon says, “The virgin Mary is the Church as it dawns in a single person” (The Wellspring of Worship [New York: Paulist Press, 1988], 173). We adopt Mary’s posture in the Church’s liturgy, as Paul VI has said in Marialis cultis. Mary is the “model of the spiritual attitude with which the Church celebrates and lives the divine mysteries” (Apostolic Exhortation Marialis cultis, February 2, 1974, no. 16). First, Mary is the attentive Virgin, who receives the Word of God with faith; “the Church also acts in this way, especially in the liturgy, when with faith she listens, accepts, proclaims, and venerates the word of God” (Ibid., no. 17). Second, Mary is the Virgin in prayer, “the title . . . also fits the Church, which day by day presents to the Father the needs of her children” (Ibid., no. 18). Third, Mary is the Virgin Mother, “the Church prolongs in the sacrament of Baptism the virginal motherhood of Mary” (Ibid., no. 19). Fourth, Mary is the Virgin presenting offerings—of her Son in the Temple and of her Son on the Cross; “this the Church does in union with the saints in heaven and in particular with the Blessed Virgin, whose burning charity and unshakeable faith she imitates” (Ibid., no. 20).
Divine grace and the human race kiss in a liturgical embrace cultivated by the people of Israel and personified in the Virgin Mary. This Daughter of zion’s fiat is our highest liturgical moment. She is our race’s response to the Trinity’s kenosis extending itself to invite us into the synergistic ascent into deification. Mary is the prototype of liturgical person, for the true end of liturgy is to arrive where Mary did. She gave birth to Christ in body; we must give birth to Christ spiritually, which, Olivier Clement reminds us, is just another expression for union with God—that is, divinization: “The Word if continually being born in the stable of our heart . . . To ensure this birth of Christ I us is the true function of liturgical times and seasons, interpreted inwardly by ascesis, prayer and contemplation” (The Roots of Christian Mysticism [New York: New York City Press, 1996; 251). (David W. Fagerberg, “Liturgy and Divinization” in Called to be the Children of God: The Catholic Theology of Human Deification, eds. David Meconi and Carl E. Olson [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016], 274-83, here, pp. 281-83)
Fagerberg referenced Marialis Cultus (1974) from Paul VI. Here are some excerpts from that text:
(Mary, the model of womanhood)
34. The picture of the Blessed Virgin presented in a certain type of devotional literature cannot easily be reconciled with today’s life-style, especially the way women live today.
(Women strive for co-responsibility in the home and for their legitimate role in the social, political, cultural spheres of society)
In consequence of these phenomena some people are becoming estranged from devotion to the Blessed Virgin and find it difficult to take as an example Mary of Nazareth because the horizons of her life, so they say, seem rather restricted in comparison with the vast spheres of activity open to humankind today[ . . . ]
35. First, the Virgin Mary has always been proposed to the faithful by the Church as an example to be imitated, not precisely in the type of life she led, and much less for the socio-cultural back-ground in which she lived and which today scarcely exists anywhere. She is held as an example to the faithful rather for the way in which, in her own particular life, she fully and responsibly accepted the will of God [cf. Luke 1:38]; because she received the word of God and acted on it; because charity and a spirit of service were the driving force of her actions, because she was the first and the most perfect of Christ’s disciples. All of this has a permanent and universal exemplary value.
36. Secondly [. . . ] the difficulties alluded to above are not connected with the true Gospel image of Mary nor with the doctrinal data [. . . . ]. It is not surprising that Christians who lived in different social and cultural conditions [. . .] saw in Jesus’ mother the outstanding type of womanhood and the prominent example of a life lived according to the Gospel, and expressed their sentiments with the mentality and images corresponding to their age. They looked at Mary and her mission as the New Woman and the perfect Christian who united in herself the characteristic situations of a woman’s life as Virgin, Spouse and Mother. When the Church considers the long history of Marian devotion she rejoices at the continuity of her veneration, but she does not bind herself to any particular expression of an individual cultural epoch or to the particular anthropological ideas underlying such expressions.
(Mary in the crisis of the modern world)
57. Mary, the New Woman, stands at the side of Christ, the New Man, within whose mystery the mystery of the human being alone finds the true light; she is given to us as a pledge and guarantee that God’s plan in Christ for the salvation of the whole human persona has already achieved realization in a creature: in her. Contemplated in the vicissitudes of her earthly life and in the heavenly bliss which she already possesses the City of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary offers a calm vision and a reassuring word to modern people, torn as they often are between anguish and hope, defeated by the sense of their own limitations and assailed by limitless aspirations, troubled in their mind and divided in their heart, uncertain before the riddle of death, oppressed by loneliness while yearning for fellowship, a pray to boredom and disgust. She shows forth the victory of hope over anguish, of fellowship over solitude, of peace over anxiety, of joy and beauty over boredom and disgust, of eternal visions over earthly ones, of life over death. (The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church, ed. Jacques Dupuis [7th ed.; Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 2001], 293-95, square brackets in original)
The concept of Mary as the “spouse” of the Holy Spirit is something that became explicated further in John Paul II’s encyclical from March 1987, Redemptoris Mater (“Mother of the Redeemer”):
26. From [the moment of Pentecost] there [. . . . ] begins that journey of faith, the Church’s pilgrimage . . . Mary is present. We see her in the midst of the Apostles in the Upper room , “prayerfully imploring the gift of the Spirit.” In a sense her journey of faith is longer. The Holy Spirit had already come down upon her, and she became his faithful spouse at the annunciation, welcoming the Word of the true God, offering “the full submission of intellect and will [. . . . ] and freely assenting to the truth revealed by him”, indeed, abandoning herself totally to God through the “obedience of faith”
(Mary’s shared mediation bound to her motherhood)
38. In effect, Mary’s mediation is intimately linked with her motherhood. It possesses a specifically maternal character, which distinguishes it from the mediation of the other creatures who in various and always subordinate ways share in the one mediation of Christ, although her own mediation is also a shared mediation. In fact, while it is true that “no creature could ever be classed with the Incarnate Word and Redeemer”, at the same time “the unique mediation of the Redeemer does not exclude but rather gives rise among creatures to a manifold cooperation which is but a sharing in this unique source”. And thus “the one goodness of God is in reality communicated diversely to his creatures”
39. Mary’s motherhood, completely pervaded by her spousal attitude as the “handmaid of the Lord”, constitutes the first and fundamental dimension of hat mediation which the Church confesses and proclaims in her regard and continually “commends to the hearts of the faithful”, since the Church has great trust in her. For it must be recognized that before anyone else it was God himself, the eternal Father, who entrusted himself to the Virgin of Nazareth, giving her his own Son in the mystery of the Incarnation. Her election to the supreme office and dignity of mother of the Son of God refers, on the ontological level, to the very reality of the union of the two natures in the person of the Word (hypostatic union). This basic fact of being the mother of the Son of God is from the very beginning a complete openness to the person of Christ, to his whole work, to his whole mission. The words “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord” testify to Mary’s openness of spirit: She perfectly unites in herself the love proper to virginity and the love characteristic of motherhood, which are joined and as it were fused together. (Ibid., 295-97, emphasis in bold added, comments in square brackets in original)
I know one may sound like a broken record on this issue, but such shows yet again that Mariology, far from being a minor topic of little importance, is indeed an important theological issue, if not for the fact that, Rome, and to a lesser extent, Eastern Orthodoxy, has elevated Mary to a point of her being the “neck” of God’s grace and our salvation.
For more on the true understanding of the mother of Jesus, see my book:
