Given that it’s Lent…

I thought I might post this little taste of Volume III: Miracles, Devotion, and Motherhood from Mary, Mother of the Son. This is from the chapter on the Holy Rosary:

The Agony in the Garden

Another title sometimes used to honor Mary is “Co-Redemptrix”. It’s not an “official title”. It’s just an expression of piety among some Catholics. And it affords a fairly typical example of the way in which the Church mulls things over for long time (usually centuries) before it makes any hard and fast decisions. At present, the Church doesn’t condemn the title, but it doesn’t encourage it either. A few years ago, Pope Benedict XVI (then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) was asked about the many petitions Rome has received asking that Mary be formally declared “Co-Redemptrix.” He replied:

I do not think there will be any compliance with this demand, which in the meantime is being supported by several million people, within the foreseeable future. The response of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is, broadly, that what is signified by this is already better expressed in other titles of Mary, while the formula “Co-redemptrix” departs to too great an extent from the language of Scripture and of the Fathers and therefore gives rise to misunderstandings… A correct intention is being expressed in the wrong way. For matters of faith, continuity of terminology with the language of Scripture and that of the Fathers is itself an essential element; it is improper simply to manipulate language.

So does this mean the Church condemns those who honor her by this title? No. It just means that Pope Benedict is (rightly) worried non-Catholics will not understand the “correct intention” behind the title. So the title remains, for the foreseeable future, something Catholics may use if it matters to them (providing they rightly understand what it means) but it’s not something one finds in the Church’s liturgy or dogma.

That said, it’s worth asking what “correct intention” lies behind the title. And when we do ask, we discover a truth similar to that behind the similarly unofficial honorific “co-Mediatrix.” For while Mary did not die for our sins, it’s also true that her sufferings were joined to those of Jesus, for the good of the Church. That’s not because she’s a goddess. That’s because the innocent sufferings of every Christian in the world are joined to Jesus’ sufferings for the good of the Church. That’s solidly biblical teaching. It’s why Paul could write “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church” (Colossians 1:24). And it’s why the Catholic Faith offers such profound consolation for those who suffer innocently. For since Jesus has joined Himself to us in our pain, our pains are joined with his. Our suffering is not simply meaningless garbage that happens to no purpose and does no one any good. Rather, our pain, joined with Jesus on the Cross, has value for His Body, the Church and makes us participants in the redemption of the world.

This is supremely seen in Mary’s endurance of her suffering. For, of course, there are two kinds of agony: the agony we feel for ourselves and the agony we feel for another. Jesus felt all the terror of mortal flesh when He contemplated the fate that was snaking toward Him as the little trail of torches wended its way across the Kidron Valley and up the slope of the Mount of Olives on Holy Thursday evening. He sweated blood and begged to be spared. Three times He pleaded with His Father to let the cup pass from Him. But it could not pass. In that hour, His disciples slept and He was completely alone.

Except for one kindred spirit. We do not know where Mary was at this time. The Gospels are silent. But we know ordinary human experience. We know the anguish of a mother who begs God that her baby be spared the ravages of cancer and that she suffer in her child’s place. We know of parents who drown in the attempt to save their children. We know of parents who push their children out of the way of oncoming cars and are killed or crippled to save them. We know the agonies of parents bereft of their sons and daughters by drunk drivers, or school violence, or the thousand idiot havocs the world wreaks on our lives. We know how powerfully their hearts cry out like David’s and say, “Would that I had died instead of you!” And because of this we know that Mary could not have contemplated the terrible agonies Jesus was about to face without wishing with all her heart that she could take the blows rather than Him. Jesus’ cup was to endure hanging upon the Cross. Mary’s cup was to endure not hanging upon the Cross.

The Scourging at the Pillar

In the Rosary, we are invited to contemplate the reality of redemptive suffering in the mysterious Scripture that “with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). In our culture, that’s supposed to be the same thing as saying “We are invited to contemplate sick, masochistic weirdness.” For our culture appears, at first glance, to have no place for redemptive suffering. It is, we are sure, a relic from the Dark Ages when the Church was obsessed with pain as being somehow meritorious. Today, we are assured, things are different. Here, for instance, is how the modern mind works:

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — In Hollywood’s competitive climate, accolades often go to performers who either pack on the pounds (think Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones or Charlize Theron in “Monster”) or let their frames waste away (Christian Bale in “The Machinist”).

There’s been another category at the movie theaters recently: the phenomenally fit.

——

Jessica Biel was a vampire slayer with deltoids to die for in “Blade: Trinity”. [Biel] kept a close eye on portion sizes and drank plenty of water. [Beil] recalled that at the height of her training, women pulled her aside to ask, “What’s your secret?” It was a question that Biel identified with — and resented just a bit.

“I was, like, ‘Secret? You want the secret?’ The secret is, there is no secret,” Biel said. “There’s no pill, there’s no diet, there’s no magic drink.”

The trainers agreed to describe their clients’ workouts for their big screen roles to show that there’s nothing easy — or particularly mysterious — about getting in shape, no matter who you are.

And you don’t have to spend as much time in the gym as the stars do, they said, adding that an hour’s time, five to six days a week, will make a difference.

Before her latest role as a take-no-prisoners vampire slayer in the new movie “Blade: Trinity,” Biel, 22, already had a body most women would covet. [Yet she not only had to get] into shape for a grueling, physical shoot in which the actress would perform her own stunts, [she had] to transform her lithe athletic body into that of a hyper-stylized vampire assassin with an hourglass figure.

First, there was weight training — something she’d never really done before — and she had to rev up her cardio activity with martial arts and kickboxing.

The toughest tasks… were … torturous jumping squats, which tightened up her legs and core muscles.

In all, she was working out and training about two hours a day, five to six days a week, including her fight training for the movie.

“I was just coming home and crashing. I had never really worked out that hard before. I don’t think I dreamt once, I was just so tired,” Biel said. “I was thinking, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ “

A few weeks into the new regimen, Biel felt her body changing from the inside, but fretted that she wasn’t seeing similar changes on the outside.

You see, in the Dark Ages Jesus fasted and subjected Himself to physica

l hardship in order to prepare for His all-too-real confrontation with the Evil One. In our enlightened age, however, people fast and subject themselves to physical hardship in order to pretend they’re confronting the Evil One. In the Dark Ages, people like Paul could rejoice in their sufferings for the sake of Christ’s body. But today we rejoice in our sufferings for the sake our bodies.

In short, the culture which has given us the Stairmaster has little room for sneering at the asceticism of our ancestors. When we think it’s important, we can pursue asceticism with all the zeal of St. Francis rolling in the snow. The difference lies in what we think is an important goal. The goal of the saints, carrying their crosses, is union with God Who carried His cross. The goal of our culture is toned abs.

The Crowning with Thorns

One of the fruits Catholics sometimes pray for in this mystery is “purity of mind”. Of course, Americans, being apostate Puritans, tend immediately to think this means “Don’t let me smile at a risque joke, Lord.” But that’s not really what is meant by mental purity.

The Church teaches that part of the effect of the fall is the “darkened intellect”. This doesn’t mean sin necessarily makes you unintelligent. Great sinners have been highly intelligent and cunning. But it does mean that sin makes you stupid about eternal things. The great illustration of this is the devil himself. With great cunning, the fallen angel, possessing intellectual powers far surpassing anything human, engineers the murder of the Son of God, only to be overwhelmingly defeated by his own schemes like a cosmic Wile E. Coyote. Even in our own race, we see the darkened intellect of a man like Hitler, using cunning and guile to gain power and running rings around his enemies as he gains victory after victory in the conquest of Europe. But his darkened intellect blinds him to his own stupidity, and so his idiotic racism and pride commits him to letting the British army escape at Dunkirk, throwing an entire army away at Stalingrad, diverting the dwindling resources of his Reich to an insane campaign of mass murder even as that Reich is collapsing around him, and to blaming and shooting everybody else for the results of his own loony orders. Sin has the strange effect of making people clever about things that destroy while rendering them imbeciles about the things of God.

On a human level, the sins of the intellect are on full display in the sheer gratuitous cruelty of the Crowning with Thorns. It’s a picture of the human race at its most exquisitely vile—and at its most noble. The soldiers responsible for flogging Jesus are, up till this point, just doing their jobs. Brutal, to be sure. But they needn’t have anything personal against the prisoner. He’s just another damned dirty criminal sent down by headquarters. If they retained a shred of their humanity they might have just processed Him and sent Him on His way to execution like good little thugs.

But no. Sin’s corruption is to be on full display in this execution. The soldiers inflict on Jesus a brutal scourging but even that’s not enough. They now feel the need to play and get in touch with their creative and childlike impulses. So they parade Jesus before the whole Cohort and hail him as “Imperator.” They put a reed in his hand, mimicking the lictors’ rods for the consul (from which the Field Marshal’s modern baton is descended), representing the power to chastise and to lead. They clothe him with a legionary uniform.

Finally, out of a chemically-pure cruelty they take their God-given capacity for play, for creativity, for problem-solving, for art, and for humor—and twist them all into a crown of thorns to press down on the head of a man Who has already been beaten nearly to death. The sheer gratuity of the act takes my breath away. It’s almost the perfect parody of love in its complete freedom. Nothing about this act of refined savagery leaves any room for whining about environment, or a bad childhood, or any of the other Usual Suspects in the Blame-Shifting Game. Here is Man, acting with complete freedom and choosing to use that freedom for completely demonic ends.

But even more breathtaking is the Son of Man, silent as a sheep before his shearers, an unbearably noble figure Who not only endures such cruel humiliation, but Who endures it for these creatures, thereby showing forth a glory to which his tormentors are blinded by their darkened intellects. For the Roman legion had an award, called the “corona graminea” (“grass crown”) which was woven from the grass on the field of battle and given to a man who, by single-handed action, saved the entire legion from destruction.