Queen Mother

“And a great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1).

Today’s feast of the Queenship of Mary celebrates the coronation of Mary as Queen of the universe. This is another Marian teaching of the Church that non-Catholics have trouble with, because it’s scriptural roots aren’t as obvious as they often are for other doctrines. A proper understanding of typology, however, makes the Queenship of Mary stand out in sharp relief as one reads the sacred page.

What is typology? As one writer put it, “God writes the world the way humans write with words.” Human writers can use literary devices like foreshadowing to tip the reader off to what’s coming in the future. When God acts in the history of salvation, he works in a similar fashion. He uses not words, but events, places, and people during Old Covenant times to foreshadow even greater realities – events, places, and people – of the New Covenant.

One of those realities is the position of Queen. In the Old Covenant Kingdom of David, the Queen was not the wife of the King, but his mother – the Queen Mother. This position began under King Solomon, the son of David. Solomon had, of course, many wives, so rather than have them slug it out in some sort of mud wrestling match for the title, the crown went to Bathsheba, the king’s mother, who sat at his right hand.

In a similar way, the one the New Testament hails as “the Son of David” rules a Kingdom. Jesus calls it “the Kingdom of God – exactly what David’s kingdom was called in the OT. That kingdom has a Prime Minister, which we saw in this past Sunday’s readings is Peter, who holds the “keys of the kingdom”, like Eliakim did in Isaiah 22.

This Kingdom also has a Queen – a Queen Mother, Mary. This is why foreign dignitaries pay homage to Jesus as to a king, alongside his mother after his birth (Matthew 2:11), just as other rulers would have done in earlier times for Solomon in the presence of his mother.

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Catholic Tech Talk Reviews The New Mass App!

Brad West from Catholic Tech Talk.com has put The New Mass app through its paces, and his full review is now online! You can check it out by clicking here. Brad has really captured the essence of why we created the app.

As well, please don’t forget to click on the “Recommend” button at the top of the The New Mass page, to tell all your Facebook friends about it! We would also greatly appreciate it if anyone who has downloaded the app would give it a rating, via the App Store on your mobile device, or through iTunes on your computer. Thank you so much!

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The Assumption of Mary

The scene was a McDonald’s in the aptly named town of Normal, Illinois. I was a 21-year-old business student who was doing an internship at Illinois State University. I was having a chat with Jerry McCorkle, a young adult pastor from a local Baptist Church. And I was in the process of leaving the Catholic Church to become an Evangelical. Over Big Macs, Jerry seemed to give me another big theological reason to make the move. “The Catholic Church invented the Assumption of Mary in the year 1950″, Jerry said. “1950! That’s almost two thousand years after the time of Christ! I mean, where are they coming up with this stuff?” Sadly, I didn’t even know what the Assumption was – such was the state of my Catholic formation at the time. I just nodded my head in silence. Jerry and I had two things in common that day: we were both sincere seekers of God, and neither one of us had any clue what Catholics really believed about the Assumption of Mary. Since today, August 15, is that great solemnity, it’s a good chance to run over some facets of this dogma.

The Assumption of Mary is the belief that, at the end of her earthly journey, God took Mary, body and soul, into the glories of heaven. Critics of the Assumption point out that the New Testament never mentions such an event. But not all of the truths of the faith that we need to believe are explicitly recorded in Sacred Scripture – in the Catholic Church we also have the Word of God delivered to us by means of Sacred Tradition – and even Sacred Scripture itself was Sacred Tradition before it was written down. It is also highly likely that Mary was still alive on earth when many, if not all, of the books of the New Testament were being written. Luke, for example, seems to have interviewed Mary himself in writing his gospel, in order to ascertain certain details about the events surrounding the Nativity of Christ.

It is also worth pointing out that all Christians – Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant – believe that Assumptions not only can happen, but have happened! Scripture records for us the case of Enoch, who “was taken up so that he did not see death, and he was not to be found because God took him up. For before his removal he had been commended as having pleased God” (Hebrews 11:5). The prophet Elijah was also taken, or assumed, into heaven – body and soul – by a chariot of fire and a windstorm ( Kings 2).

As Scott Hahn points out in his excellent book, Hail, Holy Queen, no city ever claimed to have the relics of Mary – an absolutely astonishing fact, because the early Christians took great pride in venerating the relics of saints and martyrs, building their altars, and, indeed, their churches upon them. The example of Saint Peter’s Basilica, with its high altar directly over the underground crypt of Peter, is a prime example. The fact that no one ever claimed Mary’s relics, which would have been the ultimate prize, is good corroborating evidence that no one had them, because they didn’t exist. She had already been bodily Assumed into heaven. Two cities (Ephesus and Jerusalem) did claimto be the locale of her tomb, found to be empty, but none claimed the relics.

The liturgy is the place where Sacred Tradition is taught most clearly; the ancient maxim “Lex credendi, Lex orandi” – “the law of belief is the law of prayer”, or “the Church believes as she prays” holds true. If you want to know what Christians really believe, observe how they worship. Just because Pope Pius XII formally defined the dogma of the Assumption in 1950 doesn’t mean that he invented it, as Jerry supposed, or that Catholics didn’t believe it beforehand. A defined dogma of the Church has always been contained in the original deposit of faith, but dogmas can be defined much later, when the need (eg. a heresy challenging the belief) arises. For example, God was always a Trinity of Persons, long before the Council of Nicea affirmed it in the 4th century AD – in fact, this truth goes back to all eternity! But it was never formally defined until it was challenged by the arch-heritic Arius and his followers. The Church clebrated the Assumption in its liturgy – the highest form of prayer, and thus belief – going back to at least the 4th and 5th centuries.

Much more could be said, but it’s fitting that we finish with an argument from what is called “fittingness”. The preface to the Eucharistic prayer for the solemnity reminds us that the Assumption simply makes good common as well as supernatural sense, with this prayer to God: “You would not allow decay to touch her body, for she had given birth to your Son, the Lord of all life, in the glory of the incarnation.”

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