The Divine Lamp

We must avoid relegating Mary’s maternity to the sphere of mere biology…If, therefore, Christ, and ecclesia are the hermeneutical center of the scriptural narration of the history of God’s saving dealings with man, then and only then is the placed fixed where Mary’s motherhood becomes theologically significant as the ultimate personal concretization of the Church.  At the moment when she pronounces her Yes, Mary is Israel in person; she is the Church in person and as a person.  She is the personal concretization of the Church because her Fiat makes her the bodily Mother of the Lord.   But  this biological fact is a theological reality, because it realizes the deepest spiritual  content of the covenant that God intended to make with Israel.  Luke suggests this in harmonizing 1:45 (”blessed is she who believed”) and 11:28 (”blessed…are those who hear the word of God and keep it”).  We can therefore say that the affirmation of Mary’s motherhood and the affirmation of her representation of the Church are related as factum and mysterium facti, as the fact and the sense that gives the fact its meaning.  The two things are inseparable: the fact without its sense would be empty.  Mariology cannot be developed from the naked fact, but only from the fact as it is understood in the hermeneutics of faith.  In consequence, Mariology can never be purely mariological.  Rather, it stands within the totality of the basic Christ-Church structure and is the most concrete expression of its inner coherence.