Our Lady of Guadalupe by Carl Anderson

Author:Carl Anderson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307589491
Publisher: The Doubleday Religious Publishing Group
Published: 2009-02-08T05:00:00+00:00

THE CHURCH: BRIDE AND MOTHER

Within the Church, Mary’s motherhood takes on a concrete character of care. Importantly, however, as a woman espoused to God, Mary does more than point toward the Church. She is in fact a model for the Church, the Church that is the Bride of Christ, and she is a model for us precisely in our participation in the Church. While a model for each individual believer, Mary’s motherhood is also a model for the Church. In fact, as John Paul II wrote in his apostolic letter on the dignity of women, “Unless one looks to the Mother of God, it is impossible to understand the mystery of the Church, her reality, her essential vitality.”23 In a fundamental way, the Church finds a model in Mary, who in her “yes” to God became that place where God and humanity met. The Church is called to an analogous vocation, bringing Christ in the sacraments to all people and, at the same time, giving birth through her preaching and the sacraments to a new community of believers.

Speaking of the Church, there are two terms most often used. One is populus Dei, meaning the “people of God;” the other is ecclesia, meaning “church.” Together they describe two different aspects of the Church’s relationship to Christ. As Cardinal Ratzinger explains:

In contrast to the masculine, activistic-sociological populus Dei (people of God) approach, Church—ecclesia—is feminine. … Church is more than “people,” more than structure and action: the Church contains the living mystery of maternity and of the bridal love that makes maternity possible. There can be ecclesial piety, love for the Church, only if this mystery exists. When the Church is no longer seen in any but a masculine, structural, purely theoretical way, what is most authentically ecclesial about ecclesia has been ignored.24

The Church as ecclesia points to the way the Church relates to Christ in a feminine manner. Several times in the Gospels, Christ spoke in parables of himself as the bridegroom with his bride. This bride is the Church. The Church incorporates into her own self-understanding the mystery of Mary, “the listening handmaid who—liberated in grace—speaks her Fiat and, in so doing, becomes bride and thus body.”25 Without the values of femininity and an ethic of care, as embodied in the person of Mary, the proper relationship between God and the Church is threatened. To lose sight of the Church as the patient bride of Christ risks reducing the relationship between human and divine to an exclusively human dialogue. Coming to the Indians and missionaries as a woman, Our Lady of Guadalupe awakens them to the femininity of the Church. Just as Mary’s receptivity to God enables her to bring us to Christ, so the Church’s continual receptivity to Christ enables the Church to bring Christ to all peoples. The image and codex of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which carried the symbol of divinity in the four-petaled flower at its center, brought to the Indians in a feminine form the message and truth of Christ.

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