Transcript of CS#116: Mark Shea Mary, Mother of the Son

Transcript of Interview with Mark Shea about Mary, Mother of the Son. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Mary, Mother of the Son at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1111352/Mary-Mother-Son-3-Volume-Set/

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Chris Cash: This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool, and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host, Chris Cash, director of eCommerce for catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs. Today, in the spotlight, we have Mark Shea who has a wide variety of talents, both published and not, I’m certain. Welcome Mark!

Mark Shea: Hello there!

Chris Cash: Hello.

Mark Shea: How’s it going?

Chris Cash: It is going pretty darn good today. I have the place to myself.

Mark Shea: Cool.

Chris Cash: There’s no little helpers running around this morning.

Mark Shea: Oh yes, my little helpers have just gone off to the state fair up here in Washington and so yeah, I’m hanging around the house by my own self too.

Chris Cash: There we go so hopefully, there won’t be too many interruptions in the show today. Anyway, we’re going to talk primarily today about Mary Mother of the Son, the three-book set just out from Catholic Answers by Mark and you’re actually already in your second printing so I guess it’s not brand-spanking new, right?

Mark Shea: Yes, it’s not brand-spanking new. We released the book in May and it sold out really fast which is something that authors like.

Chris Cash: Not a real common occurrence in the Catholic market but it does happen.

Mark Shea: Well and it’s nice because it’s a trilogy and a trilogy selling out is even better so I’m very happy with the response of the book. It seems to be stretching where a lot of people are interested.

Chris Cash: And of course, one of the main things you’re working on with this second which hopefully will be out very soon is getting an imprimatur so…

Mark Shea: Yeah, we’re getting an imprimatur from the Diocese of San Diego. I made all the necessary changes and mostly petty small things and so I’m expecting an imprimatur. I don’t know that we’ve got one yet but I’m looking forward to having one.

Chris Cash: And hopefully by the time all of you hear this show, the imprimatur will have been granted but until then, we’ll just keep praying.

Mark Shea: All righty!

Chris Cash: Did you want to mention any of your blogs or other endeavors before we start talking about the book?

Mark Shea: Well sure, I’ve got lots of irons in the fire. I’m been busy. I write a blog called Catholic and Enjoying It which you can Google or just Google my name and you’ll find it. I’m busy, I write a regular column for both Inside Catholic which is a webzine which you can also Google and I also have a column with the National Catholic Register and also, most recent foray into Catholic culture and all sort of thing is I filmed a movie in March. It’s a feature length adaptation of GK Chesterton’s novella Manalife and I had the great honor and privilege of playing Innocent Smith, one of Chesterton’s greatest creation. That film is in postproduction right now and will hopefully be out and available either late this year or early next year.

Chris Cash: Now, is that a feature production for the theaters or…?

Mark Shea: Yes.

Chris Cash: Wow!

Mark Shea: Yup so we’ll see how that goes. It’s a small budget film, sort of like Bella so if it gets into theaters, it will probably be a limited run. We’re still bickering with distributors and the film will be in various film festivals and so forth but yeah, our hope is to get the movie into theaters and we’ll see how it does.

Chris Cash: Very excellent, you know? We have had some success in the past few years getting some interesting Catholic films into the theaters.

Mark Shea: Yup!

Chris Cash: So everybody out there, throw some prayers that way too and who knows what’ll happen?

Mark Shea: Yeah!

Chris Cash: Anyway, let’s talk a little about Mary, Mother of the Son. Now this is a three-volume set so you know, very substantial work you’ve got there. What made you decide to break it up into three different volumes?

Mark Shea: Well, the book as it was conceived very naturally broke into three sections. I had always conceived of the book in three major sections and so when we published it, we decided because the fact is, readers are intimidated by great big fat books that aren’t the Lord of the Ring and so we decided…

Chris Cash: Or Harry Potter.

Mark Shea: …or Harry Potter, yeah exactly. So we decided that it would be better to break it into three sort of more bite-sized, less intimidating and that seems to be making readers happy. The books are pretty much the same length. They’re close to the same length and basically, what Mary, Mother of the Son is trying to do is these are books that I wished someone had written about all things Marian when I was coming into the church. I waited around for 20 years. I entered the church in 1987 and waited around for 20 years for somebody else to write that book and finally the dawning of dreadful thought broke upon me that no one else was going to write the book so I would have to. So that was why I wrote it. It was basically because you can find lots and lots of stuff about it. Certainly, it’s not hard to find books about Mary out there but what tends to happen is if you find a book that talks about the four Marian dogmas, it won’t be talking much about things like apparition or maybe you’ll find a book about Our Lady of Fatima but it’s not going to talk about the Marian dogmas of the church and very often what the Marian books will not tend to do is give much of an explanation to the outsider as to where the church is getting all this stuff about Mary because for *** [00:07:39] of the principal experience that you have coming into the church is not of somebody sitting you down and saying, “Okay, let’s talk about Marian revelation and where it comes from.” You’re not going to…you’ll never walk into a church and the priest stands up there during the homily and says, “Okay, for the next four weeks, we’re going to take a detailed look at the dogma of Mary Theotocus, of her perpetual virginity, of the Immaculate Concepcion, of the Assumption. We’re going to trace this historical development of Marian doctrine and so on and so forth so that you can understand what’s going on.” Instead what happens is you walk into a church as an outsider and there’s somebody praying to a statue. And you know, it looks like they’re praying to a statue. What’s up with that? I mean, I thought you weren’t supposed to pray to statues. And then you turn your head and there’s the rosary squad because Mass just ended and so they’re all saying the rosary there and the score at the bottom of the first decade is Hail Mary ten, Our Father one so you can tell who’s more important to the Catholic. And on and on and on and on it goes so this sensory data flung at you, holy cards, rosaries, and statues, and pictures, and various devotions, and dah, dah, dah, dah…and nobody puts it together for you. You’re just kind of there floundering around trying to figure out what Catholics are doing with all this Mary stuff and where it all comes from. And so, what I decided to try to do in my book was explain. Where does this stuff all come from? How does the church arrive at this? Because the overwhelming assumption particularly among Protestants, I mean a lot of non-Catholics whether they’re Protestants or not is, “Well, okay fine. It’s not in the bible. The Church just grabbed this stuff from paganism somewhere in the early centuries and…”

Chris Cash: It’s really Isis reborn.

Mark Shea: Yeah, right. It’s just…”Well, you know, I’m a half converted Greco Roman Christian who used to go to the temple of Diana with his grandma and now we can’t do that anymore because we’re Christians so…well, I know, let’s worship Mary instead.” And that’s really a very, very broad misperception that is everywhere. And in fact, has crept into the Church itself. There are a lot of Catholics who sort of have this notion that the Mary devotion is kind of warmed over paganism because we’re open to that sort of thing and so the first book is to really clarify where Mary devotion comes from and what you discover is that in the early Church, there is virtually no interest in paganism other than sometimes Christians will acknowledge as Paul does in the Areopagus, that yeah, pagans can feel after God and sometimes they get a couple of things right. There’s also a very strong tendency in early Christianity to regard paganism as a counterfeit of true revelation and finally, there’s a tendency to see in paganism merely human wisdom which as long as it doesn’t contradict revelation, it’s okay. So wedding rings, for example, come from paganism and nobody makes a big deal about that because okay, fine. We can use rings as a symbol of eternal love but what you don’t find anywhere is anybody in the early Christian Church looking to paganism as a source of doctrine concerning Mary. It’s just not there. It’s completely absent and so the question then becomes where do they get it from? And the answer is they’re getting it from apostolic tradition both written and unwritten. And so, when the fathers of the Church looked at Mary, they see Her always in exactly the same way as they see Jesus, as the fulfillment of Old Testament foreshadows and so, they look at the Ark of the Covenant, they see this is an image of the Blessed Virgin. They look at Gideon’s fleece which remains dry when the ground all around it is wet as an image of Her virginity. And so on and so on and so forth. They’re always paying attention to Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition and they’re never paying attention to paganism until this whole notion that Marian devotion comes from paganism turns out to be what I call pseudo-knowledge. It’s one of those things that everybody knows but the only reason they know it is because somebody else told them who had no basis for the assumption at all and so what we discovered then is that in reality, the reasons that the early Church is interested in Mary is not because it’s interested in paganism but because our understanding of Mary is intimately linked to our understanding of what Jesus is. We are a faith that believes in the incarnation that God became flesh and the moment you accept that proposition, you have to accept the proposition that He got His flesh from His mother because that’s where we get our flesh from and so, who Mary is, is inevitably and inextricably bound up with who Jesus is. And what we discover then and this is the burden of the second book is that in fact, for Catholics, the point about Mary is that the point is never about Mary. Mary’s life is a completely referred life. It is always referred to Her Son Jesus. You would never have heard of Mary if it weren’t for Her Son. And so, in this way then, what the Church does is it understands Mary to be the first guardian of the faith and that’s the title of the second volume. And so, she’s literally physically the first guardian of the faith because she literally was the guardian of Jesus when He was growing. She’s the one that kept Him as an infant from wandering into a pack of wild dogs or whatever dangers a little kid would run into in first century Judaea. She did the job that all mothers do. She nursed Him and cared for Him and protected Him and in the same way, she acts as a guardian of certain crystal truths about who Jesus is and about who we are. And that’s what the Marian dogmas all serve as is they serve as commentaries on and hedges of protection around something crucial about who Jesus is or about who we are. And so that’s what the second book looks at and then the third book looks…if the second book is about the dogmas concerning Mary, what you must believe about Mary, the third book looks at what you may believe about Mary, so devotions for example. I focus on the Holy Rosary because that’s sort of the 800-pound gorilla of Marian devotion but there are lots of other forms of Marian devotion as well. In the east, for example, there’s the Akathist, a long hymn praising the Blessed Virgin. We look at things like then prayer to the saints, communion of saints, look at phenomena like prayer of revelation such as apparitions of Mary, for example. And then finally, look at what’s the wave forward from here because I think that there is a reevaluation of Mary taking place among evangelicals in the sense that we’ve been scared of her for far too long and we need to sort of re-appreciate who she is for us.

Chris Cash: So now, you just gave us a synopsis of what’s the content of each book is. Now a little more specifically, are we going to find the book is very heavily footnoted or how do you approach trying to get the information across? Is it more of a conversation?

Mark Shea: Yeah, the book is very well footnoted and documented. I wanted it to because so many critics of Marian devotion make their wild and wooly claims. It’s all Babylon mystery religion or whatever and so what I wanted to make clear was really let’s take a look at what early Christians are actually saying and thinking because they write it down for us and they tell us what they’re saying and thinking and when it comes to Mary, the notion that Marian devotion somehow is Babylonian in origin is quite simply rubbish. It’s nonsense. However, at the same time, we do need to engage the fact that the early Christian Church is born into a world of Greco-Roman paganism and that yes, there are places where the faith and Greco-Roman paganism overlap. What do we make of that? Well, the assumption that’s made by critics of Marian devotion or critics of the Catholic faith is that what’s taking place is a sort of unholy hybrid of pagan thoughts hence what used to be biblical Christianity but the Church ran off the rails the moment the last apostle died and there was this great apostacy and so on and so forth. Well, in fact, what you discover is that what the Church does consistently is exactly the same thing that it does during biblical times, during the lifetime of the apostles themselves. The apostles engaged with paganism. Paul engages paganism, for example, on Areopagus on Mars Hill and what he does is the same thing that the Church will go on doing. He says, “What you worship ignorantly, I now proclaim to you.” And so, the Church does the same thing so it will take pagan forms, Christmas trees, Easter eggs, for example and it will fill them with Christian content. What it never does is take Christian forms and fill them with pagan content and this is exactly the same thing that takes place with Marian devotion. You can find pagan imagery being used by Christians, yeah, that’s true. So for example, the sun is an image of spiritual illumination. This is the image that’s known to ancient Egyptians. Does it mean then that Christianity is warmed over Egyptian religion? Well obviously not. When we say that the word God is the sun and the shield as the ancient Jews did, or we called Jesus the sun of righteousness, that doesn’t mean that this is some form of Egyptian religion. It means that human beings are complete idiots and an image as blazingly obvious as the sun or sunlight can be taken by any number of religious traditions to be an image of spiritual illumination. You may as well say that the enlightenment which was atheistic was warmed over Egyptian religion, well no it wasn’t. It was yet another group of human beings who said, “Yeah, light. That could be a symbol of truth.” And so, in the same way, Christianity will borrow certain images from paganism like the Christmas tree and say, “The Christmas tree is a reminder of the tree of Jesse and Jesus is the shoot that sprouts from the stump of Jesse and so on and so forth.” And so the adornments on the Christmas tree which were originally fruit, real fruit that you hung on the tree, sort of evolved into glass bulbs over time. But the fruit on the trees becomes an image of spiritual fruit and so on and so forth. So yeah, Christianity could make use of pagan imagery but it never took the content of pagan belief and say, “Hey, let’s all worship Diana or some god other than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And of course, one of the great mistakes that people still make today is the notion that in honoring Mary, Catholics are worshipping her as a kind of a goddess. This is simply not so. All that’s being done in the honor and veneration given to Mary is the carrying out of the commandment that God gives to Moses which is honor your father and mother. And in this case, your mother because she’s our mother and this is something that John is at great pains to point out to us. He records the story of Jesus on the cross, the moment when He tells John, “Behold your mother and sister Mary, behold your Son.” John’s not telling that story because he just kind of thought we’d be curious about what happened to Judean widows. He’s telling us that story for the same reason that he’s telling every story that he records in his gospel. The reason that he gives is so that you may know that Jesus is the Son of God and believing, you may life in His name. In other words, every incident that he records in his gospel is recorded for a spiritual and theological purpose. He wants us to learn something from the incidents that he records and the thing that he wants us to learn in the case of Jesus’ words on the cross here, is that Mary is our mother. We are the beloved disciple and so the Church has always regarded Mary as her mother and has always seen in Mary the image of the model disciple. St. Ambrose writes in the fourth century, he says that Mary is the type of the Church and this is not Ambrose’s brand new idea. He’s already reflecting something that is commonplace throughout the early Christian Church which is to see in Mary a sort of, if you will, a sort of miniature figurine of the Church. If you want to see what the Church looks like in miniature, look at Mary. Well, why should we look at Mary? Why shouldn’t we just keep our eyes on Jesus? Well, Paul tells us. He says to the disciples, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” There is one thing that Jesus, God though He is, cannot do for us. He cannot show us what a disciple of Jesus looks like. Only a disciple of Jesus can do that and so, we are referred to Mary so that we can see what it looks like to be a perfect disciple and therefore imitate her as she imitates Christ.

Chris Cash: Okay, well, we’re going to take a short break here to hear from our sponsor. We’ll be back in just a minute to talk more with Mark Shea about Mary, Mother of the Son. This is the Catholic Spotlight.

Chris Cash: And we’re back on the Catholic Spotlight. We’re talking with Mark Shea about Mary, Mother of the Son, the awesome new three-volume set that covers all sorts of different facets of Mary and Marian doctrine. One thing that really fascinates me is kind of the content of book three especially with regard to the Marian apparitions and you know, I’m very fascinated with Marian apparitions but what I see, at least personally, is that some people discount them altogether and some people go way the other way and just put everything into what’s the Marian apparition saying.

Mark Shea: It’s true. It’s true. You know, it’s funny. One of the things that I discovered to my great surprise, when I became Catholic was because there really is a very common perception among many non-Catholic Christians that Catholics believe Mary to be goddess of some kind and then you come into the Church and somebody once remarked and I think it’s really true, that trying to see the Church from the outside, the stained glass windows look all dark and dingy and not terribly impressive. When you come inside the Church is when everything is illuminated and so all of a sudden, the stained glass windows are bright and beautiful and everything looks completely different and it’s much the same thing with Mary. When you come into the Catholic Church, what’s really striking is how smaller she is, that she’s not this gigantic figure that Catholics are just obsessed with worshipping her and all this kind of stuff. Mary assumes her rightful place and certainly is the most exalted of preachers but she is not…I’ve never met a Catholic who mistakes her for God. I mean, a Catholic would laugh if I…do you think Mary is a goddess? Of course not! But here’s the thing. Although I’ve never met a Catholic who thinks that Mary is another god, I have met and run into more than a few Catholics who seem that think that Mary is another pope and by that I mean, you do get sort of enthusiasts for apparition and these sort of things who have this notion that the Church is basically governed by Marian apparition, that someone, somewhere claims that Mary has told them to do X, Y, and Z and if the pope and the bishops don’t salute smartly and do whatever it is this Marian apparition somewhere that somebody is claiming…

Chris Cash: And there literally are hundreds, if not thousands, who claim the apparitions…

Mark Shea: Oh yeah, people are always claiming to see her…right and so this is…and of course, the pope is under no obligation at all to obey Marian apparition. It’s his job to discern them, the claims of Marian apparition. It’s the local ordinary’s job to discern claims of Marian apparition and the vast majority of Marian apparitions, of course are imaginary or they’re a mistake. This is the interesting thing about private revelation to me and that’s why I wrote a whole chapter simply not focusing so much on that particular species of private revelation called the Marian apparition but private revelation in general. What does the Church mean by private revelation and what does the Church do about it? There are two kinds of revelation that the Church is traditionally public revelation which is the revelation entrusted to the apostles and handed down to the Church in the deposit of faith but there is also a private revelation which is to say that God, there’s a law used in scientific circles called the Harvard law of animal behavior which states that animals under carefully controlled laboratory condition will do whatever they want and in the same way, there is what I call the divine law. There is the law of divine behavior which is exactly the same, God under carefully controlled laboratory condition will do what He wants and so if He feels like it, He can and has worked wonders from time to time, miraculous occurrences of all manners and He will do and can do this with anybody, anywhere, under any circumstances. You don’t have to be a Catholic for it to happen. You don’t even have to be a believer. You could be a witness to a miracle and be an atheist. How you will respond to it will determine a great deal about you but it’s not something that is only for the faithful and so there have been people who have witnessed miraculous healings and as a result have become believers. There have been people who have witnessed miraculous healings and have refused to believe anyway and there is also in addition to the fact that God does work real miracles and signs and this sort of thing is also the phenomenon of fake and false private revelation. Fake private revelation of course is a deliberate deception. It’s when someone deliberately sets out to deceive by claiming that Mary has appeared to them. It is also much more commonly the phenomenon of false private revelation where the person really believes that they have received a sign from heaven and this becomes freaky because the Church is responsible for the pastoral care of people who are deluded about things or who are mistaken about things so someone thinks that the Blessed Virgin has appeared to them on a place of grilled cheese sandwich, for example…

Chris Cash: Or Our Lady of the Underpass is…

Mark Shea: Right, the thing is that may constitute for that person the central religious experience of their entire life.

Chris Cash: Amen to that.

Mark Shea: Yeah and so the Church can’t just sort of barge in say, “Ah, you’re a moron.” It has to weigh this. It has to say, “No, we don’t think anything supernatural is taking place here.” But it also has to do so in such a way as to really be respectful of the person and also there is simply the problem of what do we mean by private revelation? I would argue that a private revelation is any time that God uses any means at all to jump the gap from the public revelation to a particular human heart and He doesn’t have to use obviously supernatural means to do that. He can use anything. So for example, one of the most significant conversions in western history, Augustine, takes place when he hears what he takes to be a child or somebody saying, “Take and read. Take and read.” He himself isn’t sure if maybe this was just a kid on the other side of the garden wall saying a rhyme or something but for him, this is the moment where God reveals Himself to Augustine. Another example, Pope John Paul when he was in seminary was hit by a car and survived the car accident. Well car accidents happen all the time. There’s nothing especially supernatural about a car accident for Karol Wojtyla, this was the thing that confirmed to him that God wanted him to be a priest and of course, that’s one of the most consequential conversions that takes place in the 20th century. And so God can use anything and those things, I think, can be properly understood as a private revelation which means that private revelation is enormously common. It’s happening all the time because anytime anyone anywhere has a moment where they recognize that God is speaking to them and respond in obedience, some kind of very small private revelation has taken place there. However, there are certain kinds of private revelation which are designed by God to be much broader in scope and impact so for example the apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes or Fatima and so the Church has a responsibility with these sort of larger scale claims of private revelation, claims which you don’t have to believe, you can go to your grave not believing that Our Lady appeared at Lourdes and that has no impact on whether or not you are faithful to the public revelation of the Church. Nobody is bound to believe a private revelation but at the same time, sometimes it looks like God sent Our Lady to appear at Lourdes. It looks like all the evidence points to the fact that this thing really happened, that God really did this and so the Church being open to reality says, “Well, why would God do this and what is He saying to us through this?” And so, the whole phenomenon of private revelation, I think is really, really interesting because of all those reasons. And so what my book does is it looks at how does the Church weigh private revelation, what are some of the criteria that we’re looking at to help determine whether private revelation is real or not and so on and so forth and then in the appendix what we look at is a number of specific, not every but a number of specific approved Marian apparitions so Lourdes and Fatima and Guadalupe and several others.

Chris Cash: And I mentioned Our Lady of the Underpass just because having come from Chicago, that one was familiar to me and while it’s not an approved apparition, there were certainly a number of conversions that took place because of that event.

Mark Shea: Right and that’s part of what makes it so fascinating is because you really do have to ask, “Okay, was it a private revelation or wasn’t it?” Judging by the fruits in the number of people’s lives, apparently for them it was, just as the car accident was for Wojtyla and so was Mary really appearing there? Well that’s a separate question. Maybe she was, maybe she wasn’t. I tend to think not but through that moment nonetheless, people are drawn to love, serve, and obey God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and when that happens, we have to assume that God is working that because no one and St. Paul tells us, no one calls upon Jesus as Lord except by the Holy Spirit. So that’s the interesting thing about it.

Chris Cash: I wish we could talk a little longer but we are already over time so we’re going to have call it quits there and say folks, if you want to learn more about Mary, Mother of the Son, please go on over Catholic Company, grab all three of those. It is a three-book package, very powerful stuff in there, highly footnoted; just chockfull of more information than you’ll ever realize you needed to know. And I know that Mark always writes in a very easy to access, down-to-earth style which is you’re not going to be picking these up and going holy goodness, we can’t make it through all the highfaluting theology. I assume that was part of your intention in putting this together as well, right?

Mark Shea: Yeah, I was very careful to write in accessible prose.

Chris Cash: So be sure to go on over to and check that out and before we leave, I want to ask one more burning question I’m sure everybody wants to know. How does it feel to be a first-time grandpa?

Mark Shea: Hey, it feels good. She is beautiful. Lucy Beatrice, my adorable granddaughter.

Chris Cash: And you will, I’m sure will have many, many chances to have a lot of fun with her over the next few years.

Mark Shea: Yup.

Chris Cash: And for those of you who haven’t checked it out yet, also be sure to go over and check out our new site, rosary.com if you’re into anything to do with Mary, you’re going to find anything to available to do with Mary over at rosary.com. Rosaries, of course but also all sorts of Marian devotional items as well as the rosary resource center where we have lots of information articles posted to help you learn more about the rosary and about Mary. Mark, it was a real pleasure getting to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Mark Shea: Thanks, likewise.

Chris Cash: All right. God bless.

Mark Shea: You too!

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Transcript of Interview with Mark Shea about Mary, Mother of the Son. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

Mary, Mother of the Son at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1111352/Mary-Mother-Son-3-Volume-Set/