Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

We, the faithful, bless thee, O Virgin Mother of God, and glorify thee as is thy due, the city unshaken, the wall unbroken, the unbreakable defence and refuge of our souls.

BYZANTINE.

hatsoever He saith unto you, do it." These words have often been called the Gospel according to S. Mary. They certainly sum up her whole attitude in life. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word," she had said in reply to the message S. Gabriel brought her: and that is the meaning of her whole life-story, that she is at all times ready to accept the will of God, to give herself to the fulfilment of the divine purpose. There is no more perfect attitude, for it is the attitude of her divine Son whose meat it was to do the will of the Father and to finish His work, whose whole life's attitude was compressed into the words of His self-oblation in Gethsemane, "Not my will, but thine be done."

And this is the virtue that Jesus Christ inculcates upon us. "When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven ... thy will be done." There is no true religion possible without that attitude. And therefore one is deeply concerned about the immediate future inasmuch as the spirit of obedience, the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of Mary, is so rare. As one looks into the social development of the Christian era, one feels that the life and example of S. Mary has been of immense influence in the development of the ideal of womanhood. The rise of woman from a wholly subordinate and inferior condition to a condition of complete equality with man has owed more to S. Mary than to any other factor. I am not concerned with political equality; that under our present conditions of social development women should have that equality if they want it seems to me just, but I am by no means satisfied that in the long run it will prove a boon either to them or to society at large. But I am at present thinking of their spiritual equality, which after all is the basis of their other claims; and this comes to them through the Gospel, and was shown to the mind of the Church largely through S. Mary. In the earliest records of the Church woman stands on the same level of privilege as man, and the same sort of spiritual accomplishment is expected of her.

There are many members of the Body of Christ and there is a certain spiritual equality among them; but "all members have not the same office." In the Holy Spirit's distribution of functions within the Body there is a difference. Some functions, by the allotment of God, women are not called to exercise: these are sacramental and ruling functions. Others, as prophecy (the daughters of S. Philip), and ministry (the deaconess), are given them. For centuries she recognised this allotment and gave her best energies to her appointed works. She showed herself a true daughter of Mary in her loyal acceptance of the divine will and her zeal in its accomplishment. And what was the result? The Calendar of Saints, filled with the names of women, is the answer. There are no more wonderful works of God than the women whose names are commemorated at the altars of the Church and whose intercession is constantly asked throughout Catholic Christendom. There can be no thought of narrowness of opportunity or limitations in life as we study that wonderful series of women who have illumined the history of the Church from the day of S. Gabriel's message to this very moment when there are many many women who are faithfully following their vocation and doing God's will, and who will one day be our intercessors about the throne of God and of the Lamb, as they are our intercessors in the Church on earth to-day. Why any woman should complain of lack of opportunity and of the narrowness of the Church--the Church that has nourished S. Mary and S. Monica, S. Catherine of Genoa and S. Theresa; the foundresses of so many and so varied Religious Orders, so many who have devoted their lives to teaching, nursing, conducting works of charity, I am at a loss to understand. To-day we are witnessing all over the world a revolt of women against the Church; we hear not infrequent threats of what is to be done to the Church by those revolted members. I am afraid that woman is on the edge of another tragedy. She is once more looking fascinated at the fruit which "is good for food, and pleasant to the eyes and to be desired to make one wise," and listening to a voice that whispers: "Thou shalt be as God."

The question which is becoming more urgent everywhere is, What are the women of the future to be,--the daughters of Eve, or the daughters of Mary? It is not a question for declamation, but a question that calls for immediate action: and the action must be the action of women. If women clamour for work in the Church of God, here it is, and here it is abundantly; and to accomplish it there is no need that they "seek the priesthood also." The work in the Church of God is in the first place a work that God has given mothers to do; it is the primary duty of a mother to bring up her children, and especially her daughters, in fear of the Lord. That she can always succeed I do not for a moment claim; there are many adverse factors in the situation that she has to deal with. But she is inexcusable if she does not give her effort to the work as the most important work of her life. She is utterly inexcusable and must answer to God for the result if she turn her children over to the care of maids and teachers while she occupies herself with society or any exterior work.

In the second place the work of the Church of God is a work that ought to appeal to all women and a work that any woman can help in. All women can help the spiritual progress of the Church by meditating upon the life of Blessed Mary and fashioning their lives upon her example. We are all tremendously affected by example, and that is especially true of young girls. Their supreme terror seems to be that they should be caught doing or saying something different from what all other girls say or do or wear. Their opinions are as imitative as their clothes. Hence the need of the pressure of a strong Christian example, which would result most readily in the union of Christian women in a single ideal. Our present difficulty is that so many of our women who are devout members of the Church in their private capacity, so far succumb to the group-mind in their social relations that they are possessed by the same terror as the young girl in the face of the possibility of being different. Therefore are they careful to hide their real feeling for religion and their devotion to spiritual things under the mask of worldly conformity which evacuates their example of much of the power that it might have. I am quite convinced that fear of the world is about as strong an impulse toward evil as love of the world.

We need that women should clear their ideals and realise their public responsibility for the presentation of them. We need terribly at this moment insistence on the purity and simplicity of the Holy Mother of God. One is stunned at the abandonment of the ideal of reserve and modesty that the last few years have seen. Women seem to take it quite gaily: men, one notes, take it much more seriously. I have been consulted by more than one father during the past year as to the possibility of sending a boy to a school where he would be kept out of the society of half-naked girls. Have mothers no longer any sense of the value of purity? Or have they simply abandoned all responsibility that normally goes with being a mother? One recognises how helpless a man is under the circumstances, that his intervention in such matters simply casts him for the part of family tyrant; but why should a mother abandon her duty simply because her daughter says: "You don't understand. Girls are not as they were when you were young. All the girls do this. No other mother takes the line that you do. You are not modern."

One knows, of course, that the whole matter of decline in manners and morals is but a part of the world-wide revolt against the morality of Jesus Christ that we are witnessing everywhere. Social and religious teachers, students of history and social movements have seen the approach of this revolt for a long time, have been watching its rise and growth. When they have pointed out the end of the path that we have been travelling, they have been disposed of by calling them pessimists. These "pessimists" pointed out long ago that the denial of the obligation to believe would be followed by an abandonment of all moral standards. They pointed out to the devotees of "liberal religion" that they are in reality the leaders of a moral revolt, that if it does not make any difference what you believe it will soon come to make no difference what you do. It is a rather silly performance to blow up the dam which holds back the mass of water of an irrigation system and imagine that no more water will flow out than you want to flow out. When the Protestant revolt blew up the restraining dams of the Catholic Religion they had no right to expect that only so much denial of Catholic truth as it suited them to dispense with would be the result. Through the broken dams the whole religion of Christ has been flowing out and it is mere empty pretence to claim that all that is of any value is left. It is impossible to maintain anything of the sort now that all the moral content of the Christian system is openly thrown overboard by vast numbers of the population of the world, in every country that claims to be civilised. It is useless to say that there has always been evil in the world and that the maintenance of the Catholic religion has never anywhere abolished sin. That is true, but it is not to the present point. The social situation is one where there are definite religious and moral ideals strongly maintained and universally recognised, though there are many men and women who violate them; it is quite another situation when the ideals themselves are repudiated and set aside as superstitions. That is our case to-day. The Christian theory is confronted with a theory of naturalism in morals, and those who follow that theory do not do so with a feeling that they are violating accepted ideals, but with the assumption that they are missionaries setting forth a new faith. Those who have revolted from the Kingdom of God have now set up another kingdom and proclaimed openly, "We will not have this Man to reign over us." The revolt which began with a breach in the dogmatic system of the Church and denial of the authority of the Catholic Church in favour of the right of private judgment, has ended, as it could not help but end, in open abandonment of the life-ideal of the Gospels. We now have the application of the right of private judgment in the theory that one's morals are one's own concern. Such things have happened before. "In those days there was no king in Israel, but every one did what was right in his own eyes." The social state depicted in the Book of Judges reflects this revolt. The result of the same repudiation of authority is seen in modern society where what is right in one's own eyes is the whole Law and Gospel. Are we to remain quiescent, or are we to make the attempt to generate moral force?