The First Church

This fall, I have been taking a 1-credit course on the Catholic teachings on Mary. Tonight is the fifth and final meeting of the class. Prof. Matovina, who's really great, asked us to write a 5-page paper on 5 statements we'd want Catholics to know about Mary. Rather than just rehash the four dogmas on Mary and throw another something in there, I lumped those into #1 and drew out four different ones.

Here's my five Mary statements, including the page I wrote on #5, which was my favorite:

1. Our four dogmatic teachings on Mary—The Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, Mary as Mother of God (Theotokos), and the Assumption—are each a part of Mary’s modeling of the Christian ideal to which all Christians should aspire.

2. The evolution of teachings on Mary has been gradual and deliberative; Catholic belief in various Marian devotions has never been unanimous, and the teaching of the Church is the product of much thought and disagreement.

3. The call of Mary, as described by St. Luke in his Gospel, is the only instance in the Bible of a direct mission call from God followed by a direct verbal assent.

4. Mary is the only human being to be present in all three eras of salvation history: the Law and the Prophets; the ministry of Jesus Christ; and the Church.

5. In the Gospel of John, just before Jesus utters, “It is finished”, on the cross, he entrusts his mother Mary and the beloved disciple, John, to one another; in this action, Jesus essentially begins the Church.

In the Gospel of John, we hear the narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion descriptively. After Jesus is put on the cross, he sees Mary and some women beneath Him and then also sees the disciple whom he loved. In a final act of merciful compassion, Jesus unites the two people who, in the human sense of the term, he loved most. Jesus says to his mother, “Dear woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26-27). Jesus commends these two people to one another, trusting that the love they showed show profoundly during Christ’s time on earth will endure past His death. John adds, “From that time on, this disciple took her into his home” (John 19:27). The two became a kind of family, founded on their union in Christ who, in His commending these two to one another, has created His Church.

Pentecost is the traditional “birth” of the Church—the time when the Spirit comes to the Apostles in glory to inspire and embolden them to proclaim the Gospel and bring people to Christ. That is not wrong, but it may not be the whole story. The early church is founded on the intimacy of the house church, the family, and small communities upholding their members in care. The Body of Christ is central to this all, as the early Christians discerned how to celebrate the Eucharist and observe the Lord’s feast in honor of His ultimate sacrifice and His command to do it in memory of Him. The centrality of the family, the home, and the Body of Christ in this beautiful exchange between Christ, John, and Mary prefigures these central elements of the Church. John and Mary effectively make the first ecclesia at the foot of the cross. Beneath the physical Body of Christ, they become the first manifestation of the Body of Christ to follow the death of Jesus.