“THE honour given to Mary as the Mother of God is, among a thousand other things, a very perfect example of the truth to which I have recurred more than once: that even what we may call the Protestant truths were only saved by the Catholic authority. Among these is the very necessary truth of the subordination of Mary to Christ, as being after all the subordination of the creature to the Creator. Nothing amuses Catholics more than the suggestion, in so much of the old Protestant propaganda, that they are to be freed from the superstition called Mariolatry, like people freed from the burden of daylight. All the spontaneous spirituality, as distinct from the necessary doctrinal orthodoxy, is on the side of the extension and even excess of this cult. If Catholics had been left to their private judgment, to their personal religious experience, to their sense of the essential spirit of Christ and Christianity, to any of the liberal or latitudinarian tests of truth, they would long ago have exalted our Lady to a height of superhuman supremacy and splendour that might really have imperilled the pure monotheism in the core of the creed. Over whole tracts of popular opinion she might have been a goddess more universal than Isis. It is the authority of Rome that has prevented such Catholics from indulging in such Mariolatry; the strict definition that distinguished between a perfect woman and a divine Man.” ~G.K. Chesterton: ‘The Catholic Church and Conversion.’
Found that floating by on Facebook. Honest to goodness, there are some Methodists that would like to see a more Marian influence in our liturgy and theology than we’ve had in the past. I mean, even Zwingli understood that Mary had a role in the life of a Christian.
The celebration of any “immaculate heart” seems to be directed to the study of the interior life of the person.
