Why do Catholic's place so much emphasis on Jesus' mother Mary?

[Thin_Lizzy]

I notice that Catholics place more emphasis on Mary that Jesus. While Protestants hardly mention Jesus’s mother. Why is this so?

[The_Highwayman]

First off the bat, Catholics do not place more emphasis on the Blessed Mother over her son Jesus Christ, who by the way is central to our Church. If you are referring to the “Hail Mary” prayer as something that would seem to some people an object of undue devotion, the words of the prayer are taken from the Bible (I have not screened this site doctrinally because this is beyond my expertise as a lay person and I believe that there are a few mistakes). We do not “pray” to the Blessed Mother but rather ask her to intercede on our behalf. There is a difference.

Our belief is that this woman was born free from sin and was the “Immaculate Conception.” She occupies a special place in our Church that I would estimate would be above a saint but below God (that is, The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) Himself.

[Chronos]

Catholics do not place more emphasis on Mary than on Jesus. We do, however, place more emphasis on her than do most Protestants. But one might just as fairly ask, why do Protestants put so little emphasis on her? Mothers are important, and the mother of the most important person in history should surely have a corresponding (lesser, but still very great) importance. Indeed, the Bible puts her rather on a pedestal: Gabriel, in Luke 1:28, tells her “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”, and a few verses later, Elizabeth, in a fit of inspiration, calls out “Blessed are you among women!” Sounds pretty emphasized to me.

[Kyle_Rayner1]

Well, former Catholic here but Chronos is right Mary does not have more importance than Jesus. Mary is placed in high regard by Catholics, though, because she did give birth to God’s son and carried him in her womb for nine monthes. Dont forget either that she was also born without sin and if I’m correct she is one of two people ever (according Catholic dogma) that was born without sin (Jesus being the second person born without sin).

That’s a pretty good track record.

[Happy_Scrappy_Hero_Pup]

tries to resist making resurrection joke
fails

[Carnac_the_Magnificent]

I predict a Great Debate, or just a few Humble Opinions…

[Guinastasia]

@Kyle Rayner1

Well, former Catholic here but Chronos is right Mary does not have more importance than Jesus. Mary is placed in high regard by Catholics, though, because she did give birth to God’s son and carried him in her womb for nine monthes. Dont forget either that she was also born without sin and if I’m correct she is one of two people ever (according Catholic dogma) that was born without sin (Jesus being the second person born without sin).

That’s a pretty good track record.

I was taught that when Jesus was dying and said basically, “Hey, John, take care of Mom for me while I’m gone-she’s gonna be your Mom now,” that made Mary everyone’s Heavenly Mother, just as God is the Father of everyone.

[parsnip]

From the Cathecism of the Catholic Church:

http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm

The Blessed Mother shows up the following times in the index: (the numbers are the paragraphs in the CCC)
Mary
Christ’s Mother by the power of the Holy Spirit, 437, 456, 484-86, 723-26
the Church and
active example and type of the Church, 967
Church reaches towards perfection in, 829
place in the mystery of the Church, 773, 963-72
spiritual motherhood, 501

Mary in the economy of salvation
Annunciation, 484, 490
assent, 148, 490, 494
Assumption, 966
conception by the Holy Spirit, 437, 456, 484-86, 495, 723
the Immaculate Conception, 490-93
mediatrix of grace, 969
predestination of, 488-89, 508
preserved from sin, 411
virginity, 496-98, 502-07
visitation to Elizabeth as God’s visitation to His people, 717
works of the Holy Spirit, 721-26

Mary as exemplar
of holiness, 2030
of hope, 64
of obedience of faith, 144, 148-49, 494
of prayer in the “Fiat” and “Magnificat,” 2617, 2619
of union with the Son, 964
and witness of faith, 165, 273

titles of Mary
Advocate, Help, Benefactress, Mediatrix, 969
Assumed into heaven, 966
Eschatological icon of the Church, 967, 972
Ever Virgin, 499-501
Full of grace, 722, 2676
Handmaid of the Lord, 510
“Hodigitria” or “She shows the way,” 2674
Immaculate, 491-92
Mother of Christ, 411
Mother of the Church, 963-70
Mother of God, 466, 495, 509
Mother of the living, 494, 511
The New Eve, 411
“Panagia” or All Holy, 493
Seat of Wisdom, 721

veneration of Mary
faith concerning the veneration of Mary based on faith concerning Christ, 487
liturgical feasts of, 2043, 2177
in the liturgical year, 1172, 1370
not adoration, 971
prayer to, 2675-79
respect for the name of, 2146
veneration of Mary
not adoration, 971 follows (italics mine)

II. DEVOTION TO THE BLESSED VIRGIN

971

“All generations will call me blessed”: "The Church’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin is intrinsic to Christian worship."515 The Church rightly honors “the Blessed Virgin with special devotion. From the most ancient times the Blessed Virgin has been honored with the title of ‘Mother of God,’ to whose protection the faithful fly in all their dangers and needs. . . . *This very special devotion . . . differs essentially from the adoration which is given to the incarnate Word and equally to the Father and the Holy Spirit, and greatly fosters this adoration.”*516 The liturgical feasts dedicated to the Mother of God and Marian prayer, such as the rosary, an “epitome of the whole Gospel,” express this devotion to the Virgin Mary.517

The CCC explains why Mary is important.

If you go to the index, you will see that Christ has about 4 times as many entries.

[Lumpy]

Well if you really want to start some Catholic bashing, just say that the early church had to “dumb down” the deeper spiritual aspects of Christianity to appeal to the heathen barbarians, and that the veneration of Mary and the saints is polytheism in disguise.

[parsnip]

If you would like some heavy reading, here is John Paul II’s encyclical
Redemptoris Mater. I spent a semester working this over in a mother’s group, but my post-partum mind can’t explain it several years later.

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031987_redemptoris-mater_en.html

[engineer_comp_geek]

Mary isn’t given so much emphasis in the Bible, and from what I’ve read the early church didn’t place so much emphasis on her either. The church went through a period of “Mary worship” which reached a peak somewhere around 800 or 900 AD (if I recall correctly, might have been a bit earlier). One of the rejected books from the Bible was in fact a book devoted to Mary, which was rejected because it was apparently quite obviously written during this time of Mary worship.

You can’t really lump all of the protestant churches together because they were formed by different people, but generally speaking the protestant churches went back and re-examined what was in the church and got rid of a lot of things they didn’t feel belonged there, one of them being the emphasis on Mary. Other things they got rid of were saints, icons, and rosary beads, for much the same reason. They felt that these things had been picked up by the church along the way and didn’t really belong. Then again they kept a bunch of things that weren’t in the early church too, like the holy trinity, christmas, and the fire and brimstone version of hell, for example.

This is just generalizing, though. Some of the protestant churches are closer to the catholic church than others. It all depends on the history of the particular church and what it’s founders believed in, and how that particular church evolved over the years.

[disclaimer - I am not a theologian, these are just things I’ve read over the years. I don’t even have a good cite for most of it.]

[Northern_Piper]

@engineer_comp_geek

Mary isn’t given so much emphasis in the Bible, and from what I’ve read the early church didn’t place so much emphasis on her either.

Actually, neither of these points is correct.

Last March, TIME had an interesting article on recent Protestant re-examination of Mary. One of the Protestant theologians they quoted, Beverley Gaventa of Princeton theological college, pointed out that Mary appears in the Gospels more frequently than any individual other than Jesus himself, throughout his ministry:

In fact, she says, she approached her Mary work in “a Protestant sort of way. We pride ourselves on reading Scripture, so let’s read Scripture and see what we find.”

What she read–and what Protestants had been more or less skimming for centuries–was a skein of appearances longer and more strategically placed than those of any other character in the Gospels except Jesus.
…
Gaventa’s conclusion was that although Mary’s appearances can be brief and frustratingly devoid of anecdote, “there isn’t a figure comparable to her.” No major player appears earlier in the story, and none, she notes, “is present in all these key situations: at Jesus’ birth, at his death, in the upper room.” Protestant treatments, Gaventa asserted, tended to limit themselves to what God does through Mary rather than talk about Mary herself. “You could say the same thing about the Apostle Peter–that the stories are not really about him,” Gaventa says. “But that doesn’t keep people from talking about Peter as a role model from whom Christians can learn things.”

(TIME, March 21, 2005, on-line edition - subscription required).

As for the early church’s view of Mary:

The Council of Ephesus in 431 affirmed her to be the Theotokos, or Mother of God. Admittedly, the move was less about her than him. It repudiated a specific heresy–that Mary’s son and the Messiah were two different beings–and in general it made the Incarnation much more immediate. God’s taking on human flesh became far less abstract when one discussed his human mother and the actual fact of his birth.

Also, it’s not just the Roman Catholic church which places this emphasis on Mary - the Orthodox churches do as well. So two of the earliest branches of Christianity took this approach.

[ArrMatey]

So… Tangental question… How was Mary ‘without sin’? I thought, according to the dogma, everyone has sin. Was it something she did? Something about -her- parents? (Heck, I’d assume Jesus’s maternal grandparents would probably be pretty special folks, too!)

[Camus]

@ArrMatey!

So… Tangental question… How was Mary ‘without sin’? I thought, according to the dogma, everyone has sin. Was it something she did? Something about -her- parents? (Heck, I’d assume Jesus’s maternal grandparents would probably be pretty special folks, too!)

That’s why Mary was referred to earlier as being the “Immaculate Conception” according to Catholics. Essentially this means that she was born without original (Adam and Eve defying the rule of God) sin. It wasn’t anything special her parents did during conception, err, as far as I know - just that God had apparently chosen Mary as the person who would gestate and give birth to Jesus and not just any ol’ person would do.