ABSTRACT
It has become a commonplace to oppose ‘nihilism’ to Christian faith. Coupled to this has been the prevailing sense that Christianity is ‘losing the battle’ with a riptide of secularly. The varying shades of theological liberalism of the post-war period, either explicitly or implicitly, have represented a response to this, itself little more than a ‘feeling’, although backed up by a consensus claiming a basis in sociological fact.1 Against the influence of ‘liberalism’ has been a kind of conservatism, sometimes styled as a ‘neo-orthodoxy’, which has sought through various (often authoritarian) means to roll back the tide in a triumphal assertion of ‘Christian truth’ —through fundamentalisms of differing hues, biblical, moral or ecclesial. The pressure mounting, particularly in the United States, for a ‘millennial’ Infallible Statement from the Vatican proclaiming Mary as ‘Coredemptrix’ and ‘Mediatrix of all Graces’ is a good example of this. Concern with ‘orthodoxy’ appears exemplified by a concern with Mary. Framed correctly, there need be no actual problem with the dogma. (We are, are we not, all called to be co-redeemers, and mediators of grace? What Mary exemplifies, we also are called to be-indeed, as co-redeemers we must first be co-creating.) That this movement is neo-orthodox is indicated in that, were they ever proclaimed in the way being sought, the dogmas would have the effect of detaching the working out of the nature of human salvation from Mary’s person, which has been her role, above all in the first centuries of the Church’s life-as even so cautious a Mariologist as Karl Barth attests.2 The danger arises of appearing to stand the Mother of God anthropologically over against the common mass of humanity. Quite apart from the potential difficulties for œcumenism, the real motive appears to be the desire, not so much to clarify points of Marian dogma, as for an infallible Statement that will settle dispute by edict and so exemplify, not the power of God revealed through Mary, but the power of the Papacy as such.
