St. J.H. Newman, the Holy Name of Mary, and "Newman's Marian Theology of History"

Today is the feast of the Holy Name of Mary, a feast, like that of the Holy Rosary in October, inspired by a great defensive victory over the Turkish armies/navies. This feast commemorates the defeat of the Turks who were besieging Vienna on September 12, 1683. Remember that the Battle of Vienna began on September 11, 1683. Pope Blessed Innocent XI instituted the today's feast of the Holy Name of Mary to commemorate that victory. After the Second Vatican Council the feast was suppressed, but Pope St. John Paul II restored it to the universal Roman Calendar in 2002, the year after the 9-11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington, DC (and Shanksville, PA before the plane reached its target). Pope St. John Paul II also restored the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus that year (celebrated on January 3).

Saint John Henry Newman composed a Litany on the Holy Name of Mary in his Meditations and Devotions.

I've been listening to this podcast of Dr. Rebekah Lamb's lecture on "Newman's Marian Theology of History" posted by the Thomistic Institute, given on April 26, 2022 at Oxford University. Here are a couple of quotations from her lecture, which the Thomistic Institute used on their Facebook page announcements of this lecture:

"Newman's early poetic interests in the relationship between hiddenness and holiness demonstrate how his heart already stirred after the Marian even before he recognized, let alone fully accepted, the Mother of God's central and distinctive importance within salvation history." —Dr. Rebekah Lamb

"The Marian influences on Newman's thought are Marian in character: that is, they're hidden, humble, and yet profoundly essential." —Dr. Rebekah Lamb

It's interesting that she cites many of the same sources (the Apologia pro Vita Sua, Parochial and Plain Sermons, the Development of Doctrine, etc) I highlighted in the August series on the Son Rise Morning Show! Rather "affirms" me that I do know what I'm talking about!

Rebekah Ann Lamb is a Lecturer in Theology, Imagination and the Arts in the School of Divinity at St Mary's College at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland. Her research interests pique my interest:

Dr. Lamb focuses on intersections between theology, visual arts and literature, from the long nineteenth century to the present. However, her research and teaching has also led her into Biblical Studies, Dante, and Christian Personalism. She is especially interested in the religious and aesthetic implications of inter-art projects, such as Pre-Raphaelite poem and painting pairings, and links between writing and theology in the Victorian period and late modernity. Her research increasingly focuses on John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti, TS Eliot, Catherine Doherty, and Michael O’Brien. She is completing a book on the aesthetic and religious implications of boredom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (McGill-Queen’s University Press), and is currently co-editing a special issue on the life and thought of John Henry Newman with Michael D. Hurley (Cambridge) for Religion and Literature.

Dr Lamb has published articles, encyclopedia entries, book chapters, and review essays in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, New Blackfriars, Religions, Theology in Scotland, and elsewhere. A developing branch of her research involves a series of essays on the relationship between history, theology and formation--in the contexts of the university and digital culture--as informed by the thought of John Henry Newman, Stratford Caldecott and Joseph Ratzinger.

I'll be on the lookout for her book Suspended in Time: Boredom and Other Discontents in the Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle and will subscribe to Religion and Literature forthwith.

Newman's Defense of Marian Doctrine and Devotion

Matt Swaim--or perhaps Anna Mitchell as it should be her turn--and I will talk about Newman and Mary, the Mother of God this morning on the Son Rise Morning Show in our continuing series on soon-to-canonized Cardinal Newman. (About 7:50 a.m. Eastern DST;6:50 a.m. Central DST.)

As promised, here's more insight into the Marian devotion Blessed John Henry Newman developed as a Catholic, starting with his defense of the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception:

Two years after the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Reverend Doctor E.B. Pusey wrote a public letter to the other great survivor of Newman's "defection" from the Oxford Movement and the Church of England, John Keble: An Eirenicon, responding to then Archdeacon Henry Manning's public letter to Pusey, The Workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church of England", in which Manning denied that the Church of England was protected from error the way the Catholic Church is. Pusey mentions the recently proclaimed doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854: "We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God, in virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of mankind, was preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin, has been revealed by God, and therefore should firmly and constantly be believed by all the faithful.") and examines it in a historical context.

Father John Henry Newman then answered Pusey with A Letter Addressed to the Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D. on Occasion of his Eirenicon, in which he defended the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, starting with the commonly held doctrine that our first parents, Adam and Eve, were without Original Sin, filled with supernatural grace. Mary, the Mother of God is the Second Eve: her obedience and cooperation with God undoes Eve's disobedience:

She holds, as the Fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall:—now, in the first place, what were Eve's endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace. And this she had;—a heavenly gift, which was over and above and additional to that nature of hers, which she received from Adam, a gift which had been given to Adam also before her, at the very time (as it is commonly held) of his original formation. This is Anglican doctrine, as well as Catholic; it is the doctrine of Bishop Bull. He has written a dissertation on the point. He speaks of the doctrine which "many of the Schoolmen affirm, that Adam was created in grace, that is, received a principle of grace and divine life from his very creation, or in the moment of the infusion of his soul; of which," he says, "for my own part I have little doubt." Again, he says, "It is abundantly manifest from the many testimonies alleged, that the ancient doctors of the Church did, with a general consent, acknowledge, that our first parents in the state of integrity, had in them something more than nature, that is, were endowed with the divine principle of the Spirit, in order to a supernatural felicity."

Now, taking this for granted, because I know that you and those who agree with you maintain it as well as we do, I ask you, have you any intention to deny that Mary was as fully endowed as Eve? is it any violent inference, that she, who was to co-operate in the redemption of the world, at least was not less endowed with power from on high, than she who, given as a help-mate to her husband, did in the event but cooperate with him for its ruin? If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had even a greater grace? And this consideration gives significance to the Angel's salutation of her as "full of grace,"—an interpretation of the original word which is undoubtedly the right one, as soon as we resist the common Protestant assumption that grace is a mere external approbation or acceptance, answering to the word "favour," whereas it is, as the Fathers teach, a real inward condition or superadded quality of soul. And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the first moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference:—well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. I say the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is in its substance this, and nothing more or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of grace); and it really does seem to me bound up in the doctrine of the Fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.

It is indeed to me a most strange phenomenon that so many learned and devout men stumble at this doctrine; and I can only account for it by supposing that in matter of fact they do not know what we mean by the Immaculate Conception; and your Volume (may I say it?) bears out my suspicion. It is a great consolation to have reason for thinking so,—reason for believing that in some sort the persons in question are in the position of those great Saints in former times, who are said to have hesitated about the doctrine, when they would not have hesitated at all, if the word "Conception" had been clearly explained in that sense in which now it is universally received. I do not see how any one who holds with Bull the Catholic doctrine of the supernatural endowments of our first parents, has fair reason for doubting our doctrine about the Blessed Virgin. It has no reference whatever to her parents, but simply to her own person; it does but affirm that, together with the nature which she inherited from her parents, that is, her own nature, she had a superadded fulness of grace, and that from the first moment of her existence. Suppose Eve had stood the trial, and not lost her first grace; and suppose she had eventually had children, those children from the first moment of their existence would, through divine bounty, have received the same privilege that she had ever had; that is, as she was taken from Adam's side, in a garment, so to say, of grace, so they in turn would have received what may be called an immaculate conception. They would have then been conceived in grace, as in fact they are conceived in sin. What is there difficult in this doctrine? What is there unnatural? Mary may be called, as it were, a daughter of Eve unfallen. You believe with us that St. John Baptist had grace given to him three months before his birth, at the time that the Blessed Virgin visited his mother. He accordingly was not immaculately conceived, because he was alive before grace came to him; but our Lady's case only differs from his in this respect, that to her the grace of God came, not three months merely before her birth, but from the first moment of her being, as it had been given to Eve.

But it may be said, How does this enable us to say that she was conceived without original sin? If Anglicans knew what we mean by original sin, they would not ask the question. Our doctrine of original sin is not the same as the Protestant doctrine. "Original sin," with us, cannot be called sin, in the mere ordinary sense of the word "sin;" it is a term denoting Adam's sin as transferred to us, or the state to which Adam's sin reduces his children; but by Protestants it seems to be understood as sin, in much the same sense as actual sin. We, with the Fathers, think of it as something negative, Protestants as something positive. Protestants hold that it is a disease, a radical change of nature, an active poison internally corrupting the soul, infecting its primary elements, and disorganizing it; and they fancy that we ascribe a different nature from ours to the Blessed Virgin, different from that of her parents, and from that of fallen Adam. We hold nothing of the kind; we consider that in Adam she died, as others; that she was included, together with the whole race, in Adam's sentence; that she incurred his debt, as we do; but that, for the sake of Him who was to redeem her and us upon the Cross, to her the debt was remitted by anticipation, on her the sentence was not carried out, except indeed as regards her natural death, for she died when her time came, as others [Note 5]. All this we teach, but we deny that she had original sin; for by original sin we mean, as I have already said, something negative, viz., this only, the deprivation of that supernatural unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had on their first formation,—deprivation and the consequences of deprivation. Mary could not merit, any more than they, the restoration of that grace; but it was restored to her by God's free bounty, from the very first moment of her existence, and thereby, in fact, she never came under the original curse, which consisted in the loss of it. And she had this special privilege, in order to fit her to become the Mother of her and our Redeemer, to fit her mentally, spiritually for it; so that, by the aid of the first grace, she might so grow in grace, that, when the Angel came and her Lord was at hand, she might be "full of grace," prepared as far as a creature could be prepared, to receive Him into her bosom.

Regarding Newman's devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, remember that he included praying the Rosary everyday in his short guide to perfection:

If you ask me what you are to do in order to be perfect, I say, first—Do not lie in bed beyond the due time of rising; give your first thoughts to God; make a good visit to the Blessed Sacrament; say the Angelus devoutly; eat and drink to God’s glory; say the Rosary well; be recollected; keep out bad thoughts; make your evening meditation well; examine yourself daily; go to bed in good time, and you are already perfect.

He also wrote a series of "Meditations on the Litany of Loreto" for the month of May, dividing the titles of Mary in that litany according to her Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation, her Dolours or Sorrows, and her Assumption. In a "Short Service for Rosary Sunday" Newman demonstrated his love for the Blessed Virgin Mary:

IN Jesus Christ is the fullness of the Godhead with all its infinite sanctity. In Mary is reflected the sanctity of Jesus, as by His grace it could be found in a creature.

Mary, as the pattern both of maidenhood and maternity, has exalted woman’s state and nature, and made the Christian virgin and the Christian mother understand the sacredness of their duties in the sight of God.

Her very image is as a book in which we may read at a glance the mystery of the Incarnation, and the mercy of the Redemption; and withal her own gracious perfections also, who was made by her Divine Son the very type of humility, gentleness, fortitude, purity, patience, love.

What Christian mother can look upon her image and not be moved to pray for gentleness, watchfulness, and obedience like Mary’s? What Christian maiden can look upon her without praying for the gifts of simplicity, modesty, purity, recollection, gentleness such as hers?

Who can repeat her very name without finding in it a music which goes to the heart, and brings before him thoughts of God and Jesus Christ, and heaven above, and fills him with the desire of those graces by which heaven is gained?

Hail then, great Mother of God, Queen of Saints, Royal Lady clothed with the sun and crowned with the stars of heaven, whom all generations have called and shall call blessed. We will take our part in praising thee in our own time and place with all the redeemed of our Lord, and will exalt thee in the full assembly of the saints and glorify thee in the Heavenly Jerusalem.

Amen.

The Blessed Virgin Mary and Her Mother

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the Catholic Church we celebrate three births: the Solemnity of the Nativity of Our Savior Jesus Christ, his mother's, and St. John the Baptist's. We celebrate Mary's nativity nine months after we celebrated her Immaculate Conception.

According to the Protoevangelicum of St. James, the names of Mary's parents were Joachim and Anne. St. Anne is one of my patron saints.

As England, through Duns Scotus, heralded the dogma of Mary's Immaculate Conception (freedom from original sin through the free gift and grace of God), England also developed devotion to St. Anne early on, as this study demonstrates:

the cult of St. Anne was so closely connected with that of the Virgin Mary, especially at the beginning, that it is not easy to tell where the one leaves off and the other begins. In the Eastern church the cult of Anne herself may go back as far as c. 550, when Justinian built a church in Constantinople in her honor. The earliest sign of her veneration in the West is an eighth-century fresco in the church of Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome, which shows her with a halo, holding the infant Mary. But not until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is there unmistakable evidence that the Western church was honoring St. Anne in her own right, rather than just an adjunct to Mary. During those centuries returning crusaders and pilgrims from the East brought relics of Anne to a number of churches, including most famously those at Apt, in Provence, Ghent, and Chartres. By 1300 at least five important English monastic foundations were also claiming to have relics of Anne, and dozens of additional shrines, altars, and chapels had been dedicated to her, both in England and on the Continent.

Liturgical commemorations of Anne in the West seem to have followed a similar course of development, except that monastic houses in England played a more central role. The story of Joachim and Anne received at least passing mention in the liturgy for one of the oldest annual feasts of Mary, the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8 in Western calendars), which was included in the Sacramentary of Gelasius (c. 700) and firmly established in Anglo-Saxon England by the ninth or tenth century. Anne's role tended to take on more importance when an annual feast was added to celebrate the Conception of the Virgin (observed exactly nine months earlier - i.e., December 8). There is good evidence that the Conception was being commemorated at Winchester, Exeter, and Canterbury before the Norman Conquest, and this feast day was revived in the twelfth century through the efforts of Benedictine writers like Eadmer of Canterbury and Anselm of Bury, although it became generally established in England only after 1328 (when it was made obligatory for the whole Province of Canterbury) and was not clearly mandated for the Church as a whole until 1476 (when Pope Sixtus IV confirmed the Council of Basel's ruling on the matter). England also preceded most of the Continent in instituting a separate feast day for Anne herself (July 26). The date traditionally associated with the adoption of this feast is 1382, the year in which Pope Urban VI authorized its celebration throughout England, but it was already being celebrated in the twelfth century in some of the great English monastic churches, most notably those at Worcester and Evesham.

The great flowering of Anne's cult among the laity occurred between about 1300 and the Council of Trent in the mid sixteenth century. By 1540 there were at least 40 medieval churches and chapels under her patronage in England, the majority of which had been dedicated or rededicated to her during the previous two centuries. She also had major shrines at Buxton (Derbyshire) and Wood-Plumpton (Lancashire), and was frequently chosen by prosperous laymen and women as patron saint of their guilds and recipient of special bequests and offerings. As Gail Gibson has shown, such devotion to her seems to have been unusually strong in East Anglia. Many churches had cycles of paintings or tapestries illustrating key scenes from her legend, or portraits of the Holy Kinship that showed Anne surrounded by her daughters and grandsons. . . .

Please read the rest there.

The painting above is by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the Pre-Raphaelites.

England and the Blessed Virgin Mary

Today is the memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, in both the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches (it's called The Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple in the Orthodox Churches). In fact, the Eastern Orthodox celebrated the feast before the Western Church, based upon the Protoevangelium of James. More about the feast here.

On such a great day, it seemed appropriate to draw your attention to this commentary in The Catholic Herald, "How England Took Flesh":

Walsingham was ranked with Rome, Jerusalem and Santiago de Compostela in medieval times, and was the only pilgrimage shrine entirely devoted to the Mother of God. Richard II – in an act commemorated in the stunning Wilton Diptych, a treasure of the National Gallery – dedicated England to Our Lady as her “dos” or gift or donation or “dowry”. There is also papal approval or confirmation of this title. Pope Leo XIII asked the English bishops in 1893 to consecrate their country to Mary, the Mother of God, recalling the “singular title” the land enjoyed of being “Mary’s Dowry”.For many, though, such talk belongs in the past: it is redolent of a “Faith of our Fathers” vision of England, incorporating a lament for a lost medieval unity, a dash of Chesterton and his “rolling English road”, and a kind of Marian devotion which many find rather flowery and excessive. . . .

Marian devotion is not something excessive or affected: it is part of the essence of our faith. And England’s destiny seems to be especially closely connected with Our Lady. Christ we know cared for his mother so deeply, remembering her in his agony to ensure she was cared for by St John. He can hardly have put a whole country specifically into her care as her own possession – for a “dowry” is that part of a man’s estate inalienably set aside for her use alone – without a very clear purpose. No other nation on earth claims this. What is it for?

To understand why England’s status as the Dowry of Mary is so important, we must go back to the beginnings of the nation. Legally speaking, there was no England until the 10th century. There was Offa of Mercia with his coin Rex Anglorum in the 8th century. There were the “English folk”. But we have to wait for the 10th century for “Engle-land”, or the land of the “Angles”, to have official, documentary recognition.

But all histories proclaim there was an England before this: an ecclesial England, a spiritual entity and reality. Schoolchildren still learn of the Synod of Whitby of 665/6, which ensured that the Roman rather than the Celtic method of church administration prevailed.

Please read the rest there.

Illustration: Limbourg Brothers, Miniature from Les Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, c. 1415 (Public Domain).

Katherine of Aragon and Our Lady of Caversham

Today is the Feast of the Triumph or the Exaltation of the Cross and tomorrow is the memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows, but in 1538, it was a sad day. The Tudor Society reports the event briefly in its almanac for this week:

The Destruction of the Shrine of Our Lady of Caversham, near Reading, by Dr John London, on the orders of Henry VIII. The shrine had been established in 1106.

On the website of the Catholic Parish of Our Lady and Saint Anne in Caversham, part of the Archdiocese of  Birmingham provides more detail:

Throughout the Middle Ages the fame of Our Lady of Caversham spread throughout the country and pilgrims came not only to pray, but also to present votive offerings to the Shrine, so that by the 15th century the statue was plated in silver. In 1439 Isabella Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick, left 20lbs of gold to be made into a crown for the statue. Kings and Queens of England travelled up river from Windsor to visit the Shrine, the last being Queen Catherine of Aragon who came on July 17th 1532 to pray to Our Blessed Lady while Henry VIII pressured her for a divorce.

Henry’s break with Rome meant the destruction of all religious houses and shrines so, on 14th September 1538, Dr. John London, the government agent, arrived at Caversham and in a single day closed down the Shrine, stripped it bare of all its religious property and ended over five hundred years of religious devotion. The statue was sent up to Thomas Cromwell in London where it was burnt.

It almost seems that Henry VIII ordered the destruction of the shrine himself because Katherine of Aragon had gone there to pray for Our Lady's intercession in the cause of their marriage.

The museum in Reading has a photograph of the foundation stone of the new shrine being placed in October of 1958:

A revival of devotion to Our Lady of Caversham began in 1897 and in 1958 the parish priest, Fr. William O’Malley, decided that a new shrine should be built. A stone chapel was built and a large oak statue of Our Lady and child purchased. The renewed shrine of Our Lady of Caversham was dedicated by Archbishop Francis Grimshaw of Birmingham in 1958.

This photograph was taken for the Berkshire Chronicle but was not published.

Christopher Haigh and David Loades collaborated on an article about "The Fortunes of the Shrine of St. Mary of Caversham in the  1981 issue of Oxoniensia,  the annual journal of Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society (OAHS).

Our Lady of Caversham, pray for us!

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us!

The Rosary and Anachronism

I noticed this post on the English Historical Fiction Authors page about the use of beads in prayer and the term "rosary":

The image of a Catholic kneeling in prayer, rosary in hand seems timeless. Having a Dark Ages character rub the beads while murmuring a prayer wouldn't be an anachronism, would it?

Yes and no. Christians, and people of other faiths such as Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, have used beads to keep track of the prayers they were repeating. In the fourth century, Egyptian Abbot Paul used 300 pebbles that he would drop. (Would picking up all those little stones count as penance, too?)

By the seventh century, at least some of the faithful used strings of beads.

The author notes that the term "Rosary" was not used in English until 1547. 

Reading this post reminded me of an historical anachronism I found in a novel, Leonardo's Swans, set in Renaissance Italy. A character prays the Rosary and ends the decades with the Fatima prayer:  "O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those in most need of Your Mercy". That prayer dates from the early twentieth century so a person in that era would not have added it to the recitation of the Rosary.

Another note for thinking about how Catholics have prayed the Rosary through the centuries: the Ave Maria ("Hail Mary") was just the two verses from St. Luke's Gospel, the first chapter (28 and 42) with the addition of the name Mary: Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee (the Angel's greeting) and Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb (her cousin Elizabeth's greeting). The second part--Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death--was a later addition, as was the name Jesus at the end of the second verse.

Anne Winston-Allen wrote Stories of the Rose, published by Penn State University Press, to trace the development and popularity of the Rosary prayer throughout the medieval period. Nathan Mitchell picks up the story of the Rosary and its importance to Catholic identity during the Counter- or Catholic Reformation period in his book The Mystery of the Rosary.