 This is the Bellarmine Lecture, an annual lecture which has been offered in the university one form or another for probably 40 years now. And this evening it's the turn of Dorian Llewellyn, a distinguished Jesuit scholar as it's always a distinguished Jesuit scholar who offers the Bellarmine Lecture. So Dorian Llewellyn as you might guess from the difficulty that non-kelts have of pronouncing and the impossibility of spelling his name is a Welshman. He's also a member of the California province of the Society of Jesus, though his current appointment is in teaching systematic theology at Heathrop College, the Jesuit School of Philosophy and Theology that's part of the University of London. Dorian Llewellyn read English at Cambridge, read in quotation marks which is the English way for saying he spent three years doing nothing else but read English at Cambridge, not his fault, which means he spent three years doing little else of a scholarly nature except read English. He also holds degrees in theology from the Universidad Pontificada Salamanca and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. He did his PhD work at the University of Wales. He is taught in universities in the United Kingdom and the United States including the University of Wales, Stanford University and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a sister Jesuit school where he was founding director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute and also director of Catholic Studies. He's also held visiting chairs of theology at Marquette University and Seattle University to more Jesuit schools and he is currently president of the International Society of Jesuit Ecumenists. Professor Llewellyn is the author of two books, Sacred Space, Chosen People, Land and National Identity in Welsh Spirituality and more recently, Toward a Catholic Theology of Nationality published in 2010, which was described by Professor Peter Farn of Georgetown University as, and I quote, a veritable intellectual tour de force. The theology of nationality is an unusual area of research but I think fascinating and important. We look forward this evening to hearing Father Llewellyn explore the roles of the Virgin Mary as both champion of empires and mother of the church, not infrequently in skirmishes between church and state. As a cultural icon, the Virgin plays a complex and ambiguous role, at times affirming the status quo yet equally disturbing and challenging it. So as your reward for braving the weather and being here, I invite you to join me in welcoming Father Dorian Llewellyn to give this year's Bellamon Lecture. As a priest, I always note that the good Catholics always sit in the back. So I do have a large number of images to show you tonight. Some of them are rather small, so you might like to consider moving forward at just a couple of rows, you could actually work out what's going on. So thank you Nancy, thank you, Elizabeth. So here we go. On March the 26th, 2013, the front page of the tablet, the weekly paper of the Diocese of Brooklyn featured an image of Mary. Free prints of this picture were distributed to all parishes in support of the US Catholic Bishop's Fortnite for Freedom for Campaign, a phrase which is a code for a culture clash over the respective domains of church and government. Now, this was pre-Twitter, but the editor's choice caused something of a small storm in the Catholic blogosphere, particularly in progressive circles. I think, however, it would not have given the theological heebie-jeebies to many Catholics and Orthodox in other places today or indeed to earlier generations of Christians. And by earlier, I mean the previous 1700 years or so. And in fact, calling up the Virgin Mary in this battle of state and church hierarchies is in fact a well-established norm. And the rest of my lecture is explaining why that is the case. Christian thought and cultural endeavor has, an endeavor has quarried to the max the very few biblical episodes in which the mother of Jesus appears. At Cana, she intercedes with Jesus on behalf of others. In John's account of the crucifixion, she is put in a maternal relationship with the beloved disciple. Now these two biblical scenes in particular underpin some visceral root and branch convictions. Mary can be prayed too. And with a fierce maternal intensity, she is going to protect those who seek her help. This papyrus fragment, which is dated roughly to 250 AD, contains the earliest version of a prayer addressed to the Virgin Mary, which Catholics know as beneath thy protection. There you have the translation. And in the word on line three, the word Theotokos, Mary is addressed in Greek as the birth giver of God, the mother of God. So the writer of this prayer is assuming that she can mediate between earth and heaven and that she will intervene in human history. That religious instinct has produced an immense transnational edifice, which incorporates liturgy and literature, theology and architecture, prayer and politics. Mary's title, Mother of God, the one who gave birth to the one who was God is fundamentally not about her, but about Jesus. So if Mary truly gave birth to him then, as he was really a human, if she is the God birther, then her son was divine. The problem is, how can Jesus be both and the precise relationship between his humanity and his divinity? Differences of opinion came to over the matter, came to the head in Constantinople and the dispute involved bishops and emperors, women and men, monks and mobs. The city of Constantinople had opened for business as the capital of Constantine's new Christian empire in 330. Unlike the first Rome, this city had very little cultural baggage from paganism. New Rome was an entirely Christian polity and gradually it came to be considered as a reflection of heaven. Court theologians had quickly painted the emperor's role as being inseparably political and sacred. He was the earthly representation of the ruler of the courts of heaven. In the year 428, the emperor Theodosius II appointed Assyrian monk Nestorius as Bishop of Constantinople. Now, Nestorius argued that that title Theotokos, the mother of God, meant that the whole Godhead had been born as a man, an idea which he found deeply repugnant because he held it would make Mary equal to God or even superior to God. Nestorius's reservations might actually have been a matter of style as well as substance. The homilies of his contemporary, Saint Cyril of the Bishop of Alexandria, addressed to Mary, praised her lavishly. Through you, he says, churches are established throughout the world. The people's alleged conversion. Through you, the dead rise. Through you, sovereign's reign. This rhetoric could easily imply that Mary is an agent in her own right. Nestorius's suggestion that Mary should be addressed instead as Christotokos, the mother of the Christ or Anthropotokos, mother of the man, was bitterly opposed by his wily arch nemesis Cyril, and just as importantly, he managed to infuriate the redoubtable empress, Virgin Pulcheria, who sought to live her life in imitation of Mary. Nestorius's opponents saw in his rejection, the Virgin's title, a refusal to accept the unity of the human and the divine in Jesus. But equally, Nestorius was also refuting a deep-seated voice of the faithful, so to speak. By that point, Christians had been praying to the Virgin Mary as mother of God for at least two centuries in Egypt, which was a Christian community far more ancient than the newcomer, the newcomer, Constantinople. Tempers flared publicly, and as they did, the unity of the church and empire were threatened. So, to settle the dispute in 431, Theodosius convoked a church council at Ephesus. Now, how the relationship between the human and the divine in Jesus actually worked was more than just a matter of really obstruc, obscure metaphysics. Because really what was it about, what it was about was the connection between belonging to Christ and being in the world, between religious loyalties and secular citizenship, between the role of bishops and the power of rulers. So, the council anathematized Nestorius, the emperor deposed him, and Mary's title Theotokos was affirmed. The mother of God and her devotees had triumphed. Devotion to Mary grew inexorably. New churches required new images to decorate them. New Marian feasts in the church calendar produced new homilies and new hymns. One of these hymns, the Akathistos hymn, is a triumph of imaginative imagery, deployed to show the virgin at the very, very heart of salvation. In one of the first verses, the city of Constantinople itself addresses Mary. To you, our leader in battle and defender, I, your city, delivered from sufferings, ascribe hymns of victory and thanksgiving. Since you are invincible in power, free me from all kinds of dangers. Mary is portrayed as God's hypermachos strategos, that is the general who is mighty in war. She has the responsibility of defending the city. The mother of God looks after the state. The Greek word for hymn of victory or prize of victory is nikhetiria. And that was the name also of the ancient festival of the Greek goddess of victory, nike, or as we know her, Nike. Byzantinists told that this verse of this hymn reflects the conviction that Mary herself had saved the city from invasion by the pagan people called the Avars in the year six to six. Now the siege of the Avars was a foundational event in a key self understanding of the city and empire. Constantinople was the virgin's own dwelling and its inhabitants, her chosen people. Constantinople gathered substance as a holy city amongst other ways by acquiring relics. Relics were far more than just venerable objects. They were extensions of sacred persons they were connected to and so they held the power to heal and to safeguard from danger. They represent in the words of Peter Brown, the availability of the holy. The more and the more important the relics, the greater the holiness and Constantinople held a fabled number of them. None was more treasured than the robe of Mary which was enthroned at the church called Blakernay. One early hymn describes Constantinople as quote, guarding the precious garment by which it is guarded all the more, saying, lady, always preserve me like a maid servant under your arms in the way in which you have already delivered me from the sword. Since her robe, her garment was there, people felt that the mother of God was physically accessible to them. Even if her body no longer remained on earth, the faithful could visit her by visiting the church which held her robe. So by the seventh century, the city contained more than 100 churches and chapels dedicated to Mary, rendering it into what one writer called the Theotokopolis, the city of the mother of God. It was sacred geography. The Byzantines thought of the Virgin as living with them. Belief in her power to defend her city was tested by and proved in military context. Now, the Byzantine chronicles describe many sieges in each of which case, the Theotokos was held to have intervened sometimes very concretely indeed. Contemporary accounts of that siege by the Avars describe her as running on the ramparts, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the enemies brandishing her sword, inspiring them to redden the waters of the city with the blood of the pagans. A host of invaders was massacred on her front door, right on the front porch of the Blechernai church. The tale grew in the telling. Accounts of the same event, but centuries later relate how a storm blew up which caused the attackers to abandon the siege. The leader of the pagan Avars, the Hagan, announced that nobody can win against the mother of God. Her victories resemble those of the war goddess, Athena Promachos, whose ancient statue still stood in the form of the city. And in every case, salvation came from the robe, the sacrament and the symbol of salvation. During a siege in 860 by the Slavs, more than 200 enemy ships were threatening the capital. The emperor, Michael III, desperately prostrated himself on the floor of the Blechernai church, begging the virgins' help. Bishop Fotius of Constantinople solemnly processed Mary's robe around the walls, as he dipped its hem in the Bosphorus, there he is in the bottom right there, as he dipped its hem in the Bosphorus, a sudden storm arose in destroying the invaders' flotilla. Fotius preached a sermon of victory. The whole city was carrying with me herraiment for the repulse of the besiegers. This most holy garment embraced the walls, and the foes inexplicably showed their back. The city put itself, put it around itself, and the camp of the enemies was broken. Mary's robe was a powerful cloak of invincibility. The emperor Romanos Lecapenos wrapped himself in it before battle with the attacking Bulgarians a century later. 100 years after that, Emperor Alexios I carried the robe into battle with him. Under Mary's protection, state and church were free from danger. Images of Mary date from the second century, and it is likely that icons were used in both domestic settings and public liturgy from the very beginnings of the city. Now, Byzantine image theory holds that an image actually participates in the being of the person it represents, and therefore in their power as well. So at the Avar siege, the emperor Heraclius had been away on a military campaign. Images of Mary, with Jesus, were put up on the gates of the walls, standing in, as it were, for the emperor, keeping the city safe. Holiness is shown particularly by miracles. That Blachernei church would in time become home to a miraculous icon of the virgin and the child. One 12th century Spanish visitor relates how every Friday evening, to large crowd, the image performed what he called the usual miracle. The veil in front of the icon was lifted, and the face of the virgin became animated or inspirited. The rare absence of this miracle portended bad things for the state. In 1107, the emperor Alexios Komnenos went on a military campaign in the middle of the week, before he had received the blessing of the miracle. On hearing that the usual miracle had failed to take place, he and his army trekked all the way back to the capital immediately, and the miracle resumed, confirming the legitimacy of his campaign against the crusaders. Political and military success signaled God is with us. There are hundreds of standard variants of Byzantine icons of Mary, all of which portray Mary with Jesus. From the ninth century onwards, they frequently show Jesus held in her arms as the mother would hold a child. They indicate her maternal human qualities. The Hodegetria, that is the icon of the Hodegon monastery, was the most revered of the imperial icons, because it was believed to have been painted from life by Luke the evangelist. In 971 to celebrate, in the triumphal procession, to celebrate his defeat of the Bulgarian czar, Boris, John Semiskes, the emperor, had the image of Mary placed in his imperial chariot. The Hodegetria, this implied, was the true military commander and victor. His grandson, John II Komnenos, adopted the Hodegetria as his personal palladium. He took copies of the icon, his campaigns, to secure the borders of empire. And on his imperial carnage, the Theotokos Hodegetria, there on the right, herself crowns John. This is a motif which evoked a really ancient motif of taking back to the time of Constantinople, when who where Constantine was portrayed as being crowned by a goddess called the Tuche, the goddess of good fortune, whose own crown were the city walls themselves. But the Theotokos did not intervene when the Frankish crusaders sacked her city in 1204. The Blecherna icon and its usual miracle at that point disappear from history. But the other icon, the Hodegetria survived. When a native dynasty was reestablished in 1261, the icon once again led a triumphant procession into Constantinople. As the Byzantines sought to erase the shameful memory of Latin conquest, the icon of Mary was at the center of the memory of the city, a star in the most grandiose religious and state spectacles. Over the course of a millennium then, in the imagination of both church and state, Mary had become to be a war-like protective figure, a mother who was tender to her children, but implacable with their enemies. One contemporary Byzantinist describes her as, quote, dynamic activist, a majestic militant grandmother. But for much of Byzantium's history, in the East, a new star with a crescent moon had been rising ever since the first Arab forays into the empire in the 630s. The empire dwindled. 14th century inhabitants of Constantinople claimed that, quote, the Hodegetria, the protectors of our city will be enough without anybody else to secure our welfare, end quote. The faithful city-state was a holy sanctuary, almost like Mary's body. It was ever virgin, inviolate. Its walls were intact. Its gates were sealed against impure invaders, but in 1453, the walls of Constantinople were breached. Ottoman forces entered the church of the Hodegetria. They pulled the icon down off the altar and to get at its precious golden frame, they hacked it into four and threw the remains on a bonfire. The dismemberment of the Hodegetria symbolized the end of Mary's patronage of second Rome, but not of the militant virgin. Some of those gutsy convictions have remained important features of the cult of Mary throughout the centuries. These ideas are subtle and remarkably durable and ubiquitous. The virgin is interested in whole peoples and places as well as individuals. She is active in political as well as spiritual warfare. She will intercede, especially for her devotees and a fire, and she will protect both church and state. But when church and state are in conflict with each other, then she has definite favorites. Now, at this point, I wanna put us on a fast plane with a rather eccentric route to get us home on time. So we go, first of all, to Russia, which inherited many of the spiritual dispositions of Constantinople. According to legend, the evangelist Luke also painted this icon, the mother of God, of Vladimir. In fact, it's probably of 12th century Byzantine origin. It became the perduring symbol of the survival of the Russian people as a people, and indeed of orthodoxy as Russia's faith. Its origin legend relates the waves of fear that the icon itself stirred up in the Tatar armies of Tamerlin the Great. Accounts displaying nationalist, theocratic, and xenophobic sympathies show the hand of clerical chroniclers. These associations attach themselves to the icon like another coat of varnish. This icon, the Vladimir Miskaia, remained in the Kremlin for centuries as a protective presence. It even survived the Bolshevik bonfire of vanities. Today, it is enthroned not in a church, but in the government-owned Tradyakov Gallery in Moscow. There are other Russian icons which are venerated as nationally significant, but not necessarily by the state. One blackened icon was discovered in the village church of Kolomskoye on the very day that Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The village priest was given to understand in prayer that the mother of God had taken up the crown that had fallen from the head of the Tsar. Henceforth, the icon itself would reign until the Tsars returned to the Russian throne. Now, the Virgin can work on either side of political authority and can challenge the collaborations between church and state. Russian neo-nationalism, as you may know, is strongly linked with orthodoxy. In the year 2011, a relic that had once lived in Constantinople, the Virgin's Sincture, was sent from Mount Athos to Moscow. President Putin greeted it at the airport with a protocol due to a head of state. Some two million Russians stood in line for hours in subzero temperatures to venerate Mary's belt and to seek her intercession. But in 2012, the Pussy Riot protest at Holy Saviour of Cathedral also appealed to Mary. They sang, become a feminist, we pray thee, join our protest, Holy Virgin, mother of God, banish Putin. The entreaty was ironic, but at the same time, it was inscribed in a millennial liturgical tradition. In orthodox liturgies, in the Sundays of the middle of Lent, that Byzantine hymn, the Akathist is prayed, and Mary is addressed as mighty leader in battle. Now, at this point, we are just going to fly low above Poland for some quick Instagrams. In the year 1655, at the height of his campaign against the Swedish Lutheran forces, King Jan Kazimierz made his public vow before a wonder-working picture of Our Lady of Grace in the Cathedral of Lvov. He swore, great mother of God, I choose thee as patron of myself and as queen of all my states, and to offer my kingdom of Poland to thy special care and protection, so that this sorely tried and confused realm of mine may withstand the foes of the holy Catholic Church." And the quote. He won the war, or rather, they won the war, and Mary got a new title, Queen of Poland. Yet between the year 1795 and 1918, there was no kingdom of her to be queen of. Yet, Mary's queenship relativized the power of the Russian, Prussian, and Austro-Hungarian states. The queen of Poland symbolized resistance through a heavenly citizenship, an eschatological version of nationality, and it fueled the hope of restoration of the Polish state. During the years of Soviet communism, devotions to the queen of Poland remained strong, both in Poland and in the diaspora. Catholicism coalesced with patriotism. Mary was the champion, not of the state, but of the nation and the church, and it is only against the backlash of the thousand-year history of Poland and Mary that we can fully understand the life and the thought of St. John Paul II. Now, Poland is far from being the only example where the boundaries are rather fuzzy between the mother of God, mother church, the mother of the church, and the motherland. In 1638, in hopes that his pregnant wife would give birth to a son, rather than a daughter, Louis XIII of France, too, made avow to Our Lady of the Assumption, quote, consecrating to her our own self, the state, our crown, and our subjects, in treating her to diligently defend this kingdom against the endeavors of its enemies. But the French Revolution was to dissolve that consecration to Mary. The fiercest battles fought on French soil where Mary were involved were not, in fact, military, but cultural and political. The early architects of the French Revolution embarked on an energetic project of decrystianization, enthroning briefly, for example, a young lady dressed as the goddess of reason in the cathedral of Notre Dame of Paris. After the ideological repositioning of the Napoleonic era, France became a social war zone, with church state skirmishes inevitable and frequent. But so often did the Virgin appear in 19th century France that that period was dubbed the Marian Century. France's claim to be the eldest daughter of the church dated back some 1400 years, but it now became known as Lorraine de Marie, the kingdom of the Virgin. The lady who appeared to the peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirou, at Lourdes, identified herself in local language as the Immaculate Conception. This was read as an earthy affirmation of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception four years earlier by Pius IX. Now, the fact that Marie had chosen to do this on French soil directly challenged the Republican ideal of laïcité, that is state secularism. Art Lourdes, Marie, Refuge of the Sick, could also be Marie, the Refuge of Catholic France, or at least the symbol of true France. In the battle for the soul of the French, apparitions and popular acclaim were particularly effective ammunition. Yaroslav Pelikan writes, quote, neither the intellectual defense of Christian revelation by 19th century theology, nor the political defense of the institutional church against the anti-clericalism of the time was as effective a campaign, particularly among the common people as the one that the Virgin Mary waged. Rome is the head of the church, but Lourdes is the heart. Aspects of identity, ideological, geographical, and religious are particularly likely to fuse under fire and to front lines. From the time of the rise of Islam, Christians have sought Mary's aid against Muslims. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 was the turning point in the Spanish Reconquista. To repel the Moors, the Virgin Mary appeared in the sky with St. James, who got the title the Moor Slayer. In preparation for battle against the Ottomans and hoping to regain the Christian control of the Eastern Mediterranean, Pope Pius V promulgated a rosary campaign. The naval victory at Lepanto in 1571 was attributed to Mary's direct intercession. And sometimes she interceded very directly. Muslim Turks besieging the Ukrainian Monastery of Pochaev in 1675 were confronted with a host of armed angels with the mother of God holding her robe over the monastery to shield it. The arrows that the Turkish forces shot to the angels turned back in mid-flight and killed the archers. Do not mess with Mary. Now that Virgin warrior imaginary also informed Spanish expansion into the New World. Fernández de Oviedo's 1526 Historia General de las Indias, the first chronicle of the Spanish conquista, describes how the Virgin Mary seated on a white horse appeared in battles against the Aztecs. Again, in company of St. James the Moor Slayer, sometimes referred to as St. James the Indian Slayer, she cast dust in the faces of the Aztecs and blinded them. A feat repeated in some 10 other battles. New Spain became eventually the land of Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Now, time precludes spending lingering time and lingering in her company, even if she is Empress of the Americas. But I just want to add that the Guadalupe figure cannot be understood without reference to everything I am talking about tonight. So finally, to the New World, with its own founding legends and its own imperial capital, Washington, D.C. In the city on the hill, with its puritan myths told in the accents of Exodus, there seemed once again to be no room at the infirmary. That other dominant gene in our American psyche, the Enlightenment, felt that Marian devotion smelt a little too much of sheep and of the wrong sort of savages, the ignoble ones. So where the church of Santa Sofia had had the Theotokos enthroned in a gilded dome, and where Catholic European art portrayed as one of its favorite themes, the Assumption of Mary, the Dome of America's capital had instead the apotheosis of Washington, who is seated above the goddess of freedom, who is busy hacking down kingly power and tyranny. But gathered in Baltimore in 1846, the bishops of America put the United States under the patronage of Mary, under her title of the Immaculate Conception. Now this choice combined ultra-montane loyalty with a universal Catholic devotion. And it also sought to construct another alternative narrative to the myth of progress, to those quote, pilgrim feet who stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare of freedom beat across the wilderness. Lands that would later become U.S. territory were in fact already Mary's domain. In 1760, Clement the 13th had placed Georgia, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California under the patronage of the Immaculate Conception. So before there was an us, before there was a U.S., this land was her land, this land was our land, our Catholic land. 19th century Catholics sought many ways of finding their place in national memory. Now one of the thing was to do was to write histories and our historians traced the fingerprints of the Virgin in the flourishing of the Republic. One report, for example, describes how Ursuline nuns prayed to Our Lady of Prompt Sucker the night before the Battle of New Orleans. The following day, 2,600 British troops were caught off guard by a fog and wandered into a swamp where American muskets easily picked them off. Oh, victorious general mighty in battle. It wasn't Andrew Jackson. Over the course of the 19th century, immigration transformed American Catholicism. By the year 1916, three quarters of the U.S. Catholic population of more than 15 million were Czechs, French Canadians, Germans, Irish Italians, Lithuanians, Mexicans, Poles, Slovaks and Ukrainians. Creating a Catholic unum out of this pluribus was a matter of practical survival. Anti-Catholicism has a long history in America. The hostility of the know nothings was as much religious as it was ethnic. And among the clearest markers of ethno-Catholic difference was Mary. A project to build a large church in the nation's capital in honor of the nation's patroness was envisaged in 1919. Its promoters sought to secure an eminent place among the capital's great monuments, one that would make Catholic claims on civic space and national awareness. Said a 1922 article, quote, the shrine is by no means intended to rival the capital. Architecturally rather, it complements it. Its grandly proportioned mass will be as manifestly ecclesiastical in motive as that of the capital is secular. In other words, separate but equal. In the minds of the church's founders, the church's design and decoration were an apologia for the paleo-Christian oranges of origins of Catholicism. The low ceilings and the many small chapels of the lower church, our Lady of the Catacombs, recall Rome, the foundation of faith. For the upper church, the main building, in contradistinction to the English Gothic pastiche of the so-called National Cathedral, they invoked the ancient and expansive world of Constantinople. Some 50 chapels, statues, oratories, and mosaics are each dedicated to particular ancestral devotions to our Lady of Somewhere or of Something. And at the same time, in the words of its promoters, it is America's church. The Basilica was finally completed in 1958. It's sought to convey that Catholics were as fully American as anybody else. The program issued for the opening of the shrine featured on its front cover a painting by the Benedictine brother Raphael Fistera. Below the virgin is an American flag. On the left, just beneath the capital, a bishop points to Mary. On the right, just beneath the national shrine, a mother looks up reverently at the virgin. At the bottom of the image, two American Indian women hold up a map of the U.S. They petition for the nation's protection, their wooden idols cast down. Around this time, Cardinal Spellman expressed similar sentiments in dreadful poetry. America or America, thou art dedicated to Mary. She conquer of evil, conquers evil for thee, who art resisting evil. Sing thou the song of souls, the magnificat of Mary, the magnificat of America. The evil that required resistance by both church and union was communism. As battle lines emerged between West and East, the millions who believed in Our Lady of Fatima saw the Cold War on Earth as a reflection of a war in heaven. Mary, according to some, also appeared in the land of the free. In 1950, in Nesita, Wisconsin, Mrs. Mary Ann Hoofe received a number of apparitions. Through her visionary, Mary gave a message to thousands gathered at the Van Hoofe family farm. Quote, the enemy of God is all over America. They have Satan in their hearts. The black clouds are coming over to America. Alaska is the first stepping stone. Remember the Pacific coast, the coast. The completion of the National Shrine seemed to some to come at the tail end of that long century of Mary. Thomas Tweed calls the attempt to forge through the shrine a consolidated American national Catholicism centered on Mary, a failed endeavor. Its wishes and hopes expressed in subjunctive architecture. With the changes wrought by the Second Vatican Council, devotional Marian piety was an embarrassing relic of an atavistic past for some people. The only holdouts being conservative and ethnic readouts. The times, they were changing. But the church in America was being rapidly reshaped not only by the Aggiornamento of Vatican II. Mary held ways of immigrants under her protection as they crossed the border and supported them in their battles for justice and their struggles for a better life. Dolores Huerta referred to Guadalupe as a symbol of faith, hope, and leadership. She has been incorporated into everything we do. I don't think I could have survived without her. Robert Orsey says the figure of Mary, quote, is refracted through the prism of the needs and fears of the people who approach her, end quote. Her DNA is protean. So today's American Mary includes Guadalupe, mother of the vulnerable. She is also home girl heroine of Latina pride. She is a pop icon. She is pro-life defender of the unborn. As la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre in Miami, she is focus of Cuban identity and she blends into the goddess Orchun of Santería. She is at the same time feminist icon and also focus of apocalyptic traditionalism. Our Lady of Everywhere and Everything. In all these cases, one ancient gene keeps on appearing. Mary is bound to a cause, a campaign, in which there is an us versus a them. As that hymn, the archithist praises her. She is a leader in battle and a defender and the election goes both ways. Mary is chosen as protectant protractors and she chooses to gather people together to deliver them from peril. Note, she gathers people together. The link between Mary and a believing community appears in scripture. First of all, in that crucifixion scene, in John, but also in acts where Mary prays with the community of Jerusalem as they await the coming of the Holy Spirit. Now, there is a sense in which the place of Mary in a community, religious or secular, is something of a spiritual Rorsch test. Where the church is strong or where it seeks to be strong, we have what some people call Big Mary. Conversely, when Mary is put in the background like an embarrassing relative in a wedding picture or when she is photoshopped to look attractive to contemporary notions of theological propriety, then I wonder, does Catholicism lose something of the guts and the earthy mystery of the incarnation? Cardinal George once told his brother bishops that US citizens, even Catholics, are quote, culturally Calvinist. So an interventionist Mary who has definite ideas about who and what she favors and what she doesn't will likely disquiet some sensibilities. There is, I admit, something not awkward, naive, anachronistic and even disturbing about this Mary, like a Neanderthal trait which just won't go away. And that is precisely why I think it merits attention and the hermeneutics of careful discernment and rigorous respect. The image is actually entitled Our Lady of America, Queen of America. Many paintings by its artist, Joanne von Zwell, include religious and patriotic themes. Theologically, on the whole, her work is in the equivalent of folk art. That is, it's technically unsophisticated, but it is also highly evocative and with an eloquence that resides in its very naivety. Technical and conceptual simplicity reveals its underlying themes more clearly than a more sophisticated approach would have done. And precisely because of those reasons, we should not look upon it patronizingly. The reasons why it is discomforting for some are also worth reflecting upon. Popular religiosity is not only Latino. The words religiosidad popular can be translated as folk piety, but quite simply, they can also be translated as working class faith. And there is indeed something of the redneck in this Mary. The image repels, but it also compels, and it can stir hearts. And frankly, it questions my own established notions of theological and aesthetic decorum. At Ephesus, the title Theotokos was fought over viciously by all sectors of the populace, not merely clerics and intellectuals. What was at stake was the relationship between the things of this world and the world above. The impermeable wall between them or their mutual indwelling. So our Lady of America, this image, is one potential expression of the implications of the incarnation. What I think the scheme becomes questionable is that here we have a Mary who is not so much mother of the church as mother of the nation. And for us who are cultural Calvinists schooled in the separation of church and state, this image can take us back into uncomfortable old world territory or south of the Vorda, down Mexico way. But this American Mary is far from being unique. Our Lady of Everywhere can take local form, sometimes strangely so. von Sveil's painting is informed by the iconographic scheme of the Immaculate Conception which is formulated by the Spanish artist von Francisco Pacheco in the 17th century. This Mary on the left, however, does not introspect in humility, but rather she raises her eyes upwards intently in prayer. The stars on her rope, the American flag, echo the stars of her crown and they refer to the woman of Revelation 12. In that chapter, a dragon, the Roman state, threatens the woman's child, the fledgling church. Who and what might our Lady of America's robe, the flag, shelter? Against who or what is she protecting? In this year of mercy, we might remember the medieval motif called the Virgin of Mary or in which Mary shelters many people under her cloak. The children of the mother of God, the mother of mercy, may include rulers but her protection may also be sought against them. The title of the tablet, that other tablet, was religious freedom under siege. Please note the military metaphor. In an evocation of ancient patterns, the mighty leader in battle was being drafted in. Heavenly power invoked against the danger of civic invasion. The struggle here is not citizens of the empire versus invaders. It's not Christians against Muslims. Rather, the struggle is about competing visions of church and state and how they fit together. The early inhabitants of Constantinople would have read the front page of the tablet in a New York second. The cities rise and fall. And the names of kings come and go from the walls of Constantinople to our sea to shining sea. But the incarnational tensions remain the same and Mary is always in the middle. Beneath your compassion, we take refuge, rescue us, O Theotokos. Everybody in this room knows the words of God bless America, which are in fact the back cloth of Van Sveil's painting. The history spans continents and centuries and it involves a long-lived instinct that the eye of the land that I love might be somebody more than a US citizen. In 1976, the English writer Marina published a book, a landmark book. It was the first feminist deconstruction of the cult of the Virgin Mary. And she anticipated that soon, quote, the virgin will recede into legend, which will be emptied of moral significance and thus lose its present real powers to heal and harm. 40 years later, that prophecy has yet to be fulfilled. Personally, I'm not sure it ever will be. Thank you. So we have time for a few questions and we have a couple of microphones. So if you have something to ask, please raise your hand and we'll come by. Since Vatican I, we experienced. What? Vatican I, we experienced a deification of Mary that in some way, and I can see the year. I'm listening, yes. Okay, yeah, yeah. That in some way, especially for women, devalued her real experience as mother. And I'm wondering if you have anything you'd like to. Yes, it's an interesting question because that question of the deification of Mary, I would trace that observation. I would take back actually far before Vatican I. I'd take it back to Ephesus, in fact. At some point there's always been a certain amount of theological nervousness about that. Now what I find interesting, Jamie, about your comment there is that the category of how, what is the operative category for Mary? I think in the theological tradition, it actually is motherhood. But the sensibility of the question of whether that actually devalues women, I think that's a contemporary sensibility. I have to say that at the moment, I tend to think that there are two tensions within the study of Virgin Mary. One of which is what we call a Christo-typical one, and the other one is ecclesiotypical. Let me just unpack that theological jargon. One is that do you concentrate on the unique privileges of Mary? You know, the immaculate conception, the assumption of force, by her close association with Jesus. So in Vatican II, for example, what we find there is that is actually not there. In Vatican II, we get the church focus where he is actually Mary becomes mother of the church. Now I think in that second model, that is where you get a kind of, she's more like Elizabeth Johnson's book, it's truly our sister. I tend to think, however, that you don't get the church without the Christ, you don't get Christ without the church. So I think both perspectives are important. It may be, and I think I would agree, that I think there is a case for arguing that an excessive concentration on one actually leads to the denigration of the other. Yeah, I hope that's, yeah. Dorian? Yes. I mean, in some ways this is a very obvious question, but as I listen to this fascinating story, one way to describe it is the eclipse of Jesus Christ. So I mean, I think you mentioned Jesus twice, both in connection to what Mary said to him. What I wonder is, if you, you know, can you speculate on or talk about what is it that encourages the prioritization of devotion to Mary over devotion to Jesus Christ? That's very interesting. You know, one year I went on a little radio program for BBC when I went to Lord, and my companion there, or two of us, was a Presbyterian minister, and who was appalled by Lords, you know. I mean, she says it's all Mary, Mary, there's no Jesus. One of the theories that you could say that is in the, if you lose the dimensions of the Trinity, you know, then, which can, sort of in the history of devotion and theology, tends to happen somewhere in the Middle Ages. You get this figure where Jesus becomes the judge and Mary becomes the kind of the figure of mercy. So there are plenty of legends where, you know, people are going to go to hell because of the bad things to do, and then Mary steps in and miraculously with them. So I rescue them. So I think, Paul, it's something about needing to recuperate that figure of the merciful side of Jesus. Who knows that they, it's curious, you know, in terms of, if I look at some of these images, let's see if I can go back to one. What I mentioned here is that, okay, so that's a very coded image, okay? You'd have to be able to, but you get the immaculate heart, which is, in fact, a reflection of the sacred heart. So there is a kind of a reference to Jesus there. However, in the art history things, one of the major distinctions between Eastern representations of Mary, the Orthodox Church and Western ones, is that Mary is almost always with Jesus in there. So she's there. So her role there is the maternity of the divine word. I think the fact that there isn't a Jesus directly in this figure says that somehow she's got somehow disconnected from her son and tends to can easily take over a role. Now, when you get, I have to be careful here, but there are times I think when one listens to the comments particularly in the apparitions from the 19th century onwards somehow, some of the language there, I find puzzling in the sense that it gets back to this medieval idea that my son is so angry, I cannot restrain his hand, so this is what you've got to do. So one of the reasons why I study this stuff is because this field, this stuff, is because I find it theologically problematic and intellectually unrespectable. So it is because of that that I find it, it's untidy. It doesn't necessarily fit into a kind of neat theological scheme as I as a university professor would want it. At the same time, it actually represents the living faith of so many people. And I think that there's a kind of a disconnect with them. So those are some comments rather than some answers. Elizabeth, I'm sorry, then Mark. Mark, you go first. Thank you. Thanks. Dorian, in some of the slides, there's the literal juxtaposition of Mary and the Statue of Liberty. Yeah. This, I'm sorry, let me just move a little hand here to this final one, if I can. This was the prayer card for the opening of the Shrine of the Macley Conception. Okay. Yeah. This, I'm sorry, I'll try and do this one. The final one, yes. Sorry, and I interrupted you, Mark, I'm sorry. So the question that I have is, for me, that raises questions of female imagery as the personification of either abstract things or national things like Columbia, Lady Columbia, and all that stuff. So is there a conflation of Mary? Is she like an origin of that imagery or does the feminine personification of entities precede her, predate her? This is where I'm an old fashioned teacher who needs a blackboard, okay, is that I could actually draw this on you, okay. So one claim is that what happens with the demise of the mother goddess is Mary takes over, you know, so that she replaces those in the early Christian church. I think a more sophisticated way of saying is that there is need somehow psychologically in the deep anthropological sense for a female figure. Now, the personification of virtues, places, movements and so forth as female figures long predates Christianity. Long predates Christianity. But they're not exclusively female, but very often we get. I mean, how, when we refer to, you know, I mean, where the church is female, you know, I mean, so, to that extent, Mark, I think what we're dealing with is a kind of a fairly deep, I would think, an instinct down here. And it may be something that that what's going on, Paul, with that, why somehow the figure of Mary as can eclipse Jesus in that way, yeah. Mark, does that address your question? Yeah, thank you. Okay, so choice of questions. Yes. What, just so you have a choice. So what role would you determine that women religious may have had in sustaining the popularity of Mary? So that women religious, women religious, have they played a significant role or did Mary not need any help? And then the second thing, because you were going the low aerial view, this speeded up version, understanding JP2 and the importance of Mary. So comment on either one. I'll do the JP2 question, even though because it's a little neater. You know, John, you can't understand Polish Catholicism without understanding the significant theological and cultural role that Mary has played in the history of Poland. And given the history of that culture and that country, the fact that it didn't exist for so long, the fact that it's seen itself as the bulwark against orthodoxy and sometimes against Islam as well, the figure of Mary is taken on this whole national resonance. The very earliest Polish song that we have, it goes back to the 12th century, is a hymn to Mary. The legend that I told you about, the Lwów, that's not a legend that actually happened, but you know, there are countless things, stories where Mary's health have intervened in the history of Poland. For John Paul II, his first collection of poems is called Matka, which means mom, and it's addressed not to Mary, but to the motherland. But I think I kind of said there, rather hurriedly, the figure of Mary, the motherland, the mother of the church, mother Poland, the mother of Poland, all kind of blend to each other. So Polish Catholicism is deeply, deeply, deeply Marion in a way that I think that it's kind of difficult for us white bread Americans to realize. I really have one question, but it has two different dimensions. Mary is mentioned in the Koran, and I believe with respect. How could that affect the ongoing dialogue between Christianity and Islam? Secondly, the same question in regard to the various denominational churches. You made clear that in the Calvinist dimension, Mary was totally de-emphasized, and I'm not sure, but I believe the role of Mary is very ambiguous and difficult in ecumenical conversation today. Let me deal with the first one first. Mary, okay, again, when I try to teach this to students, there is a figure in the Koran called Maryam. She's the only person, only woman mentioned my name in the Koran, and the Koran gives a significant treatment to her. There is a figure in the Koran called Issa, who we would translate as Jesus. Now, Issa in the Koran is not exactly the same as our notion of Jesus, because he's not the, I mean, he's born miraculously, but he is not the ultimate prophet. So the figure of Maryam picks up in the Koran on some early I'm just lost the word completely. Not apocalyptic, what's the word I'm looking for? Not even deuterocanology, apocryphal legends of Mary. So to that extent, the figure of Maryam can be, Maryam Mary can be a bridge figure, and quite often is, in discussions between Islam and Islam and Christianity. Practically, Mary and shrines in Christian countries are visited by many, many Muslim women. So at some practical level, the devotion is already there. People don't necessarily see that as being a contradiction. They wouldn't necessarily go to a church, but they would go to shrine of Mary. Secondly, in terms of ecumenical dialogue, Vatican II, amongst other things, decided not to declare a new Vatican, a new dogma about Mary for ecumenical sensibilities. It felt that if Mary were declared as co-redembricks, this would totally mess up any kind of questions of unity between the churches. What I tend to think, there's actually quite an interest, and there's a whole body of Protestant work on Mary as Protestant theologians are actually rediscovering the figure of Mary. So it's not, she's necessarily a red rag to a bull. Having said that, it depends who you're talking to, you know, because there are people whom you can't, you know, she's the sign of contradiction, it's not Jesus, the sign of contradiction is Mary. So she's ambivalent in that way. So she can be a bridge figure, but at the same time she can also divide as well, yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, will you join me in another round of applause for Dorian? Thank you. Thank you so much Dorian. Thank you all for being here. We look forward to seeing you here on March the 16th for the next installment in the Jewish Christian Engagement Lecture Series. The details of that and many other wonderful events on the table at the back of the room. Thank you all for being here, good night.