Mary

views updated

Mary

In pre-Christian Mediterranean cultures the many cosmic goddesses were a background for an early and vigorous diaspora of Christian traditions on Mary. In Europe, important preparations for widespread medieval Marian devotion were made at the ubiquitous prehistoric goddess worship sites at springs, caves, and wooded areas. A strong devotion to Mary accompanied the first Catholic settlers to the Western Hemisphere. They were mostly Spanish (1492), French (1534), and English (1634). In the New World the strength and survival of a great variety of European Marian traditions can often be traced back to ingenious adaptations by the practitioners of indigenous and Afro-Caribbean rituals.

The Marian devotions imported to French territories were mostly limited to a few titles of Mary approved by Rome and universal throughout Europe. There had been no preparation among the huntergatherer natives of Canada for an effective grafting of Marian devotions onto an organized goddess-worship system. Nonetheless, Indians were at times deeply moved by the pictures of Mary used by Jesuit missionaries at sites such as Sault Ste. Marie, Immaculate Conception Mission on the Illinois River, and later, in the Northwest.

English Catholic colonists arriving in Maryland in 1634 named their first settlement St. Mary's City. Devotions to Mary under a few general European Marian titles continued but were kept private due to religious struggles with dominant Protestants. The destruction of indigenous societies and the consequent establishment of a secular-commercial civilization preempted a deeply rooted Marian religious culture among future U.S. Catholics. However, upon his consecration as North America's first Roman Catholic bishop in 1790, John Carroll spread an official devotion to the small number of colonial Catholics based on his experiences at the Italian shrine of Our Lady of Loretto. A few religious orders, such as the Sulpicians and the Carmelites, were also beginning to establish limited and generalized Eurocentric Marian titles.

With the conquest of Latin America, more than five hundred separate Spanish Marian cults were introduced. These were the vestiges of a huge number of local Iberian goddess traditions, and each Marian cult had individualized local histories, rituals, and iconographies. Very many of the images preserved legends about their miraculous discovery in Spain's wilderness after eight hundred years of Muslim domination. Most were gradually appropriated by the official church but usually maintained a basic folk ownership. Titles and specific American images such as Nuestra Señora de Altagracia and Nuestra Señora de la Caridad were introduced early into Caribbean settlements. From the beginning, they accumulated additional popular symbolisms and narratives frequently related to struggles of poverty, hunger, sickness, exploitation, racial persecution, and so on. For example, the rediscovery of the Spanish statue of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad in the ocean by three young Cuban slaves—two indigenous and one black—is the root legend for its New World transformation. "Del Cobre" was added to this Virgin's name because the devotion and shrine were developed in the copper mining town of Cobre, which had a large slave population. The trajectory of this devotion among colonial populations reveals a basic paradigm for the development of a great many other Latin American Marian cultures.

Another precondition frequently existed. The Mexica (Aztecs) and the many other civilizations of Central and South America were organized within systems of territories, cities, villages, and neighborhoods called calpulli, each with their patron deities. Important areas and sites, and also significant forces of nature, were under the protection and control of goddesses. Individual citizens, households, trades, working tools and activities, trees, hilltops, crossroads, and every single day in the calendar (tonalamatl) were each assigned to a specific god within an immense pantheon of at least sixteen hundred deities possessing their own identifying iconographies. Feminine deities were preeminent. Teteoinnan was Mother of all Gods. Toci was Our Grandmother; Atlan, Our Mother; Cihuacoatl, Woman Serpent; Ilamatecuhtli, Old Lady; Tonantzin, Our Mother, Earth Mother, Mother of Fertility, Mother of Flowers (very closely associated later with Our Lady of Guadalupe), and so on.

Spanish missionary practice alternated between efforts to eradicate these indigenous religious cultures and efforts to insert into them an endless variety of Virgin Mary and other saints' traditions. These would often take the forms of lay fraternities (cofradías), through which Indians preserved elements of their own religions. Furthermore, Charles V's New Laws of 1542 attempted to protect Indian property and hence, indirectly, some of the older religious observances. In effect there developed a coexistence of indigenous religious systems with Catholic Virgin Mary and saints' devotions and fiestas. There were frequent Marian titular designations for personal names, lands, temples, natural sites, villages, and lay groups. Native responses to official Catholic religious questionnaires, such as that of royal chronicler Juan Lopez de Velasco in 1577, were based on incomplete indigenous historiographies and native pictographs that were impossible for the Spanish to decipher accurately. Moreover, Catholic images of Mary and the saints afforded direct access to sacred powers the indigenous religions had already possessed in their own ways. The worship of Jesus was largely controlled by ecclesiastical authorities, but the ubiquitous number and variety of cults to Mary allowed the faithful to frequently bypass official church control, partly due to the absence of an adequate number of priests, especially in outlying areas. Indians and mestizos continued the indigenous custom of dressing goddess effigies in robes appropriate for each feast day. They continued to develop curanderismo (folk medicine) systems using titles and images of Mary and the saints, still obvious today in the many botanica shops throughout U.S. Latino neighborhoods. The cofradías and their chosen Marian titles were very popular and politically effective among the castas (racial mixtures), since official Spanish census lists did not record persons by race or racial mixture. This encouraged a very rich crossfertilization of Marian cofradías that sponsored occupational groups, apprenticeships, artistic expression, public sponsorships for fiestas, neighborhood organizations, and other kinds of services and reputations that enhanced ethnic identities. The profuse racial mixtures of Spanish colonial society must be taken into account to appreciate the fermentation in varieties of Marian devotions. The major divisions of the castas were españoles (Spanish born in Spain), criollos (Spanish born in the New World), indios (well over five hundred cultures), negros (slaves and free), mestizos (español + indio), castizos (español + mestizo), mulatos (español + negro), morisco (español + mulato), lobo (indio + negro), coyote (indio + mulato), and chino (indio + lobo). The great Mexican mystic and intellectual Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648–1695) composed Christmas carols for these different castas.

An example of casta contribution to New World Marian tradition is the 1695 wilderness discovery by the wood gatherer Juana Pereira of a negroid statuette of Mary, La Negreta. This developed into the national Costa Rican Marian title of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles. Numerous other Latin American Marian cults originated among wood gatherers, wood carvers, fishermen, farm laborers, and pack carriers, such as Nuestra Señora de Ocotlan (Tlaxcala, 1541), Señora de Esperanza (Michoacan, 1685), Nuestra Señora de Quinche (Ecuador, 1585), Nuestra Señora de Copacabana (Bolivia, 1579), and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Tepeyac, 1531). The original images were those of dark-skinned maidens called morenitas.

The hordes of European Catholic immigrants who inundated the United States during the nineteenth century established a pluralistic, ethnic church. They brought with them and established their own Marian devotions, but these were normally under more official titles, such as the Immaculate Conception, which itself frequently split into subsidiary devotions such as the Miraculous Medal, the Sacred Heart of Mary, or Our Lady of Lourdes. For a while the devotions to the Immaculate Mary symbolized a cultural resistance to the dominant secular U.S. civilization and strengthened the ethnic identities of Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Lithuanian, Slovak, and African-American Catholics. A type of Marian melting pot approach soon developed as Catholic ethnic groups assimilated to a consumer culture. However, there remain a few Marian shrines throughout the United States that preserve some of their European ethnic Catholic backgrounds. Because Florida stayed Spanish until 1821 and had retained connections to Catholic slaves in the Caribbean and escaped slaves from the North, Latin American Marian cofradia titles were often inherited among the black Catholic confraternities in St. Augustine (Florida), Baltimore, Mobile, and New Orleans. Today, other U.S. Catholic minorities manage to preserve an energetic Marian spirituality, such as the Vietnamese, who participate in a massive gathering in southwestern Missouri every August 15 for the Feast of the Assumption. Filipinos also observe their own public fiestas, such as that of Nuestra Señora de Antipolo in Chicago.

However, after 1960, for the majority of U.S. Catholics, there was a great erosion in Marian traditions. Earlier ethnic Catholics had assimilated to U.S. secularism, but the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965) reduced Marian tradition almost to an afterthought in its key document Lumen Gentium and hence influenced a considerable weakening in U.S. Catholic Marian spirituality. But there had already been a kind of melting pot reduction in North American Marian observances. However, in 1979 the Latin American Bishops' Conference held in Puebla, Mexico, compensated for Vatican II's lack of a strong and multicultural Mariology with a firm support for popular religion and questioned "any universality that is synonymous with uniformity or leveling that fails to respect different cultures by weakening them, absorbing them, or annihilating them." The conference criticized religious universality used as a tool of domination by "some peoples or social strata over other peoples and social strata." The Puebla documents also praise popular religion as a "storehouse of values" and a power for resisting cultures of consumerism among dominant groups.

These Latin American developments supported the ongoing fermentation in Marian popular religion among Latin America's poor—the vast majority of the population. These poor are now streaming into the United States, so that Hispanics will soon be 50 percent of U.S. Catholics. Both legal and undocumented immigrants are rapidly adding to the U.S. Hispanic/Latino population which will number forty million before long. They continue to bring with them a great repertoire of Marian customs. With a few notable exceptions, Catholic parishes usually do not publically sustain much variety in Latin American Marian observances. Some dioceses have an annual, centralized Marian celebration to which Latino ethnic groups bring their own images of Mary. But the people themselves preserve a rich variety of Marian customs in their homes and in their ever-expanding botanica shops. Each of the many U.S. Latino/Hispanic Marian traditions continues to possess its own unique image and history, with important influences contributed by Latin American Indian and Afro-Caribbean cultures. Great numbers of new immigrants and the many circular migrants reinvigorate many of the second- and third-generation Hispanic Marian practices that might have become submerged or manipulated beneath a more generic Catholicism. Latin American refugees fleeing natural disasters, political persecution, or economic hardship enter the United States highlighting their narratives of exile with miracles of Mary's deliverance. U.S. Latin American ethnic groups continue to support a thriving multiplicity of unique Marian traditions that challenge any kind of arid or sterile uniformity. A few of the most notable Hispanic/Latino Marian devotions in the United States today are: Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Mexico), Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre (Cuba), Nuestra Señora de Providentia (Puerto Rico), and Nuestra Señora de San Juan de Lagos (Mexico).

A Hispanic/Latino multicultural Marian hemispherization is the strongest development in devotion to Mary taking place today in the United States among the people. How this Latino fecundity in the many expressions of its Marian cultures will affect the mono-cultural Catholicism of the United States remains to be seen.