MISSING MARY

What ever happened to the Virgin Mary in the modern Catholic Church? Since the 1960s, her presence has been radically minimized. In this work, Charlene Spretnak cuts across the battle lines delineated by the left and the right within the Church to champion the recovery of the full spiritual presence of Mary. Spretnak, a liberal Catholic, sheds new light on the dethroning of the Queen of Heaven at Vatican II, and she traces the rise of a grassroots resurgence of Marian spirituality. She offers fresh reflections on the meaning of Mary, situating the Marian renewal in the larger context of contemporary efforts to correct the barrenness and sterility of modernity. Spretnak also notes that much of the cosmological symbolism traditionally associated with Mary as the Queen of Heaven and the maternal matrix is simpatico with recent discoveries in scientific cosmology about the profoundly relational nature of the Creation. Moreover, Spretnak asserts that a deep loss ensues for women in particular when Mary's female embodiment of grace and mystical presence is denied and replaced with a strictly text-bound version of her as a Nazarene housewife.