Cases of aberrant devotions to Mary in the Roman Church

Um, He was, but only because He was God. Whereas today's "woke" people think that their life experiences and the experiences of others in their "oppressed" group give them special knowledge that all others lack, Jesus really, truly did have special knowledge that He was the Messiah and God the Son (but He opened not His mouth against His oppressors when they condemned Him). And so He wasn't "woke" in the same sense that the word is being used nowadays by its advocates.

 

You surprise me. I thought 'woke' was a denegratory term used by the opponents of people who care about the fate of others. Wasn't it supposed to be an insult? I just can't keep up nowadays with modern semantics.
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You're the one who asked, "Wasn't Jesus woke?"

Besides, it's the term is also being used by the people who consider themselves to be "woke." I'm pretty sure they originated it and they are happy to say that they want everyone to be "woke."

 

I can certainly imagine Pharisees accusing Jesus of being 'woke', because it seems they most definitely weren't, neither at one critical time were his own disciples. Luke 22:45-46.

St Paul considered himself 'woke' too it seems. Eph.5:12-16. Rom.13:11. 1 Cor.15:34. So it would seem that scripture generally has good things to say about being 'woke'. Ps.3:5-6. So there is a precedent for wanting everyone to get 'woke', I suppose, especially if they or we are perishing. Mark 4:38.
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Woke as a political term of African American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression "stay woke", whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

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For those who would broadly consider themselves woke, the word has been weaponized against them. But the Fox/Young brigade often claim the same.

The origins of woke, in this context – as forged by African American communities – dates back at least to the 60s, but its mainstream ubiquity is a recent development. Fuelled by black musicians, social media and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary only in 2017, by which time it had become as much a fashionable buzzword as a set of values. Some of those who didn’t keep up with the trend felt left behind: if you didn’t know the meaning of woke, you weren’t.

Rather than rejecting the concept of wokeness outright, today’s detractors often claim they are rejecting the word as a signifier of pretentiousness and “cultural elitism”. However, as Fox and others have shown, it is as much to do with the issues of racial and social justice. Criticising “woke culture” has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle. The language has been successfully co-opted – but as long as the underlying injustices remain, new words will emerge to describe them.
https://www.theguardian.com/society...how-the-word-woke-was-weaponised-by-the-right

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woke
The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue
Yeah most people don't care about parking spaces for families with disabled pets. I wish they were woke like me.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=woke

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As it happens the term finds its early origins with Abraham Lincoln, where the Republican Party rad an add campaign in support of Lincoln under the headline 'Stay Awake' and that campaign was intended to stop the spread of slavery.

The question really has to be would Jesus be woke today (WWJD), and what sort of woke would that be. The sad truth is that there was a man who could not breath, and when the protest arose, and got a little out of hand, a number of people claimed that they were the victims. Now all of this takes a deal of wrangling, however what is needed to resolve these issues, is to hear and value each other. Until that happens nothing happens.

The image that sparked this new burst in this thread calls us to reflect on how jingoistic we want our faith to be. Richard Niebuhr's The Kingdom of God in America, was a classic, and sadly it has often been understood to have been mistitled, for they believe that the Kingdom of God is America.

So from memory, from that work

So it was A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross
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We need to be far more awake than whatever woke might mean at the present moment.

 

Having explored that particular rabbit run . . . . . what about the downsides of idolising the Mother of God. Would even she disapprove of some of the excesses she is humiliatingly subjected to by her misguided, over-enthusiastic devotees?

 

IMHO Protestants get too worked over the "mediatrix" title. I've never met a rightly catechized Roman Catholic who didn't fully assent to 1 Timothy 2:5, "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus."

But they also recognize that their are lesser, subordinate mediators/mediatrixes. And we do too, though we don't know we do. Abraham mediated on behalf of Sodom and Gemorrah, Moses on the people of Israel, etc. And if protestants truly believed in no other mediators they would never ask for others' to pray for them.

“Mary, being Mediatrix of all Graces and Queen of all Martyrs, merited for us all the graces we receive and made satisfaction for our sins.”​

The language is hyperbolic and poetic, but not heretical or idolatrous. St. Gabriel the Archangel proclaimed he was "highly favored" or "full of grace" and was chosen by God to be the Mother of God. From her womb came the Holy Incarnation. She is therefore the Theotokos, the God bearer, who brought forth Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, King of Kings, from whom all Graces flow. In that sense, she is the Queen Mother, without whom there is no manger, no cross, no resurrection,no ascension. Those are just facts pulled from the Gospel. Therefore,she is a co-worker in Christ's mediation between God and man. Nothing aberrant in any of that.

 

Whoa! "Nothing aberrant"????

“Mary, being Mediatrix of all Graces and Queen of all Martyrs, merited for us all the graces we receive and made satisfaction for our sins.”​

Mary most certainly is not Mediatrix (capital "M" denoting primacy) of all the graces we receive; Jesus is our one and only 'capital M' Mediator. Mary did not personally make satisfaction for our sins and indeed would have been unable to do so, for only a sinless person could die for the sins of all, and Mary was a sinner in need of God's grace like the rest of us.

Nothing made Mary indispensible. There is no good reason to say of Mary, "without whom there is not manger, no cross, no resurrection..." Were the earliest descendants of Adam all indispensable, or did God make a new start for mankind through just one man, Noah? Was Moses indispensable to the Israelites, or could God have raised up another leader? Was Solomon indispensable, or could God have worked through another man? No mortal human has ever been indispensable in God's plan. If Mary had not been willing, God would not have approached her for the task of bearing Jesus; instead He would have foreordained another woman for the honor and privilege.

That's right, it was a privilege for Mary to bear the Son of God. We all are privileged to have become children of God by grace through faith, but that doesn't mean the rest of unsaved humanity should put us on a pedestal and look up to us. Nor should any of us have put Mary up on a pedestal as someone greater or higher than the rest of us followers of Christ. Mary is one of us, a sinner saved by grace like us, a believer and a disciple like us, no greater and no less.

 

So your issue is capitalization? That's a new one for me

You say nothing made Mary indispensible. But 1 thing does: God. Going back to the protoevangelion in Genesis, it is clear that God's plan was for salvation to come from a woman's seed. That woman out of all women that had ever been or ever would be, was Mary. But you know better than God which part of His plan is dispensible and which is not? I don't think I can walk with you off that plank.

 

and yet God chose Mary for this task, and I would choose not to be disparaging of God's choices, of which I am a most unworthy beneficiary through the merits of he Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

 

Sorry to be pedantic, (but you know how us Agnostics are), but I don't believe Gabriel was an Archangel let alone the Archangel.

 

Well, I wouldn't be surprised if you were agnostic on that point, lol. It has been a feature of sacred tradition that the"Angel of the Lord" that announced to Mary and appeared to Zacharius was St. Gabriel. Regardlessof whether it was or wasn't, the point remains that the Angel allegedly named Gabriel claimed Mary was full of grace and therefore, we can follow that lead.

 

Some people see, "Hail Mary, full of grace," and they get a mental picture of a woman who is holier than the rest, better than the rest, more deserving than the rest. They picture Mary as a woman chosen by God because she was full of this special inner beauty called "grace." That idea is inaccurate.

What is grace? While not a comprehensive definition, one could loosely define grace as the unmerited favor and gift of Almighty God. The thing I want to call attention to is the fact that grace is a gift from God which He gives to a person who doesn't deserve it. Grace descends from God and is bestowed by His sovereign strength; receiving God's grace does not reflect any merit or specialness on the part of the recipient (beyond the fact that grace is usually received through faith in God). Therefore, for Mary to be full of grace speaks of God's greatness and goodness infinitely more than of Mary's.

 

I concur with this statement. Mary's yes behold I am the handmaid of the Lord is a response to grace, and a response with grace to participate in grace. It is by this yes that the great moment in the story began to unfold as the word became flesh and dwelt among us and so we see Mary's meaning and purpose to to faithfully bear Jesus into the world. As such whilst he role is unique, so each one of us in our unique way are also called to bear Jesus into the world, and each of us will know that our so doing is but a pale reflection of what Mary did, and more precisely what God did through Mary.

 

Today I was scanning through radio stations and fell upon a RC broadcast (IIRC it was a production of the 'Virgin Most Powerful' network). A woman (a nun, I believe) was saying that when the angel greeted Mary by saying "Hail," the Greek word was used to denote the special respect due to royalty; she further stated that Mary, being the mother of the King of the Universe, was thereby a queen and this is why she was greeted with the special word χαίρω
(chairō).

But when one examines the N.T. for this word (#5463) in the concordance, one finds that it most often denotes rejoicing, gladness, and joy; when used as a salutation it is (according to the Greek scholar Zodhiates) like saying 'happiness to you.' And most interestingly, the Jewish religious leaders addressed Judas with this word when he offered to betray Jesus.

I wonder if the nun thinks that Judas was a member of royalty? She certainly made her position sound plausible, and I'm sure the average RC listener would have been completely taken in by this incorrect assessment.

 

Isn't it amazing what lengths human beings will go to, to believe what they want to believe rather than what actually IS.
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“The Coronation”, by the Spanish painter Diego Velasquez:

 

Bizarre! Why is that baby looking up her skirt, or is he just trying to ignore all the beheaded ones with wings sprouting out of their necks, in the fog.

 

That’s a good question. However, the infants with two wings are cherubim (although they should have four; see Ezekiel chapters 1 and 10, and also the cherubim are synonymous with the tetramorphs, which are held to represent the four evangelists and their gospels (Matthew has a human face, Mark, the visage of a lion, Luke, the visage of a calf, and John, an eagle, these being reflections on the distinct character of the four Gospels.* Likewise, the “beheaded ones” are Seraphim, as described in Isaiah 15 and elsewhere. Cherubim and Seraphim play a vital role in Christian theology, as do the angels in general, so it is a good idea to familiarize oneself with the Old Testament pericopes that describe their appearance, and one can, from that, also evaluate, appreciate or critique artistic or iconographic depictions thereof.

To wit, this artwork is not how I want to see the honorable cherubim and glorious seraphim depicted. In addition to the cherub in a seemimgly inappropriate position as cited by Tiffy, the artist fails to get the details right on any of the angels; they all seem to have the wrong number of wings. And on the subject of personal aesthetic preference, depicting the cherubim after the manner of the putto image is a characteristic of the visual arts of the Baroque that I am not entirely comfortable with.** Nor was this painting, which appears to be a representation of the Holy Spirit descending on the Theotokos, well conceived theologically. Traditional iconography one finds in the East and West, which along with Gothic architecture was revived in Britain in the 19th century by the Oxford Movement in the spirit of Romanticism, abolishing the dry, cold Neoclassicism of the late 18th century, is more careful in its theological depictions; new icons are adopted slowly before making it onto a Byzantine or Coptic iconostasis, an Armenian bema, a traditionally-minded Roman parish*** or an Anglican or Lutheran stained glass window.

* St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who is in the opinion of patristics expert Fr. John Behr, the first scholar of theology or divine, to use an appropriate Anglican term, drew heavily on the appearance of the number four in nature in order to discount the validity of the heretical and pseudepigraphic Gnostic gospels; for example, just as there are four cardinal directions and four winds, there are four true Gospels.

** To put it mildly.

*** These do exist; there are several architects specializing in traditional architecture for Catholic churches, and the style of new and refurbished churches inclines towards the pre-schism Romanesque, avoiding Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Modernist excesses.

 

The Ethiopian Orthodox icons depict our Lord with a Levantine appearance, as well as the Virgin Mary and other persons where lighter skin is indicated. However, they do depict angels as being black, which seems fine to me, given their pneumatic nature.