The Marian Library Newsletter -- Archive Articles
No. 41 (New Series)
Winter, 2000-2001
Mirror of Hope: Dedication
On October 10, 2000, about two hundred Friends of the Marian Library/IMRI gathered in the Roesch Library of the University of Dayton for the dedication of a large work of art– Mirror of Hope. Centered on the Nativity of Christ, the multi-figured piece represents the whole of biblical history. Participating in the ceremony were Bro. Raymond Fitz, S.M., president of the University of Dayton, Fr. Johann Roten, S.M., who had commissioned the work and was consultant on the project (from its beginning to the conclusion), and Kevin Hanna (Norwalk, Connecticut), the artist who created the panoramic multi-figured structure. Mr. Hanna worked on the composition full time for more than a year, which was preceded by two years of planning and consultation with Fr. Roten.
The large (12' x 5') triadic work has four inner focal points: the Tower of Babel (on the left); the Nativity Stable (center, bottom); the Heavenly City (center, top); the Temple-Cathedral Spires (on the right). Within the structure, there is a circular movement, first of descent (on the upper left), then a plane of pilgrimage moving from left to right, and, finally, a concluding ascent (on the right). The work is peopled with two-hundred clay-molded figures–each with a unique facial expression--sometimes standing alone, but more frequently in groups, interacting with each other. Their faces range from anger and despair, to surprise, hope, and gratitude.
The departure from Paradise is on the upper left. Discord characterizes the crowd around the Tower of Babel. At the foot of the tower, three kings fight; at the stable, three kings kneel in homage to Christ. Abraham entertains three guests, but the prepared meal lies uneaten. The meal is completed at the Wedding Feast of Cana. Abraham looks skyward and receives the promise of salvation.
The Savior’s coming is portrayed in the scenes of the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity (the center of the work), the presentation in the Temple, the flight into Egypt, the finding in the Temple. Many scenes contain birds. As a child, Jesus makes clay birds who later take flight. The scenes from his public life include the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, his concern for the lost sheep, the wedding feast of Cana, the Samaritan woman at the well. From the crib of the Nativity, there is a trajectory to the cross on Calvary. Grace prevails, and redeemed humanity advances on its pilgrimage to the multi-spired Heavenly City (which includes the dome of the University of Dayton’s Immaculate Conception Chapel and its flanking arches). Redemption is the victory over sin and evil, and also the restoration of humanity in its ascent to its final destiny in God.
The artist commissioned by the Marian Library/IMRI to execute the work, Kevin Hanna of Norwalk, Connecticut, worked in close consultation with Fr. Johann Roten, S.M.. Mr Hanna, Fr. Roten commented, is an "artist with great religious sensitivity and with the ability to translate religious insights into visual expression." This work, Fr. Roten continued, "is a remarkable summary of the most important aspects of the Christian story. We wanted to create something that would serve as a memorial for the University of Dayton’s Sesquicentennial Celebration, its 150 years as a Catholic university, as well as a testimony to the religious tradition it represents." He concluded with the hope that this attractive and engaging sculpture will show that "beauty and religion are closely related." This sculpture was made possible through the contributions of Mary. E. Keller, Joseph Quatman, and Karl and Agnes Roten. It will be on permanent display in the first-floor lobby of the Roesch Library of the University of Dayton.
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Mirror of Hope: Commentary by Johann Roten, S.M.
Central to the Mirror of Hope is a classical symbol of salvation–the mountain. The Mountain of Salvation became very popular during the Baroque period and replaced other symbols of salvation such as the Mirror of Human Salvation and the Bible of the Poor of the Middle Ages. The mountain is a universal and biblical symbol of divine revelation and sacred space--the juncture between heaven and earth and the place of encounter with God. Within Hanna’s presentation of a mountain is a circular movement-- a cycle of love. It is the narrative of God’s love for his creation and humanity’s response. On the left, there is a descent representing the creation of the world and the history of civilization seen as a combination of God’s gracious gifts and human resourcefulness. Here we have a descending movement. The base and right flank of the sculpture suggest an ascending movement. It represents the story of redemption: beginning with the promise to Abraham and Mary, leading from Bethlehem to Cana and to Calvary, and taking the people of God back to the point of departure and fulfillment on the mountain’s top. Here again, it is suggested that God’s work is not achieved without human participation. The latter aspect, human participation, is best illustrated with the discreet but active presence of the figure of Mary in most of the scenes picturing Jesus’ life and that of his followers.
This sculpture is built and organized around four cardinal points or architectural structures. We see on top what biblical tradition calls the City on the Mount, to the left the tall but sturdy Tower of Babel, at the bottom and center of the mountain the wide open Stable of the Nativity, and to the right the elegant steeples of the Temple-Cathedral.
1) The City on the Mount
With its golden towers, steeples, and spires, the City on the Mount is a symbol of God’s presence and of abundant goodness. It is the ultimate point of reference for the meaning of human existence, the Alpha and Omega embracing creation and redemption. The City on the Mount or Heavenly Jerusalem is the cradle of human life and also its destiny. In the medieval tradition, works of art included some faces or objects familiar to the audience. In the skyline of this work is the silhouette of the University of Dayton’s Chapel, flanked by its two gates. This artistic device well indicates that salvation is not past and distant, but always a concrete, local, personal and communitarian endeavor. It occurs here and now.
2) The Tower of Babel
The Tower of Babel is a sign of contradiction. It is, on the one hand, an impressive monument representing human effort and achievement. The history of human civilization is not separate from salvation. All our striving toward the good is a contribution to full redemption. However, the tower of Babel is also a monument of human hybris, of refusal and rejection. Its architects are no longer inspired by the light that comes from the mountain top. They have mapped the world according to their own standards and ignored the more fundamental design of God’s creation. Thus, the tower of Babel remains incomplete, it is an unfinished structure in the landscape of redemption.
3) The Temple-Cathedral Steeples
A recurring temptation in Christian history is to believe that God can be completely accommodated to human categories, sometimes even to the point of making God a prisoner of beautiful palaces and cathedrals. Deus semper major: God transcends human scheming. Only a God free to love can be a true redeemer. In this sculpture, Jesus, his mother and his disciples bypass the imposing structure of the cathedral. This is one way of indicating that cross, passion, death and resurrection lead us beyond the narrow confines of organized religion. But this is only part of the message the temple-cathedral structure conveys. God’s grace comes in earthen vessels, in the middle of the assembled Church. It is we who give a home to God’s message and presence. The temple-cathedral then is a reminder that Christian salvation has both a long personal and collective history. Every church is a memorial in stone of the continuous effort to understand and cherish the message of salvation.
4) The Stable of the Nativity
The stable of the Nativity stands between the Tower of Babel and the Cathedral, at the center of the Mountain of Salvation, directly below the City on the Mount. It is showered with the light of the sun and the stars from the mountain top. The stable is open on all sides: in front and behind, right and left, and on top. Incarnation is a permanently open house. Invitation goes out to everybody; salvation is available to all. The stable of the Nativity is a halfway house: the mystery of incarnation is meaningful only if we neither reject nor domesticate God, that is, if we accept the sometimes tenuous position between the tower of Babel and the cathedral. On the other hand, there exists a direct line, a real lifeline, between the glory of the City on the Mount and the infant in the drafty house of Bethlehem. Visually speaking, salvation is rooted in the complementarity of these two images: it comes to us from the mountain top. It is a gift of God’s generous love, but it needs to be enfleshed in human reality and cared for with holy realism. The Mountains of Salvation frequently have a Nativity scene at their base and center. The meaning is this: Salvation has cosmic dimensions. It permeates all layers of human and natural reality, from top to bottom. God assumes the totality of his creation.
Mirror of Hope is the Marian Library’s contribution to the University of Dayton’s sesquicentennial celebrations. It was meant to be a visual and permanent memorial to honor 150 years of salvation history spent in Catholic education. May it also be a challenge for efforts to come, and a reminder that the new millennium is a wonderful window of opportunity to give redemption an ever-more-wide-open space in this world.
Act of Entrustment
[from Pope John Paul II]A highpoint of the Jubilee year occurred on Sunday, October 8, 2000, when Pope John Paul II led the bishops, assembled for the Jubilee of Bishops, in an Act of Entrustment of the New Millennium to the Virgin Mary. The pope pronounced the words at the end of the Mass in St. Peter’s Square, before the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, brought expressly for this occasion from the shrine in Portugal. The presence of the Fatima statute indicates continuity between this act of entrustment and previous acts of consecration. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the apparitions at Fatima (1942), Pope Pius XII consecrated and entrusted the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and on the March 25, 1984, Pope John Paul II, in union with the bishops of the world, consecrated and entrusted the world to the Virgin Mary. Most of our readers are familiar with Marian consecration, but what is the meaning of entrustment?
Throughout Christian history, individuals and groups have wished to imitate the sentiments of the Virgin Mary by a special dedication. St. Ildephonse of Toledo (d. 667) spoke of becoming "servant" of Mary, in imitation of Jesus and Mary who identified themselves as servants. In the middle ages, the language of chivalry, with its oaths of fealty and allegiance to the patron or the patroness, influenced expressions of Marian dedication. In the 1600's, Jesuit sodalities began to speak of consecration to "Our Lady." St. Louis Grignion de Montfort (d. 1716) insisted that Marian consecration was "giving oneself entirely to the Blessed Virgin in order to belong entirely to Jesus Christ through her." Marian consecration is part of the tradition of some religious congregations–Claretians, Montfortians, Marianists, Society of the Holy Heart of Mary and others.
Vatican II appeared to reserve the term consecration for an act addressed to God (the language of latria), and after the council, the question arose whether consecration was the best word to express a special dedication to Mary. In the 1960s, three Jesuit theologians, including Karl Rahner, were asked whether the Jesuit sodalities should continue to use the term. They recognized that it was an appropriate term for "total donation," while noting that there was a difference between the consecration to God and consecration to Mary, a human person. After the inquiry, the Jesuit sodality rule of 1968 spoke of the "total donation to God in union with Mary."
John Paul II’s pontificate, beginning in 1978, brought with it a rich tradition of Marian consecration in Poland and his own personal example. His motto Totus tuus is directly taken from St. Louis Grignion de Montfort’s True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin. In his prayers at Marian shrines, the pope used both the word consecrate and entrust. In his 1987 encyclical Redemptoris Mater, the pope spoke of entrustment. At the cross, Christ entrusted Mary to John the disciple, which affirmed the relationship of a child with its mother. The disciple’s entrustment to Mary was "the response to a person’s love, in particular to the love of a mother" (#45).
The language of entrustment is founded in the Calvary scene of John’s Gospel (19:25-27). An ancient interpretation of the scene, found already in the second-century writer, Origen, was that, on Calvary, the Apostle John stood for every reader of John’s Gospel. Jesus on the Cross entrusted his mother to John, the representative of every Christian and of the Church. Jesus presents her as gift to every disciple: "There is your mother" (John 19:25-27). Mary stands at the cross as the Woman, the associate of the New Adam, and the embodiment of Mother Jerusalem, who brings forth the new generation of God’s people. For the pope, Christ’s entrustment is the basis for the "Marian dimension of the life of the disciple of Christ" (RM 45).
John’s Gospel continues, "And from that hour the disciple took her into his home." Literally, the text is "The disciple welcomed her into the things that were his own." Pope John Paul explains that, by entrusting oneself to the Virgin Mary, "the Christian, like the Apostle John, ‘welcomes’ the Mother of Christ ‘into his own home’ and brings her into everything that makes up his inner life, that is to say, into his human and Christian existence . . . Thus the Christian seeks to be taken into the ‘maternal charity’ with which the Redeemer’s Mother cares for the brethren of her Son,’ in whose birth and development she cooperates through the power of the Holy Spirit." Entrustment is a relation of love and confidence in the Virgin Mary, a willing reception of the Virgin Mary as God’s gift, a desire to cooperate with and to allow oneself to be guided by God’s spirit, in imitation of Mary. All these sentiments are well expressed in the pope’s Act of Entrustment.
"Woman, behold your son!" (Jn.19:26).
As we near the end of this Jubilee Year,
we hear Christ’s words
entrusting us to you, making you our Mother:
"Woman, behold your son!"
When he entrusted to you the Apostle John,
and with him the children of the Church and all people,
Christ did not diminish but affirmed anew
the role which is his alone as Savior of the world.
The Church today seeks refuge in your motherly protection
and trustingly begs your intercession as she faces the challenges
which lie hidden in the future.
Today we wish to entrust to you the future
that awaits us,
and we ask you to be with us on our way.
Today as never before in the past,
humanity stands at a crossroads.
Salvation lies fully and uniquely in Jesus, your son.
Therefore, O Mother, like the Apostle John,
we wish to take you into our home (Jn.19:27),
that we may learn from you to become like your Son.
"Woman, behold your sons and daughters."
Here we stand before you
to entrust to your maternal care
ourselves, the Church, the entire world.
To you, Dawn of Salvation, we commit
our journey through the new millennium,
so that with you as guide
all people may know Christ,
the light of the world and its only Savior
who reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit
for ever and ever. Amen.
(Adapted Text)
The Beatification of Father Chaminade
On Sunday, September 3, 2000, at the Solemn Concelebrated Mass in St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul beatified five servants of God: Popes Pius IX and John XXIII, Archbishop Tommaso Reggio of Genoa, Fr. William Joseph Chaminade, founder of the Marianists, and Dom Columba Marmion, Abbot of Maredsous.
Hundreds of Marianists attended the ceremony, together with their students and others who have been influenced by the spirit of Fr. Chaminade (1761-1850). The beatification of Fr. Chaminade was the culmination of a long period of investigating his life and writings, and of awaiting a sign, in the form of a miracle attributed to his intercession.
The following is the section of the pope’s homily devoted to Blessed William Joseph Chaminade:
"The beatification during the Jubilee Year of William Joseph Chaminade, founder of the Marianists, reminds us of our task to find ever new ways of bearing witness to the faith, especially in order to reach those who are far from the Church and who do not have the usual means of knowing Christ. William Joseph Chaminade invites each Christian to be rooted in his Baptist, which conforms him to the Lord Jesus and communicates the Holy Spirit to him.
Fr. Chaminade’s love for Christ, in keeping with the French School of Spirituality, spurred him to pursue his tireless work by founding spiritual families in a troubled period of France’s religious history. His filial attachment to Mary maintained his inner peace on all occasions, helping him to do Christ’s will. His concern for human, moral, and religious education calls the entire Church to renew her attention to young people, who need both teachers and witnesses in order to turn to the Lord and take their part in the Church’s mission."
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51st Annual Meeting of the Mariological Society of America
The Mariological Society of America’s fifty-first annual meeting took place at the National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows, Belleville, Illinois, May 24-26, 2000. In his letter to the members of the Society, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, Bishop of Belleville, said that it was "a particular honor to host the gathering this year as we all travel together with the Mother of the Lord on Pilgrimage to the New Millennium." The theme of pilgrimage was chosen because it figures prominently in the celebration of the Great Jubilee. Pope John Paul wrote that pilgrimage is foremost among the signs by which the "the institution of Jubilee has been enriched . . . which attest to the faith and foster the devotion of the Christian people."
Shrines are presently under the care and supervision of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People. In preparation for the Jubilee Year 2000, the council prepared two documents: Pilgrimage in the Great Jubilee (1998) and The Shrine: Memorial, Presence and Prophecy of the Living God (1999). Both documents were intended "to aid pilgrims and those in charge of the pastoral care of pilgrimages." These two documents guided much of the discussion at the Mariological Society’s meeting.
The first document begins by recalling that pilgrimage is embedded in sacred history (Adam, Abraham, the Exodus). Christ’s pilgrimage–from the Father to the world and his return to the Father--illustrates the journey or pilgrimage of every person. The Church is by its nature a people of pilgrimage, preaching the Gospel to every land and people. The pilgrim Church in some way reflects the universal pilgrimage of humanity. There are always vast movements of people who for various motives leave their native land and move to one which is unfamiliar. This vast pilgrimage "not withstanding its tensions and contradictions, participates in the inevitable pilgrimage towards the Kingdom of God."
The second document, The Shrine (1999), notes that every pilgrimage has a destination or goal. Christians are on perpetual pilgrimage, but, at the same time, they are reaching that which they are seeking. The shrine is the place of meeting with God’s spirit, the goal and the destination for every pilgrimage. A shrine should be seen as a gift of God, a place of wonder, awe, and gratitude. It is an ideal place for listening to and pondering the Word of God. A shrine stands in opposition to worldly values of power and prestige; it is a place for education about true ethical values and the pursuit of justice, solidarity, and peace. The shrine as a place of encounter between God and humanity has a Marian significance: within the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ was first united to all humanity.
Sr. Jean Frisk (Schoenstatt Sisters of Mercy) spoke on the concept of pilgrimage found in the Schoenstatt Movement, as outlined by its founder, Fr. Joseph Kentenich. Schoenstatt, which means "beautiful place," is a spirituality which designates certain places as "holy," conducive to encounters with God’s living spirit. The Schoenstatt pilgrimage is a journey that fosters a new life and vision. As the founder of Schoenstatt noted, the secular world has an all-enveloping culture which forms opinions and influences actions. The pilgrimage experience, which reviews the daily events of life, intends to instill a spirit of love into daily encounters. The Virgin Mary is proposed as the image of "everyday sanctity." She is the one who was loved by God but also the one who loved God as she advanced in the ordinary events of life.
Fr. Virgilio Elizondo (San Antonio, Texas) spoke of Marian shrines as "places of encounter, welcome, and refuge." A necessary element for a fruitful pilgrimage is to leave the familiar behind and embark on a new journey, open to the mystery of God. The classical call to undertake a new journey was given to Blessed Juan Diego at Guadalupe. The ancient Nahuatl poem about Guadalupe describes how Our Lady’s message was to leave behind the sorrow caused by the Spanish conquest and enter into a new land of beautiful flowers, singing birds, and restored health. The new existence is one which is relational and empowering. Through the Lady of Guadalupe’s message, the Gospel was divested of its European context and set into a new culture.
In "Marian Devotion for the New Millennium," Fr. Johann Roten, S.M., spoke of some of the requisites for well-balanced Marian devotion in the future. Marian devotion will be less didactic and instructional, but more narrative and iconic. Through narrative, the story of Mary will be embedded in the fundamental story of creation’s purpose and the individual’s struggle. Through the iconic, the image of the Virgin Mary and her Child will be perceived as a summary of the whole of Christianity: the compassionate parent fostering, assisting, encouraging the younger person.
In "Pilgrimage: Devotion, Renewal, Tourism?," Fr. Nobert Brockman, S.M,. spoke of the great variety of pilgrim sites and types of pilgrimage both within Christianity and outside of it. There are over 6,150 sites of pilgrimage. 800 of these draw more than 10,000 visitors a year; 19 attract more than 1,000,000 pilgrims a year.
The conferences given at this meeting will appear in Marian Studies 51 (2000) Currently available is the fiftieth-anniversary issue, Marian Studies 50 (1999), "Magnificat: Remembrance and Praise" ($15.00 prepaid). This issue contains articles on the Magnificat by Fr. Aristide Serra, Fr. Lawrence Frizzell, Sr. Mary Catherine Nolan, and Fr. Walter T. Brennan. There are also articles on the fifty-year history of the Mariological Society of America. Address all inquiries to the MSA Secretariat; The Marian Library; University of Dayton; Dayton, OH 45469-1390 (phone 937 229-4294).
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