‘On July 23, 1816, at the shrine of Our Lady of Fourvière, Lyons, twelvepriests and seminarians pledged themselves to found a congregationbearing the name of Mary. Those who worked for the next twenty yearsto carry out this promise were convinced that they were responding to awish of the Mother of Mercy, which found expression for them in thefollowing words: “I supported the Church at its birth; I shall do so againat the end of time'' (Constitutions of the Society of Mary, n. 2).
1. A Colinian theme
We have here a theme that keeps coming back when the Founder speaks(cf. FS, p. 36). Take the four quotations collected by Fr Mayet that JeanCoste has brought together near the beginning of A Founder Speaks.
1. FS 4,1 (c. 1837): ‘The blessed Virgin said, “I was the support ofthe new-born Church; I shall also be at the end of time. My embrace willbe open to all who wish to come to me.’â€
2. On September 25th. 1844, in reply to a remark made by Mayet:‘Yes... “I was the support of the new-born Church; I shall be also at theend of time' ... these words presided over the earliest days of theSociety.’
3. On October 26th, 1844, he repeated these words once more,adding, ‘It is some thirty years since that was said to a priest.’
4. He repeated these same words at Puylata on December 2nd, 1847,saying ‘About thirty-six years ago.’
Fairly typical is FS 141,18 ( 1847). In the preceding paragraph, Colininvokes the examples of Saint Francis de Sales, Saint Charles Borromeo,Saint Francis Regis, Saint Francis Xavier, finally the example of OurLord himself. He continues: ‘And our heavenly mother, she was the light, the counsel, the consolation of the new-born Church. And did shecreate a stir? The Gospel says little about her, very little, yet it was shewho drew down graces from heaven upon the earth. Let us imitate theseholy models in their zeal and their humility. Let us go everywhere, let usdo all the good that we can, all the while remaining unassuming andhidden.’ Colin loves to stress the paradox of Mary hidden in the midst ofthe Church at its birth, while being al the same time the support that theChurch cannot do without. This manner of presence and action is themodel for Marists.
One final introductory remark. The two parts of the saying attributed toMary are inseparable: we are not meant to contemplate the theme of‘Mary support of the Church at its birth’ in isolation. This first part of thesaying is completed by the second part, where Mary is the ‘support of theChurch at the end of time’. However, in this talk and the next, we shalllook at each part in turn, beginning with the first.
[Note. The expressions ‘the Church at its birth', ‘the newborn Church’,‘the early Church’, etc. are all ways of translating the French ‘ l’Eglisenaissante’ - literally, ‘the Church in the process of being born’.]
2. Mary in the Church at its birth
I want to insist on this point: in the Marian saying that we have put at thehead of our present Constitutions in n. 2, the reference is to the presenceand action of Our Lady in the new-born Church, and not to her presence‘among the apostles’ referred to in n. 3 of the Constitutions, and not toher presence at Pentecost, which is mentioned along with her presenceat Nazareth and at the end of time in n. 228 (cf. also n. 8). ‘Mary in theChurch' is a much broader concept than ‘Mary among the Apostles’.Furthermore, when Fr Colin talks of ‘Mary in the early Church’, he isusually thinking of the period after Pentecost, rather than at or before thedescent of the Holy Spirit. Mary supported the Church not only at themoment of its birth (Pentecost) but especially in the period after that,protecting and nurturing its new life.
Fr. Mayet collected several passages in which Fr. Colin took inspirationfrom Mary of Agreda in order to imagine the Blessed Virgin in her role assupport of the Church at its birth. I shall quote two. First FS 116,7: ‘...That our Lord left the Blessed Virgin behind on earth after his Ascensionis without doubt a great mystery. The apostles needed her to guide them,and to be in a sense the foundress of the Church. At the end of time herprotection will shine forth in an even greater way...’ As a matter ofinterest, there is one detail here in which Fr. Colin does not follow Maryof Agreda. In her scheme of things, the Blessed Virgin did indeed go upto heaven with her Son at the Ascension, but decided to return to earth tobe the support of the new-born Church - it was her descent that Johndescribes in Apoc 21:2 as 'the new Jerusalem, coming down out ofheaven from God' (cf. the title of her book. The Mystical City of God). Bycontrast, our Founder seems to adopt the usual scenario, according towhich Mary remained in the midst of the early Church until herDormition and Assumption.
The second example is FS 133,2: T recommend the superior verystrongly to take care to call his council together whenever he has somebusiness to deal with (for three reasons): 3. To imitate the blessed Virginafter the ascension of her divine Son. Although she held the first placewhen the apostles met to consider the interests of the Church, she oftensaid nothing, she who read all in the heart of her divine Son. And whenfinally the apostles turned to her, Mary, always the last to speak, wouldsay to them, “My lords and masters, it seems to me that one could do suchand such. This would be in accord with the spirit of my Son.’†Coste hasshown that these words of Colin paraphrase Mary of Agreda, TheMystical city of God, III, pp. 105-107. The text is reproduced in ActaSM,vol. 8, pp. 167-169.
On the other hand, as Jean Coste points out, Colin cites explicitly Acts1:14 only a few times (cf. FS 141,20; 160,6; 188,19), ‘and each time itwas in connection with special moments of deliberation and intenseprayer’. In FS 140,13, Colin says to the novices: ‘Come, let us takecourage! Look upon yourselves as the apostles, gathered together with theblessed Virgin in the cenacle. Make good use of this time. Warmyourselves at the fire of God's love. Have courage!’ Coste concludes:‘The upstairs room, then, is a model for certain special moments in Maristlife; it is not the place in which Mary's presence in the Church becomesthe symbol of a whole mode of existence.’ (‘Mary in the NewbornChurch and at the End of Time: Analysis of Data in Jean-Claude Colin’,FA 3,3 (1996) 245-263, p. 249).
I am in complete agreement with Fr. Coste in protesting against the wayin which, for many Marists, ‘Mary in the new-born Church’ has becomesimply ‘Mary at Pentecost'. On the other hand, pace Jean Coste, we aregoing to spend some time on Acts 1:12-14, for three reasons: first,because one shouldn’t dismiss too lightly a passage of the Scriptures;second, what Mary of Agreda has to say about the blessed Virgin in theChurch at its birth belongs, I believe, to a literary tradition going back tothe Church of the first centuries which does have something to do withthe Acts of the Apostles; finally, by looking closely at these verses ofActs, we can make our own what Mary is believed to have said at Le Puy,without necessarily having to depend solely on Colin’s owninterpretations. For in fact those words ‘I was the support of the Church atits birth, etc.’ do not really come to us from Jean-Claude Colin but fromJean-Claude Courveille, and ultimately from the Blessed Virgin herself.If today’s Marists - despite Coste’s protestations - have opted for theimage of ‘Mary at Pentecost’ as the icon of the Society of Mary, it is nodoubt because it seems to offer a symbol of Mission, to put alongside thatof ‘Mary at Nazareth’ as a symbol of the hidden life. After all, wasn’t it atPentecost that the Holy Spirit came upon the apostles with the result thatthey went ‘to the ends of the earth’ (cf. Acts 1:8)? As Jan Hulshof - 1mean the author, not the Superior General - reads the history of theSociety of Mary: ‘The paradigm of the missionary community of theapostles at Pentecost retreated more and more before the paradigm of thehidden family of Nazareth' (Constitutions, New and Old, p. 75). In thatcase, wouldn’t we agree that today’s Marists have at long last recoveredthe first model as better adapted to their renewed idea of the Society?
Coste, at any rate, would insist that this is not really what Colin had inmind. I would add that it draws on a reading of Acts that is conventionalbut rather superficial. No doubt the visual power of the image of Maryamong the apostles at Pentecost has exercised a considerable impact inconcentrating these diverse themes in one simple scene. It is our job rightnow to unscramble them and examine them one by one: first, Mary in theChurch at its birth; then, Mary in the midst of the Apostles - neither canbe reduced simply to ‘Mary at Pentecost’. Later we shall also see that ‘thenew-born Church' is not really a symbol of Mission and in fact was easilyinterchanged in Fr Colin’s mind with ‘Nazareth’.
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