/\ *T 73 7 /

the

Perfect

Woman

WKm

by pLeo A. Pursley, D.D.



To the late

Archbishop John Francis Noll

whose Devotion to Mary

is memorialized in the

National Shrine

of the Immaculate Conception

Washington, D.C.

® Copyright 1973 by Our Sunday Visitor, Inc.,

Noll Plaza, Huntington, Indiana 46750

f

634

Deadest



The Perfect Woman

In 1973 there are millions of people who

cannot remember that 1954 was celebrat-

ed as the Marian Year to mark the 100th

anniversary of the definition of the dogma

of the Immaculate Conception of the

Blessed Virgin Mary. Yet, this event still

has interest for Catholics in general and

for Catholics of this country in particular.

In 1846 Mary Immaculate was chosen as

Patroness of the United States. Before the

first apparition of Our Lady at Lourdes in

1858, seven bishops had dedicated their

dioceses and cathedrals to her Immaculate

Conception.

Announcing the Marian Year Pope

Pius XII issued an encyclical letter with

the significant title, The Radiant Crown

of Glory. This, too, is of present interest.

Devotion to Mary is a permanent part of

our religious faith. It may suffer a partial

and temporary eclipse for various reasons

in some periods of history, but it is here to

stay. Indeed, there are many who feel that

the current crisis in the Church and in the

world calls for renewal of this devotion,

and there are signs that it is under way.

It would be a step in that direction to

read, or read again, the letter of a great

Pope mentioned above. In spite of its for-

mal language it breathes such a pure

spirit of filial love that all who read it may

see that it is no perfunctory official docu-

ment but a personal expression of warm

and tender devotion from the inmost

heart of the Holy Father.

Explaining the purpose of the Marian

Year, he writes: “This centenary celebra-

tion should not only serve to revive Cath-



olic faith and earnest devotion to the

Mother of God in the souls of all, but
Christians should, also, in as far as possi-

ble, conform their lives to the image of the

same Virgin. ... If this devotion is not to

consist of mere words, is not to be coun-

terfeit coin of religion, or the weak and

transitory affection of a moment, but is to

be something sincere, true and efficacious,

it is necessary that each one of us should,

according to his condition of life, avail of

it for the acquisition of virtue. The com-

memoration of the mystery of the Most

Holy Virgin, conceived immaculate . . .

should in the first place urge us to that in-

nocence and integrity of life which flees

from and abhors the slightest stain of

sin.”

All this is plainly a matter of inten-

tion and effort for each of us. Meanwhile,

however, our immediate concern is to

speak about Mary. In one of the Vatican

galleries there is a painting by the modern

German artist, Ludwig Seitz, which shows

Saint Thomas Aquinas offering his writ-

ten works to Holy Mother Church. She is

represented as a gracious and queenly

woman seated upon a throne. The saint

kneels before her in the midst of his many

books, filled with his profound learning

and love of truth. This brief inscription

tells us that she accepts them with praise

and approval: “Bene scripsisti de me,

Thoma.” (“You have written well of me,

Thomas.”) I am reassured by the thought

that Mary, Mother of grace and beauty,

forever enthroned in the Heart of Christ

and His Mystical Body, will look with like

favor upon the least of her children who,

like the little Juggler of Notre Dame, try

to please her in their words and works.



But how much easier it is to speak to

Mary than to speak to others about her!

To speak to her, as a child to a mother, is

to follow instinctively the course of

thought and language dictated naturally

and, we hope, supernaturally, by our con-

sciousness of the intimate and loving rela-

tionship between us. To speak about her is

to grope for words that tease us with their

inadequacy, to reach for a fullness and

richness of language that lie beyond our

meager resources. I am reminded of a

statement of the motion picture actress,

Ruth Hussey. When she was asked by Fa-

ther Patrick Peyton to play the part of

Mary on a Family Theatre television pro-

gram, she says that she was “stunned.”

Even after she had mastered her lines, in

private rehearsal, she could not bring her-

self to utter that inspired and incompara-

ble hymn of praise and thanksgiving, “My
soul doth magnify the Lord.” But the time

came to say it; and she tells us that the

words seemed to speak themselves “with a

kind of singing wonder.” Now she knew
what the Magnificat meant. “It was the

purpose of a whole life.”

According to Dr. Samuel Johnson,

“the ideas of Christian theology are too

simple for eloquence and too sacred for

fiction.” I am not sure that he gave to

these words the meaning they have for us;

but I am sure that, if we look at Mary in

the full light of divine revelation, we shall

see in her something of that ineffable sim-

plicity which is the attribute of God and

needs no human eloquence to enhance its

splendor. I am sure that, if we meditate

upon the mysteries that surround her life,

like the moon and twelve stars, lifting her

high above the excellence of all men and



angels, we shall know that we are in the

presence of a truth that is sacred, indeed,

and could not be made more strange and

wonderful by the most creative art.

This, then, is the initial and quite in-

superable difficulty that faces anyone who

desires to speak worthily of Mary. And

this is just the right place to remind our-

selves that Our Immaculate Lady is not an

idea of theology, a mystery of religion, a

simple and sacred truth. She is a person, a

human person; and our love of her, how-

ever deeply touched with awe and rever-

ence, must permit that primary fact to

form our concept of her and inform our

devotion to her.

In reading Caryll Houselander’s pre-

cious little book, The Reed of God, I was

impressed with the delicate emphasis she

lays upon this point. Deploring her own

misguided piety in early life, she says that

“a very great many people still think of

Our Lady as someone who would never

do anything that we do. To many she is

the Madonna of the Christmas card, im-

mobile, seated forever in the immaculately

clean stable of golden straw and shining

snow. She is not real; nothing about her is

real, not even the stable in which Love

was born.”

I should like to explore somewhat the

reasons for this sorry state of mind and

make some likely applications to the spe-

cial needs of our time. Let me begin by

borrowing two lines from one of the less

Christian poets who did, nevertheless, pay

his tribute to “our tainted nature’s soli-

tary boast.” It was not of Mary that

Wordsworth wrote the following verse,

but it could not justly describe anyone

else.



“A perfect woman, nobly planned,

To warn, to comfort, and com-

mand.”

May I ask you now to keep these three last

words in mind?

Mary is, first of all, a perfect woman.

We are dazzled and frightened by perfec-
tion, even the idea of perfection, so re-

mote and unattainable. But I did not say

that Mary is perfection. I said that she is

the perfect woman, the most revealing

mirror of that perfection which exists in

God alone. As Father Hopkins writes in

his hauntingly beautiful poem on The

Blessed Virgin Compared To The Air We

Breathe:

“Mary Immaculate,

Merely a woman, yet

Whose presence, power is

Great as no goddess’s

Was ever deemed or dreamed, who

This one work has to do

—

Let all God’s glory through.”

It is not, however, this consideration

alone that makes it difficult for many peo-

ple to love Our Lady as she ought to be

loved. I think we shall account for it more

fully if we examine the role of Mary as the

perfect woman nobly planned to warn, to

warn the world against its worldliness, to

show forth in herself those qualities of

soul and body which confound the wis-

dom of the world and challenge its loyalty

to its own idols. For there is nothing so lit-

tle appreciated today as purity, nothing so

little understood as virginity. And if we

think, good easy souls, that our own peo-

ple, secure behind the fortress of their

faith, remain untouched and uncon-

taminated by the blight of this spiritual



blindness, we shall delude ourselves with

false hope and foster in them the very

sickness we must seek to cure.

So it is, that even among the faithful,

there is current the mistaken notion that

purity and virginity are negative virtues at

best, fugitive and cloistered, always to be

associated with sterility and impotence.

How few would understand these lines of
Patmore, who was, by the way, a much-

married man:

“Love, light for me thy ruddiest,

blazing torch,

That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch

Of the glad Palace of Virginity,

May gaze within and sing the

pomp I see;

For, crown’d with roses all,

‘Tis there, O Love, they keep
thy Festival.”

If I may quote again from The Reed

of God: “Unfortunately, there are not

only wise virgins in this world but . . .

foolish virgins: and the foolish virgins

make more noise . . . than the wise, giving

a false impression of virginity by their

loveless and joyless attitude to life. They

cause us to turn with a sigh of relief to the

page in the Missal which announces the

feast of a holy woman who was neither a

virgin nor a martyr. These foolish virgins,

like their prototypes, have no oil in their

lamps. And no one can give them this oil,

for it is the potency of life, the will and ca-

pacity to love. We no longer think of vir-
ginity as the first fruit laid upon the fire of

sacrifice, but rather as a windfall of green

apples . . . hard and sour because the sun

has never penetrated them and warmed

them at the core. Virginity is really the

whole offering of soul and body to be con-



sumed in the fire of love and changed into

the flame of its glory. The virginity of Our

Lady is the wholeness of love through

which our own humanity has become the

bride of the Spirit of Life.”

How magnificently positive and pro-
ductive is this true concept of consecrated

virginity! Surely it is our duty to help

awaken the world to see the brightness of

this Morning Star that shines above it, to

feel the attraction of this lodestone of un-

alloyed love that lies accessible beneath

the vileness of our fallen nature. Surely it

is our duty to inspire in others, in our chil-

dren, in our youth, in our mature men and

women, single or married, a devotion to

this ideal of purity which alone can purify

them and thus redeem and restore. But we

can do this only if we ourselves heed with

prompt and vigorous response the voice

of the woman who warns the world of its

errors, its follies and its sins, of its crying

need for prayer and penance, of its certain

impending doom unless it strives to recov-

er that innocence and integrity of life

which the Holy Father envisioned as the

true and lasting fruit of the Marian Year.

Mary is also the woman who com-

forts. If the unthinking multitudes that

move so restlessly and, for the most part,

so aimlessly, through this shadow-land we

call the world, cannot be won back to

God by the lovely vision of Mary the Vir-
gin; and if the less enlightened and the

lukewarm among her own children stand

aloof from the fire of love that burns in

her virginal heart, surely neither one nor

the other can long resist the appeal of her

Motherhood, that divine and universal

Motherhood by virtue of which Mary is

supremely the woman who comforts. It is



our lot to live in an age uprooted from its

basic and best traditions of Christian cul-

ture, an age torn by the agonies of dissen-

sion and conflict, fighting with itself like a

guilty man who will not listen to his con-
science or cannot hear it for all the confu-

sion around him; an age rendered home-

less and empty-hearted by forsaking the

God who alone can fill the heart and
make a home in the human soul. That is

why this age of ours, more than any other,

is an orphan, an orphan of the storm.

There is nothing that an orphan needs so

much as a mother; and there is no mother

like Mary, “Mater amabilis,” most loving

and most worthy of love.

When the peasant girl of Galilee

heard the greeting and the message of the

archangel, she said Yes — for herself and
for all humanity. In that moment of whis-

pered consent, Mary offered her soul and

body as a chalice in which God would

mingle the purest water of humanity with

the rich wine of divinity. So “the Word

was made flesh” and all the exiled chil-

dren of Eve were given a mother.

Certainly it is here, in the consoling

and all-embracing implications of her

motherhood, that Mary claims our love as

no other saint ever can. It is here that we

find in her what we can find in no one else,

the kind of help that differs from all

others, the understanding, the love, the

comfort that only a mother can give and

only a child can receive. Each saint has his

special time and place, his special gift, his

special sort of accomplishment. Accord-

ingly he is classified and venerated. But

Mary has all. She is our mother. She is all

things to all of her children.

We may complain at times that God



has told us so little about her, about her

appearance, her personality, her words

and deeds. In so complaining we miss the

point. God has told us what we need to

know. He has included in Mary’s vocation

and in her life’s work the one essential

thing that lies hidden and must be re-

vealed in every vocation and in every life’s

work: to bear Christ in our hearts and

carry His light to the world. This Mary

did while remaining lowly and obscure, a

lay woman among the people of her vil-

lage, doing the ordinary daily tasks of her

home, just being what God wanted her to

be. That is why the greatest of saints is the

only one whom we can all truly imitate,

even though she stands above us as heav-

en is above the earth.

In the late Father Leen’s study of the

vexed question, “What is Education?”

there is what seems to me a penetrating

remark. He says: “Men may study to be

learned; women should study in order to

be wise.” Are we right in looking to

women, and particularly to mothers, for

that wisdom of the heart so urgently need-

ed by our world? This much is certain:

Woman is not, by nature or grace, the
mere echo of man. She is truly free only

when she is free to be herself, to develop in

herself those qualities that make her more

womanly. She is not emancipated when

she is granted the dubious privilege of

being less womanly. Whether she is des-

tined for marriage or not, she is always a

mother at heart; she is always a fountain

of life, not only in a physical sense but in a

moral and spiritual sense. That is why she

cannot renounce her motherhood, even in

this larger comprehension, without deny-

ing to God and man her unique contribu-



tion to the glory of the One and the good

of the other. And that is why we pray that

Mary, the woman who comforts, the

Mother who gives strength to troubled

minds and weak wills and timid hearts

and tired hands, Mary, the Seat of Wis-

dom, may intercede for all women that

they may know their own worth, their

place in God’s plan, the glory of their vo-

cation; that they may take the wounded

world into their arms, even as Mary

clasped the lifeless Body of her Son; that

they may hasten with the holy women to

the empty tomb and lead us out of dark-

ness and death into the newborn life of the

risen Christ.

Not only is Mary the woman who

warns and the woman who comforts; she

is also the woman who commands. It is

the right of a queen to rule over her sub-

jects, and Mary holds that right by divine

authority, by universal acclaim. She has it

because God chose her to be the Mother

of His Son Who is the King of kings and
the Lord of lords. She has it because she

earned it by standing beside Him as He

did battle unto death to save His people.

Happily there is no need within the house-

hold of the faith to vindicate Mary’s claim

to the title, Mother of Divine Grace, to in-

sist upon her living and effective union

with Jesus Christ in His sacrifice of atone-

ment, to point out her share in the shed-

ding of His blood and the dispensation of

His graces, to explain why we bow before

her as Queen of Apostles and Martyrs,

Queen of Angels and Saints, Queen of all

hearts.

But are we content to hug this secret

to ourselves and care nothing that mil-

lions of others do not know it? In contem-



porary American life there is many a

curious inconsistency. One of them is the

fact that, while we have no use for real

queens, we have set up a thousand and

one make-believe queens to receive our

flattering homage. The modern cult of

physical health and beauty, with its vast

commercial possibilities, seems to have

been exploited to the very last limit of vul-

garity. Has it helped us to appreciate the

grace and dignity that proclaim the true

quality of the queen?

The fact is, on the contrary, that

minds and imaginations and emotions,

nourished almost from infancy on this un-

substantial fare must take a long, long

step before they can understand why “all

the beauty of the king’s daughter is with-

in,” why the sweet and gentle Maid of

Nazareth is “terrible as an army set in bat-

tle array,” why she is the terror of the

legions of hell whose proud leader she

crushed beneath her foot, why she holds

the destiny of nations in her hand, why, in

a word, she is the Queen of the Universe.

Perhaps this is the one aspect of

Mary that appears least compelling, as ev-

idence of her greatness, to many people in

our day. But it conveys a weighty truth

and a mighty lesson of the utmost impor-

tance to the modern world. I shall not un-

dertake to explain to you why this is so.

You know the prevailing state of affairs

today on every level of life. Consider it

well. Look long and closely at the picture

before you. Follow the chain of events

from cause to consequence and back

again. You will see, because you have the

key, that there is only one way out — the
way that Mary walked in queenly majesty

from Nazareth to Bethlehem to Calvary



and thence across the world, the way of

submission to divine law and order, the

way of conformity to the will of God, the

way of union between the Spirit of Christ

and the heart of man, so that Love may be

born and bring us peace.

It is for us who say, “Hail, Holy

Queen!” to rally to her standard in her

struggle to win the world to her Divine

Son. If it is true, in a mystical sense, that

Christ will hang from the cross while a

single soul remains to be saved, so it is

true that Mary will stand beneath the

cross in the travail of her motherhood

until all her children are counted in the

courts of heaven. When she calls upon us

to help, it is the Queen who commands,

and we must obey.

Much that I wish to say in this final

tribute to Mary, Our Queen, is strongly

expressed by Hilaire Belloc in his Ballad

To Our Lady of Czestochowa. It might

well be taken as a summary of all that

Mary should mean to us and to our world.

“Help of the half-defeated, House of

Gold,

Shrine of the Sword, and Tower

of Ivory;

Splendour apart, supreme and

aureoled,

The Battler’s vision and the

World’s reply.

You shall restore me, O my last
Ally,

To vengeance and the glories of

the bold.

This is the faith that I have held

and hold,

And this is that in which I

mean to die.”