Part 1 of Mark Shea's Zenit Interview on Mariology
Zenit yesterday and today has published a two part interview with Mark Shea, a well known and respected convert from Evangelical Protestant to Roman Catholicism. He says that one of his biggest holdups in his conversion was Catholic doctrine on Mary - and I figured this fits in perfectly with the series of posts I am doing. He is in the process of publishing a three volume series on Mariology, which promises to be a great gift to the Church with its special sensitivity and awareness of the problems that Protestants tend to have with Marian theology. Here is part I:
Mark Shea: Mariology From A-Z (Part 1)
Former Protestant Addresses Marian Devotion
By Annamarie Adkins
SEATTLE, Washington, JULY 16, 2009 (Zenit.org).- One would think it impossible to spill any more ink about the Blessed Virgin Mary, judging from the number of Marian titles on the shelf at a local Catholic bookstore.
But when popular Catholic author Mark Shea was considering entering the Church, there were no comprehensive titles where he could address his concerns as an evangelical Protestant about Catholic Marian doctrine and devotion.
Twenty years later, that book was still missing from the shelves, so Shea set out to write it.
The result is "Mary, Mother of the Son," a three-volume apologetics tool published by Catholic Answers.
Shea is senior content editor at Catholic Exchange and a regular columnist for both Inside Catholic and the National Catholic Register.
In Part 1 of this interview, he shares with ZENIT why almost everything non-Catholics think they "know" about Mary is wrong.
Part 2 of this interview will appear Friday.
ZENIT: Why did you write a book about the Mother of God? Where does your trilogy fit on the already crowded shelf of books and treatises about Mary?
Shea: I wrote this book because it's the book I wish somebody had written when I was coming into the Church.
I waited around for 20 years, hoping somebody else would do it, but when nobody did, I decided I'd take on the project (which is only fair since I'm the only one who really knows what questions and doubts I had and what would constitute a satisfactory reply to them).
As to where the trilogy fits on the bookshelf, I suppose I'd say "Anywhere."
That is to say, part of the reason I wrote it is because there simply wasn't any book I could find that did what this book does. For instance, the books on Marian dogma didn't deal with questions about apparitions. Devotional literature didn't answer questions about where the Church was getting all this stuff about Mary. Books tracing the development of doctrine didn't talk about the rosary. In short, the literature was out there, but most people don't have time to locate all the resources for the host of questions they have about Mary. So I created "Mary, Mother of the Son" to be a sort of "one-stop shopping" resource for virtually every issue a non-Catholic (or uncatechized Catholic) might have concerning Marian doctrine and devotion.
It tackles everything from the sources of Marian belief and practice (a huge issue since oodles of non-Catholics simply assume the whole thing is a data dump from paganism) to the Catholic approach to Scripture to the four Marian dogmas to the broad spectrum of Marian devotion to private revelations and apparitions to possible ways forward in Catholic/Evangelical conversations about the Blessed Virgin.
When it comes to Marian Willies, I've run the gamut in my own life and had to deal with pretty much every difficulty and problem with Mary to which non-Catholic flesh is heir, so it's a book that comes from my heart (and gut) as well as my head.
Nothing in it is new (God willing) and the whole thing is ultimately a restatement of the Tradition. But it's a restatement that tries to run the gamut of Catholic teaching on Mary, not simply focus in on one specialized area. And it's written in order to be intelligible to the non-specialist.
Read the rest here