Body and soul

The extent to which, during my lifetime, Catholic devotion and teaching has moved away from emphasising Mary is something which often crosses my mind as an interesting topic which seems to attract little, or inadequate, attention academically.  (Not that I have really gone looking for it, I suppose.  But why isn't this really major, and rapid, change in Church emphasis, at least in the Western branch of Catholicism, more discussed?)

While not directly on that point, Phillip Jenkins here notes some relatively early "alternative gospels" which talk about Mary's death, and says they are little studied, which he thinks is a pity.  He writes:

One reason for this, of course, is that for most Protestants (and some Catholics), the ideas I am describing – the whole Marian lore – is so bizarre, so outré, so sentimental, and so blatantly superstitious that it just does not belong within the proper study of Christianity. If anything, it’s actively anti-Christian. Even scholars prepared to wrestle with the intricacies of Gnostic cosmic mythology throw up their hands at what they consider a farrago of medieval nonsense.

As I’ll argue in a forthcoming post, that response is profoundly mistaken. If we don’t understand devotion to Mary, together with such specifics as the Assumption, we are missing a very large portion of the Christian experience throughout history. It’s not “just medieval,” any more than it is a trivial or superstitious accretion.