God Squad: Why Catholics venerate Mary

QWhy do only Catholics, of all Christians, worship and pray to Mary, the mother of God?

-- C., Jupiter, Fla., via email

ACatholics don't worship Mary; they venerate Mary. Worship is reserved only for God. If you worship anything or anyone other than God, you're an idolater committing the sin of idolatry. Worshipping Jesus is not idolatry for Christians because Christians believe Jesus is God.

Venerating someone is not idolatry, because veneration is the belief that some human person reflects the values God has given to us to follow. A person we venerate as living a nearly perfect, Godly life is called a saint. Judaism calls such a person a tzadik. Buddhism, which does not have a Western idea of God, calls such a spiritually enlightened person a Bodhisattva. Every religion has a vocabulary of veneration.

In Catholicism, Mary is believed to be the mother of God and the mother of the Catholic Church, who lived a sinless life. Mary was never formally canonized as a saint, but she holds a position as a kind of super-saint in Catholicism, although she is not a part of God's triune mystery.

As of 1950, the belief in Mary's Assumption -- that she was taken into heaven body and soul -- became a dogma of the Catholic Church (Catechism of the Catholic Church 966,975).

From my point of view, the veneration of Mary by Catholics is a very good thing. Even though all words fail to express the majesty and mystery of God, there is a tendency to consider God in totally masculine terms. The figure of Mary is helpful in lifting up the feminine grace of God in Christianity. In Judaism, the feminine figure of the Shekinah does a similar balancing of the masculine elements of Jewish theology.

To Catholics, the distinction between worshipping the divine and venerating human perfection is clear. However, the Catholic love of Mary, and particularly the deep importance of Mary to the personal faith of the late Pope John Paul II, has led to the unfair accusation reflected in your question. The line between the two can become a bit blurry, but the main difference between worship and veneration remains important and distinct.

QWhat's your opinion of religious email chain letters? They're often passed on by perfectly lovely, sincere people, exhorting you to pass each letter on to 12 more people with the assurance of a reward or blessing from God, such as a financial windfall, removal of worries, healing of an illness, a new job or house. Besides the obvious danger of a vicious computer virus, or providing some unscrupulous individual with a lot of good email addresses, I've received such letters that start very reverently with cute pictures and a sweet verse, then deteriorate into ill-tempered missives warning that something terrible will befall you if you don't pass it on.

I can't believe religious email chain letters and their terms and conditions have anything to do with a gracious God, nor do they have any legitimate control over his actions.

-- R., via email

AThou hast been spammed! Whether the spammer is indeed kind and loving is something you can't know for sure and have good reason to suspect. The best assumption is that the people who send such letters are just callous, criminal spammers trolling for email addresses to use in some identity theft crime or, as you yourself imagined, using you as an unwitting accomplice to some virus attack on you and your friends.

The basic problem with so-called spiritual email chain letters is that God does not work through strangers asking you to surrender your privacy in order to qualify for some miracle.

The whole point of God's grace is that it's a free gift of love, not a device to extort information or give us several million dollars in an anonymous overseas bank account. Believing in such things is just one small step away from believing in magic.