Greenbelt 2011 - Padraig O Tuama on Our Lady of Greenbelt

Padraig O Tuama is one of my favourite Greenbelt speaker - coming originally for Cork he his the most beautiful soft Irish accents and honestly I would go and listen to him if he was reading the telephone directory.  It is therefore an extra special treat that what he actually has to say is delightful too.

This talk on Our Lady of Greenbelt should be compulsory listening for anyone who thinks that either Mary can be sidelined or that devotion to Mary is corrupt and should be suppressed.

It had strong echos of a talk Nicola Slee gave on her Book of Mary as both Padraig and Nicola were trying to rescue Mary from the sanitised and perfected imagine the Church too often uses in place of the real woman Mary was.

Padraig drawing on his Irish Catholic childhood began with a poem about Mary turning up as a parish rosary group and explored with gentle comedy how the group would react.  This was a jumping off point for a number of themes. One was the issue of Mary's Virginity, he challenged the conflation of virginity with purity.  Being a virgin has limited at best use as a predictor of someones purity or holiness.  He also challenged the public ownership of another's sexuality that calling her 'The Virgin Mary' involves - this is also true of the old fashioned term 'consecrated virgin' for a Nun, why make the primary designator of somebody in fact the one thing they are not doing.  As a Gay man he also points to the dangers when the Church decides that it is entitled to know and discuss and judge the private sexually lives of some of its members (and the Church has always hypocritically only been interested in 'some' of its members sex lives).

Padraig also addressed the 4 major doctrines of the Catholic Church concerning Mary, highlighting that the truth that each attests to (when properly expressed) is a truth not primarily about Mary but about Christ.  Although when it comes to the Assumption of Mary he express the view that it was perhaps unfortunate that this had been raised (only in 1950) to the status of an infallible dogma - however it has a long and venerable history in the Church and in itself should not be the flash point of division between Catholics and Protestants that it so often is. 


Coming home I found the Walsingham Review on the doormat, and Walsingham is often the home of the wrong sort of devotion to Mary and so it was refreshing to find Bishop Lindsay Urwin using the imaginative writings of Erasmus to make a point not a million miles away from Padraig. Erasmus has Mary say "You shall not turn me out unless you turn my Son out too, whom I hold in my arms.  I won't be pulled away from him.  You shall either throw us both out or leave us both unless you have in mind to have a Church without a Christ." - This is a Mary full of bile, the Mary who remained at the foot of the cross while future apostles ran away, the Mary when encountered as a real person rather than a porcelain doll who tells us of depths of humanity and so of Christ.