Conference: Mary on the Eve of the Second Vatican Council
The Church is now celebrating a “Year of Faith,” forty years after the Second Vatican Council.
In the decades prior to Vatican II, many creative theologians turned their attention to reflect on the Theotokos, Mary the Mother of God, and her relationship to Christ and to the Church. Some of their theology was incorporated into the documents of Vatican II, and some was left behind, but none of it is well remembered now. This creative outpouring has been largely unexamined, leaving, as it were, so many gems of Marian scholarship littering the mid-twentieth century landscape, waiting to be picked up again and, in some way, reincorporated into the treasury of the Church’s reflection on Mary.
These theologians hoped to help us rediscover how Mary is to be located theologically, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, at the ¨nexus mysteriorum—the intimate connection among the mysteries of Christian Faith,” unto renewal in the Church. It is our hope that this conference will, in a way, pick up where they left off.
During the conference we will turn our attention to the Mariological reflection of these seminal thinkers. Perhaps by picking up the strands of their thought, we can begin to re-weave them into a tapestry of Marian scholarship and devotion that will speak to a new time and place, our own, in the twenty-first century.
Our hope is to help the People of God to understand better and to embrace Mary as Mother of the Church and Star of Evangelization for this Year of Faith today, and beyond.