The Catholic church has always venerated Mary (‘Mother of God’) above other saints. But in recent years there has been a slight (a very slight) cooling in the church with regard to the inclusion of Mary in the liturgy of the mass. It’s been an English custom since medieval times to recite a Hail Mary (a verse of the rosary – the traditional Marian prayer) at the end of the ‘Prayers of the Faithful’ – the sequence of introductory prayers in the main body of the service.
But just over a decade ago Rome decided to gently discourage this practice. It still continues in many churches (old habits die hard) and in some senses represents a small disjunction in the English church’s relationship with Rome. Okay, not small – tiny. Infinitesimal. Even so, as a practising Catholic, albeit not a particularly well-behaved one, I have observed at first hand how enthusiastic Marian devotion is perceived as a vaguely unsettling and slightly eccentric fringe activity in the modern church. It can be greeted at best by incomprehension, at worst by polite derision; and this alone makes painstakingly scholarly and well-researched works such as Chris Maunder’s Mary, Founder of Christianity so piquant and so timely.
To say that Maunder is walking gingerly into a minefield in the book’s opening chapters is no exaggeration. This isn’t simply because of how traditional and fundamentalist Christians might be expected to feel about a work whose main agenda is to place Mary unapologetically centre stage in their faith narrative (Maunder is a Catholic, although his book is determinedly ecumenical in tone), but because he is also tentatively engaging with a whole gamut of other modern social, sexual, political and cultural niceties.
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