Hail, Mary

Had

the Rev. Brian Maguire hit on the idea 30 years ago, he might have found himself facing some very annoyed congregants. Four hundred and fifty years ago, someone professing similar notions might even have been hanged.

The 35-year-old pastor's brainstorm concerned a scheduling conflict on the day of the Annunciation. The holiday, which celebrates Mary's learning from the angel Gabriel that she will give birth to the Messiah, always falls on March 25, precisely nine months before Christmas. But this year the 25th is also Good Friday, when Christians somberly recall that same Messiah's Crucifixion.

Roman Catholicism, which traditionally observes both dates, has rules for this eventuality: Catholics worldwide will mark the Annunciation on April 4 this year. But Maguire is not Catholic; he is the pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Xenia, Ohio.

And in light of what he calls "a beautiful, poetic opportunity," he says that rather than preach on Jesus alone this Good Friday, he will bring in Mary as well. "If you have Jesus' entrance and exit on the same day," Maguire explains, "she should play a part in that—because she was the first and last disciple to reach out during his life."

There is an elegance to this plan; Maguire, who attended Princeton Theological Seminary, is no theological naif. But until quite recently, his decision to pair the gravest day on the Christian calendar with a Marian celebration would have struck most of his fellow Protestants as peculiar, if not doctrinally perverse. For roughly 300 years until the 1900s, Protestants, while granting Mary her indisputable place as the mother of Jesus, regarded any additional enthusiasm as tantamount to "Mariolatry," the alleged (and allegedly nonbiblical) elevation of the Virgin to a status approaching Christ's that some understood as a cause of their initial breaking with Catholicism. Even as open hostility largely abated in the U.S., some taboos prevailed. Beverly Gaventa, a professor of New Testament literature at Princeton, has portrayed Mary as the victim of "a Protestant conspiracy of silence: theologically, liturgically and devotionally." Most Protestants (excluding some high-church Episcopalians) can identify with the experience of Kathleen Norris, an author who has written of her upbringing, "We dragged Mary out at Christmas ... and ... packed her safely in the creche box for the rest of the year. We ... denied [her] place in Christian tradition and were disdainful of the reverence displayed for her, so public and emotional, by Catholics."

But things have begun to change, and not just among theologians.

Xenia, Ohio, is no radical hotbed. Campaign signs there still promote Bush, half the weekday- morning radio dial features conservative religious fare, and most of Westminster Presbyterian's 300 members are middle-aged or older. Yet with a few exceptions, the 21 who recently gathered at the Rev. Maguire's Bible class were fascinated by his thoughts on Mary. "I always thought of her as the first disciple," said Corinne Whitesell, 74. "Rosaries and Hail Marys, that's not right. [But] that total submission to God is one of the most beautiful things about her." Said Gloria Wolff, 78: "We grew up in a time when women couldn't be elected as church elders. It's important to teach young women about the strong female role models in the church." Remarked John Burtch, 75: Maguire is "the new guy on the block, and he's got some interesting ideas. So we listen to him.

We're open to change."

In a shift whose ideological breadth is unusual in the fragmented Protestant world, a long-standing wall around Mary appears to be eroding. It is not that Protestants are converting to Catholicism's dramatic exaltation: the singing of Salve Regina, the Rosary's Marian Mysteries, the entreaty to her in the Hail Mary to "pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death." Rather, a growing number of Christian thinkers who are neither Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox (another branch of faith to which Mary is central) have concluded that their various traditions have shortchanged her in the very arena in which Protestantism most prides itself: the careful and full reading of Scripture.

Arguments on the Virgin's behalf have appeared in a flurry of scholarly essays and popular articles, on the covers of the usually conservative Christianity Today (headline: The Blessed Evangelical Mary) and the usually liberal Christian Century (St. Mary for protestants). They are being preached, if not yet in many churches then in a denominational cross section—and not just at modest addresses like Maguire's in Xenia but also from mighty pulpits like that at Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church, where longtime senior pastor John Buchanan recently delivered a major message on the Virgin ending with the words "Hail Mary ... Blessed are you among us all."

This could probably not have happened at some other time. Robert Jenson, author of the respected text Systematic Theology, chuckles when asked whether the pastor of his Lutheran youth would have approved of his (fairly extreme) position that Protestants, like Catholics, should pray for Mary's intercession. "My pastor would have been horrified," he says, adding, "The pastor was my father." Yet today Catholics and Protestants feel freer to explore each other's beliefs and practices. Feminism has encouraged popular speculations on the lives of female biblical figures and the role of the divine feminine (think The Red Tent and The Da Vinci Code). A growing interest, on both the Protestant right and left, in practices and texts from Christianity's first 1,500 years has led to immersion in the habitual Marianism of the early and medieval church. And the influx of millions of Hispanic immigrants from Catholic cultures into American Protestantism may eventually accelerate progress toward a pro-Marian tipping point—on whose other side may lie changes not just in sermon topic but in liturgy, personal piety and a re-evaluation of the actual messages of the Reformation.