Tags
Andrew Greeley, Anti-Art, Anti-Imagination, Archbishop Charles Chaput, Carlota Espinoza, Catholic Imagination, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Desecration of Sacred Art, Feminine Spirituality, Fr. Benito Hernandez, Iconoclasm, Iconoclastic Spirit, Marian Spirituality, Matriarchal Model, North Denver, Our Lady Of Guadalupe Parish, Patriarchal aggression, Patriarchal Model, Patristic aggression, Peaceful protest, Peaceful revolution, Religious Imagination, Santo Juan Diego
(Photo: OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE MURAL, Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, North Denver)
“Today, we still see loss of the Holy, the literal banning of, covering over of the Holy. We see doing so narrows the view and deadens the imagination and dedication of an entire generation of the young. Banning the Holy harms the spirit of ingenuity and creativity of the young. It disheartens those who innately have the spark of longing for the Holy People…Even still today some move to lock the comfort of Holy Mother and her Child of Love away from her people, who are all of us….
Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in North Denver has been for decades a strong village of Latinos whose ancestry most often derives from Mexico and Central America. They and those who came after are strong children of Our Lady off Guadalupe, for she is called amongst other names, La Conquista, Our Lady of the Conquest-She who conquered from her heart, those who were already conquered by mere men… the Mother of those who have suffered to cross deserts and the mountains, braved the cold of climate and culture, to try to live free… She is considered the great Liberation Mother, the one who brings freedom to her children to walk free, proud, and to fear no one….
However, in 2009, someone at the little oasis of Our Lady of Guadalupe parish decided, for remodeling sake that the thirty-five-year-old historic and sacred mural painted by noted mural artist Carlota EspinoZa, showing Our Lady of Guadalupe and Santo Juan Diego should be covered by a white sheetrock wall from floor to ceiling….
(Photo: OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE MURAL, Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, North Denver)
This wall erased from sight the forty-seven foot long by twelve feet high mural of the Merciful Mother. A heating vent was punched through near the painted gown of Holy mother. The new white wall encapsulated her in the equivalent of a broom closet which stored buckets.
For a year or so after the wall was erected, respectful letters and phone calls form various people concerned about the covering of the mural were made to the parish and archbishop’s office. But inquiries about the erasure of Our Lady’s mural went unanswered. In a community of minorities who are known for the creativity, vivid love of color, and especially their strong relational ties to one another, that this huge historic mural would be obliterated without consultation with the entire community who brought and cared for Our Lady’s mural over the years, was not the way of the familia.
A group of concerned parishioners and former parishioners, community leaders and nuns coalesced into over 1,400 signatures on the petition to restore Our Lady’s mural and bring down the wall covering her. Pleas to the prelates, who had the power to bring down the wall, were not heard. This, the group held peaceful protests at the church. Present were the women in white, along with children dressed in white, all earnest, standing loyally for Our Lady and her sacred art.
Still there continued to be resistance to heartfelt requests for information about how the mural was covered over and walled up. No pastoral care was even offered to any who asked for restoration of Our Lady’s mural, that is, those who’d held their baptisms and funerals, wedding and celebratory masses within reach of Our Lady’s arms.
(Photo: OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE MURAL, Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, North Denver)
The women in white set aside a workday-not an easy thing to do for working-class members to gain time-off. But, they did and they marched ensemble to the archbishop’s residence to read a humble letter worked on for days by gentle-hearted people to choose the right words, asking that the mural be restored in keeping with the most holy teachings of the Church about not desecrating sacred art. The petition was not granted.
In addition to jailing Holy Mother, the remodeling of the altar also required the purchase of a very large rock throne for the priests to sit in during mass. The order was also given to drywall over the cherubs the artist had lovingly painted, and cover over the beautifully rendered long flowing bowers of Our Lady’s red roses.
It was said all this came about because an angry male church member had complained… “the only place for Mary is on her knees at the foot of the cross.”
Clarissa Pinokola Estes “Blessed Mother’s Immaculate Love for the Wild Soul.”
(photo: The Walling off of Our Lady- OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE MURAL, Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, North Denver)
From The Denver Post, 2009: The mural of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church at 1209 W. 36th ave in Denver was covered up in 2009. It was painted in 1975 by respected mural artist Carlotta Espinoza and hung on the back wall behind the pulpit. The Archidioces built a wall to cover the large mural of vigin of Guadalupe and Saint Juan Diego. People protested but their protests went ignored, so people sent a letter to the archbishop which was signed by 435 community members. Their hope was to get the mural back out for all to see and be fully restored. Their efforts have, to date, failed.
(Photo: Erasing the Holy: OUR LADY OF GUADALUPE MURAL, Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, North Denver)
Reflection: Andrew Greeley “The Catholic Imagination.”
“The Marian symbol is surely one of the most powerful symbols in the Western tradition. Virtually every major painter from the fifth to the sixteenth century painted at least one Madonna.
It may be that our predecessors –not all of whom were howling savages-saw something in the Mary symbol that we have missed. What they saw might well be something we can ill afford to neglect. How poor an unbalanced a religion it is that does not find place for the Divine Mother.
Ignoring the place of the Blessed Virgin in the Incarnation and the whole process of salvation has given Christianity a harsh thoroughly masculine emphasis. The absence of tenderness and affection has led to an over-emphasis on a harsh prophetic picture of God with it attending preoccupation with judgment … The development of a mature Mariology could do much to temper the harsh portrayal of the God of judgment and provide it with a healthy (and I might add, scriptural) concept of a God of mercy.
I don’t think we should overlook the fact that in some of her manifestations Mary is not just a woman but a powerful, liberated woman.
Mary represents the human insight that the Ultimate is passionately tender, seductively attractive, irresistibly inspiring, and graciously healing.
The battle of the Reformation over Mary is one of the most unseemly and foolish conflicts in the entire history of Christianity. The antipathy of some of the reformers to Mary was a disastrous mistake, as were the Catholic superstitions which in part caused the antipathy and the triumphalism which followed.
Mary becomes a model that shatters our perceptions of ultimate reality and helps us to see it in a new light. She guides us to see ultimate reality not only as creating, organizing, ordering, directing, planning, bringing to completion but also tenderly caring, seductively attracting, passionately inspiring and gently healing.”
“The image of Mary the Mother Of Jesus distinguishes the Catholic religious sensibility from others. She pushes the envelope of the Catholic imagination as far as it can be pushed by hinting there is a maternal dimension in God as well as a paternal one and thus absorbs and purifies and transforms all the female deities who came before.
In the art and the music and the poetry, Mary’s image clearly reflects the tenderness of God. The function of the Mary metaphor in the Catholic imagination represents the Mother Love of God, the generous and loving, life-giving power of God, the tenderness of God, the fertility of God, the nurturing of God.”
(Photo: Our Lady Of Guadalupe Parish, North Denver)
Reflection:
Thomas Merton From A Search For Solitude, journals 1952-1960)
Maybe what is wrong with American Catholicism is that it is in large measure, not Catholic.
Protestant features of our life-and Catholic life as a whole:
1. Distrust and rejection of emotional symbolism of art, of poetry, of contemplation.
2. Distrust of what is interior, distrust of joy, of happiness. (At the same time an all-American cult of good humor, as a ‘sign that one is among the elect’ –as a defense against anxiety, rather than true inner joy. Pragmatic joy, for efficiency’s sake. A good humorous Christian fits in and accomplishes more. He belongs)
3. Cult of energy, of efficiency, productivity, prosperity-again as ‘signs of election.’
4. Stern, practical legalism. Man face to face with demands of the divine will.
5. Harshness, aggressivity.
( Photo : Helen Richardson, Denver Post. Fran Aguirre, parishoner at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Denver, joining with fellow parishoners to protest the walling off the parish mural of Our Lady.)
Reflection:
Thomas Merton “Run To The Mountains. Journals 1939-1941.”
“It is one of the singular disgraces attached to Catholics as a social group that they, who once nourished with their Faith and their Love of God the finest culture the world ever saw, are now content with absolutely the worst art, the worst writing, the worst music, the worst everything that has ever made anybody throw up. All this, far from being caused by their Faith, only weakens and ruins their Faith. It is something of a Middle Class culture which is poisoning the Faith instead of slaking our thirst to honor God. And those who cannot distinguish what is bourgeoisie, in what they believe, from what is Christian are crucifying God all over again with their trivial, complacent ignorance and bad taste and materialism and injustice.”
(Photo: Helen Richardson, Denver Post, 2010. Tear down that wall, protesting the walling off of Our Lady of Guadalupe mural)
Reflection: “Our Lady: Catholicism’s diaphanous adagio”
A Post-Vatican II Catholicism, in a strained effort to be “protestant friendly,”has taken the easiest, superficial, surface reforms by downplaying Mary’s presence, along with caving into an iconoclastic, protestant spirit. Rosary services are set aside in most parishes, usually after scantly attended early morning weekday masses. Predictably, we have still failed to grasp the deeper, mystical reforms of John the XXIII. Even more predictably, when the mystical quality fails to be attained, that most pronounced of mystical figures, Our Lady, is the first to go.
In place of a sea of rosaries amidst a parish of divinely inspired art, the post-modern American Catholic Church, more often than not, projects the atmosphere of a dull, artless, masculine basketball court, rather than a temple. Naturally, rosaries and Mary have no place on the court.
When protestant churches jettisoned the sacramental, mysterious qualities of Catholicism, they universally rejected the Marian symbology, and proved themselves even more unimaginatively patriarchal than the original role model. Much in protestantism densely attaches itself to an alarmingly limited perception of hyper realism, in which the Marian image becomes the equivalent of a round peg in a square hole. Of all the protestant tenants to avoid, this should have been the Church’s last route. Instead, the Church has emulated the worst in its competition.
Of course, sophomoric attempts to appease protestantism hardly stops two millennium of Marian devotion among the laity, particularly European, Scandinavian, and Hispanic laity. Marian apparitions and pilgrimages to attributed sights of these apparitions are still vigorous forces of mystical inspiration to be reckoned with. The Church, understandably- from its public point of view, looks at each sighting with skepticism. That is the face the Church is forced to put on for the world. The authenticity of each sighting is reviewed, but the authenticity lies in that translucent wave of inspiration. Marian devotion has never been preoccupied with historicity or vacuous realism.
Christ himself rarely acquires that level of frenzied sightings. That possibly is because the Marian image, while certainly ethereal in the end state of being, traverses that bridge between the human condition and the goal of inclusion in the divine family.
Being a woman in first century, patriarchal-ruled Judea, Mary is a symbolic outcast, a secondary citizen. It is written that a sword pierced her girl’s heart, the traditional “Mary’s Way of the Cross” depicts a mother closely following in the bloodied footsteps of her dying son, and the various Pietas capture the mystical and emotional anguish of a parent losing her child.
In his writings of “Total Concentration to Mary”, that Franciscan martyr Maximilan Kolbe wrote, ” Anyone incapable of bending his knee and of imploring from Her in humble prayer the grace to know who She really is, cannot hope to learn anything more about Her.
From the divine Maternity flow all the graces granted to the All Holy Virgin Mary, and the first of these graces is the Immaculate Conception. This privilege must be particularly dear to Her heart, if at Lourdes She herself wished to define Herself thus: I am the Immaculate Conception. With this name, so pleasing to Her heart, we also wish to call upon Her.
To draw close to Her, to make ourselves like Her, to allow Her to take possession of our heart and of all our being, that She might live and work in us and through us, that She Herself love God with our heart, that we belong to Her without any reserve: behold our ideal.
To shine in our environment, to conquer souls for Her, in such wise that in Her presence the hearts of our neighbors also open, so that She might extend Her reign in the hearts of all who live in any corner of the earth, without regard to difference of race, of nationality, of language, and likewise in the hearts of all who will live in any moment of history, until the end of the world: behold, our ideal.
Further, that Her life be ever more deeply rooted in us, from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment, and this without any limitation: behold our ideal.
And still, that this Her life develop in the same way in every soul which exists or will exist in any time: behold our precious ideal.”
Despite some, admittedly, dated terminology (i.e; ‘conquering souls’) Kolbe’s ideal, inspired by his devotion, was put into action when he voluntarily laid down his life for a stranger in the Auschwitz concentration camp in August, 1941. “Greater love hath no man than this.”
Instead of eradicating her image and spiritual presence from our Churches, or applying a reductionist approach to her, the Marian image and presence can be embraced for what it is; the faith’s sublime, mysterious Tahitian pearl, a diaphanous adagio for our contemplation and inspiration, a startlingly sensuous rose which can, quite astonishingly, burst through the practicality of our senses. The Church and the faith are desperate for a veracious, mystical revival and movement. This will not be found in the hollow, pedestrian, futile, and predictable attempts that have been made time and again. No, the first steps of this can be attained by an image we have always had before us. As usual, she is forced to wait on our “coming round” to her embrace.