As the feast day of Our Lady of Vilnius approaches, my new collaborator, who wishes to be known as "Someone Else" for the time being, contributes the following:"In "Missing Mary," Charlene Spretnak laments the marginilization, the absence, the "disappearing" of Our Lady since the Second Vatican Council.
In the forty years time since then a political battle has ensued with the Catholic right claiming Mary as their own and the leftist, progressive side reducing her to a model of the obedient Nazarene village woman. Spretnak clearly states that her book is for neither the right nor the left but for the "large, nonideological middle range of the spectrum of Roman Catholics."
Since Vatican II, Mary's cosmological presence has been diminished. Statues of her have disappeared from our churches or been removed to less prominent places. Prayers to Mary at the end of the Mass were eliminated in the 1960s. Marian processions in the month of May when statues were crowned with wreaths of flowers have long been gone from our modernized cultures.
Spretnak does find some hope however for Mary's return as the Queen of Heaven and her re-emergence in the church. Mary's full spiritual presence is alive and well and thriving in many ethnic parishes.
Surely Our Lady of Vilnius on Broome Street in New York City is one of those places! That is just one more reason why we should work to save the church from being closed.
More about the book can be found at www.missingmary.com."
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