Mary Quotes

“In the mother’s smile, it dawns on him that there is a world into which he is accepted and in which he is welcome, and it is in this primordial experience that he becomes aware of himself for the first time.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“In this sense, the methodological form that comes into play here is ultimately quite simple: Scripture is interpreted by Scripture. Scripture interprets itself. Attentive listening to Scripture’s own internal self-interpretation is very characteristic of Redemptoris Mater.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“In Mary this petition has been granted: she is, as it were, the open vessel of longing, in which life becomes prayer and prayer becomes life. Saint John wonderfully conveys this process by never mentioning Mary’s name in his Gospel. She no longer has any name except “the Mother of Jesus”.1 It is as if she had handed over her personal dimension, in order now to be solely at his disposal, and precisely thereby had become a person.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“the Church and her exegesis of revelation progress through the ever-changing periods of world history. New aspects emerge, while others wane; efforts are made to compensate for one-sided emphases, but not rarely they are simply replaced with the opposite extremes. Today too, then, it is a duty to restate the principles in a new and timely way—while being as measured as possible—and in so doing to retrieve what is of permanent value.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“If Christ is artificially detached from his Mother or his Church, he loses his historical believability in Christian devotion; he becomes something abstract; he becomes one who falls down from heaven like an aerolite and then goes back up without having become rooted concretely in the past or future tradition of human beings.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source

“The purpose of this constant training in the naked faith Mary will need under the Cross is often insufficiently understood; people are astonished and embarrassed by the way in which Jesus treats his Mother, whom he addresses both in Cana and at the Cross only as “woman”. He himself is the first one to wield the sword that must pierce her. But how else would she have become ready to stand by the Cross, where not only her Son’s earthly failure, but also his abandonment by the God who sends him is revealed. She must finally say Yes to this, too, because she consented a priori to her child’s whole destiny. And as if to fill her bitter chalice to the brim, the dying Son expressly abandons his Mother, withdrawing from her and foisting on her another son: “Woman, behold, your son” (Jn 19:26). This gesture is usually understood primarily as evidencing Jesus’ concern about where his Mother will live after he is gone (in which case Mary obviously has no other biological children; otherwise it would be superfluous and inadmissible to commit her to the disciple of love). This must not, however, lead us to overlook a second motif: just as the Son is abandoned by the Father, so, too, he abandons his Mother, so that the two of them may be united in a common abandonment. Only thus does she become inwardly ready to take on ecclesial motherhood toward all of Jesus’ new brothers and sisters.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mary: The Church at the Source