Marian and Petrine Dimensions of the Church

(Prof. Gary Devery, Sydney)

The Petrine dimension of the Church could be succinctly expressed as the service of St Peter and his successors orientated to the building up and maintaining of the Church’s life of faith, the living of the Christian life in communion and charity, and the unity of the Church.

The Marian dimension of the Church is christological, pneumatological, ecclesiological and anthropological. Mary is the virgin made Church. She is the model of discipleship. What is said of Mary is said of the Church. In her christological dimension Mary orientates the gaze of the Christian always towards her Son, the Saviour. Her pneumatological dimension expresses her openness to and the welcoming of the Holy Spirit from the Annunciation to Pentecost. When Jesus is on the cross he gives the disciple John into the maternal care of his mother. Here her maternal care towards her Son manifests its ecclesiological dimension when it is extended to the whole Church. John, representing the community of disciples, is called to accept Mary, and the Church, as a Mother. The anthropological dimension, revealed in every encounter with Mary in the Gospels, is poignantly expressed in the infancy narrative of Luke (Lk 1-2) where Mary is seen cooperating in a fully human way with God’s offer of salvation to humanity.

The fruitful functioning of the Petrine dimension of the Church presupposes the Church living out the Marian dimension. The Marian dimension forms a necessary substratum without which the Petrine dimension of the Church would be frustrated and limited in its fruitfulness.

The Marian dimension gives the ‘spirit’ in which each Pope carries out his specific service to the Church in its Petrine dimension. We have been blessed in the last hundred years by the Holy Spirit giving us successors to St Peter who have given very fruitful service to the Church because of being deeply imbued with this Marian dimension in their own personal spirituality.

Even a Pope deeply imbued with the Marian dimension in his own living out of his Christian life and service to the Church in his particularly ministry could still find the Petrine dimension being frustrated and limited in its fruitfulness where the local Church is lacking in its Marian dimension. The interplay of the Petrine and Marian dimensions of the Church is expressed in the miracle at Cana (Jn 2:1-12). Here Mary finds herself together with Jesus and the disciples, and so with Peter. In his Apostolic Letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae(21), Pope John Paul II comments on this scene: "The revelation made directly by the Father at the Baptism in the Jordan and echoed by John the Baptist is placed upon Mary’s lips at Cana, and it becomes the great maternal counsel which Mary addresses to the Church of every age: ‘Do whatever he tells you’(Jn 2:5). Insomuch as this encounter between Jesus, Mary, Peter and the disciples is lived out in the life of the Church today, the Petrine and Marian dimensions of the Church will continue to serve the Church in the fulfilling of her mission to all nations.