You will search in vain in the New Testament for the sure basis for this Roman Catholic obsession with Mary the mother of Jesus.
Had St. Paul, for example, the slightest knowledge of this notion of contemporary Marianism, one might have expected him to have alluded to it in the straightforward way the Mary mystics do, especially whenever he discussed the related topics of virginity, fatherhood and motherhood, and the church.
It never happens.
Paul esteems virginity, for example, at considerable length in 1 Corinthians 7 (while acquiescing to marriage), however not on the grounds of Mary's supposed perpetual virginity, which he does not know. To Paul virginity was preferable not because of the example of Mary but only because of the pressures of the eschatological moment.
What's more, in Paul's theological imagination the father of us all is Abraham, and for two reasons: because of circumcision to which Abraham submitted as the first Jew; but also because of Abraham's faith in respect of Isaac, the child of the promise, through which same faith the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ now incorporates the Gentiles who similarly believe into the people of God, of whom the Jews were the first. Paul makes these arguments about the "father" at considerable length in Galatians and Romans, but there is hardly a word about the "mother".
The only time it occurs to Paul to speak of spiritual motherhood at all, it is not to Mary to whom he refers, but to the source of faith, the heavenly Jerusalem:
But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.
-- Galatians 4:26
Paul's countless opportunities in his works to introduce the mundane conceptions of Marianism characteristically are passed by, doubtlessly because they never occurred to him and he probably did not know them, even from others in the church. Whatever proto-Marianism one might think to find in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke is for this reason self-evidently quite late compared with the date of the Pauline corpus.
The basis for contemporary Marianism is sheer casuistry, which notably raises its ugly head in the story
here:
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis has decreed that Latin-rite Catholics around the world will mark the feast of "the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church" on the Monday after Pentecost each year.
The Gospel reading for the feast, which technically is called a "memorial," is John 19:25-31, which recounts how from the cross Jesus entrusted Mary to his disciples as their mother and entrusted his disciples to Mary as her children. ...
Francis approved the decree after "having attentively considered how greatly the promotion of this devotion might encourage the growth of the maternal sense of the church in the pastors, religious and faithful, as well as a growth of genuine Marian piety," the decree said. /end
Of course John 19 says no such thing about "his disciples", only about the disciple whom Jesus loved, "who from that hour took her into his own home" because Jesus in his final words on the cross had said to Mary "behold thy son" and to the disciple "behold thy mother", and promptly died.
Jesus had abandoned his mother and sisters and brothers to fend for themselves when he had embarked upon his itinerant career of preaching a similar repentance. Presumably as the carpenter's son and the carpenter, which are both attested in the evidence, Jesus had been apprentice to his father and took over as the breadwinner when Joseph was no longer in the picture. When this ne'er-do-well of a first born son left it all behind it had to hurt, for all sorts of reasons, but not the least of which was pecuniary.
In this light John's account of the final arrangements for Mary from the cross are pathetic in the extreme, Jesus' concession to his mother and friend that it hadn't turned out quite as he had expected.
If anyone had lacked the maternal sense, it had been Mary's own infamous son . . . by design.
