Where Mary Still Reigns

Abstract

In the previous chapters I have sought to make the case that the Catholic Church’s decision in the early 1960s to radically suppress Marian spirituality was a period piece, a sudden and sweeping allegiance to the ideology of modernity at a historical moment, the post-World War II period, when that worldview enjoyed an intensified burst of dominance. Only a decade after Vatican II met in Rome, however, critiques of the assumptions of modernity and its destructive results began to sprout in Europe, the United States, and the “developing ” nations. Because of these disparate postmodern critiques and because of the increasingly painful “trade-offs” demanded by the modern condition, it is now widely conceded that modernity brought significant losses along with its many benefits. Certainly it has changed our inner landscape as well as the outer.