“The dogma that has grown up around Mary will come as a surprise to anyone outside the Catholic church, even — or particularly — to those already familiar with the New Testament, in which she makes scant appearances and speaks no more than a few lines. (Full disclosure: I was raised Presbyterian.) How did such a minor character in the Bible come to be so omnipresent? How did a mere human get promoted to the realm of divinity, where she lobbies Jesus on our behalf while he in turn pleads our cause with God the Father? How many intermediaries do we need? If all creation were a corporation, the layers of middle management would seem to indicate that the chief executive is aloof and disengaged, sequestered in a penthouse office or spending afternoons on the golf course."—Holly Brubach, “Immaculate Perception: Exploring the Cult of the Virgin Mary,” T: The New York Times Style Magazine, December 5, 2010
The “Immaculate Perception” essay by Brubach, formerly Style editor of The New York Times, was published in the heart of the Christmas season, and only a few days before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It draws heavily on two books taking dramatically different views of the mother of Jesus: Marina Warner’s Alone of Her Sex and Judith Dupre’s Full of Grace. Yet if there were any justice in the world, Brubach makes clear, the former rather than the latter would be on every bookshelf.
Brubach doesn’t waste any time telegraphing her viewpoint, leading off: “At a time when the weight of scientific evidence would seem to call into question the Bible’s account of history and the God who set it in motion, the Virgin Mary enjoys a kind of free pass.” Question: From whom?
Later, she contrasts “fact-based” with “faith-based.” It doesn’t take too long to conclude that Brubach feels she has ventured into what she regards as Bizarro-World.
But “Bizarro-World” is likely to be the first phrase that enters the mind of those moderate-to-liberal Catholics who don’t mind sitting in the back of the Times church of secular, “reality-based” news, news analysis and opinion (shading into each other more often than the newspaper would care to admit) but who won’t sing from its quizzical hymn book concerning matters of religion. After all, how are they otherwise to account for the Gray Lady’s decision to publish Brubach’s piece in T, its style magazine?
Style? Did I miss something? Aren’t there more logical places for pieces like this? The paper’s Saturday column on religion? An op-ed piece? The Book Review? Why place it among articles on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Chloe Sevigny, Mick Jagger, or the Kardashian-Jenner clan?
Oh, wait—T has another piece, by one Suzy Menkes, considering nuns as “fashion inspirations” for Parisian and Milanese designers.
If you ask me, the editorial judgment of the masterminds at T is more preposterous than any belief in the Immaculate Conception.
Because, really, even aside from the patently ridiculous decision to place Brubach’s pouting pensees in this sort of editorial vehicle, there’s a more fundamental question: Is she (and/or her Times editors) even functionally literate about her assigned subject? Three points bring this into question:
1) The title of the piece is, of course, a pun, but its use—and Brubach’s constant references to “the virgin birth”—raise the question: Does she even understand what “immaculate conception” means? The constantly juxtaposed references to “immaculate conception” and “virgin birth” suggest that, her clucks of approval about the “feminist” and “scholarly” Marina Warner book to the contrary, she has collated the two very different ideas. (For an explanation of the “Immaculate Conception,” click here.)
2) Bruback states that Mary has entered “the realm of divinity,” but Catholics claim no such thing.
3) Brubach claims that Mary is a “minor character” in the New Testament. Has she ever read the Gospel of Matthew or, especially, Luke? Has she ever measured the amount of space given to her instead of St. Joseph?
Quick, now: do you recall the Times taking on after Yom Kippur, Ramadan or Kwanzaa on the eve of these religious occasions? Neither can I.
Brubach and the Times could have taken another, more objective tack in this piece, one typified by the new “Sacred Journeys” special issue of National Geographic (the issue with an image of Mary on the cover).
They could have considered why Protestant-raised Kathleen Norris came to consider the mother of Jesus a force for female empowerment in works like Meditations on Mary. They could have asked why the convention-flouting 19th-century feminist icon Margaret Fuller came to feel likewise before the end of her tragically short life. They could have speculated about the meaning for our time in a poor peasant woman challenging the power of the greatest empire of her day by accepting the puzzling birth of her child.
But no. In the cult of Mary, we learn, “A woman’s right to her own sexual pleasure has no place here.”
Some may wonder why New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan hasn’t mounted the pulpit at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to denounce the article and the Times. Simple: the whole thing is so ignorant and hilariously predictable that it will be as ephemeral as the Kardashians exalted in the same issue of T in which Mary is debunked.
You can call Brubach a 21st-century feminist, but she is still serving up the same old prejudice--the charge by mid-century author Paul Blanshard equating Catholicism with the Kremlin--that’s become practically an article of faith at the Times.
Once again, the Newspaper of Record finds itself coping with the same phenomenon noticed by its first (and best) “public editor,” Daniel Okrent, who noted several years ago: “If you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”
The “Immaculate Perception” essay by Brubach, formerly Style editor of The New York Times, was published in the heart of the Christmas season, and only a few days before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It draws heavily on two books taking dramatically different views of the mother of Jesus: Marina Warner’s Alone of Her Sex and Judith Dupre’s Full of Grace. Yet if there were any justice in the world, Brubach makes clear, the former rather than the latter would be on every bookshelf.
Brubach doesn’t waste any time telegraphing her viewpoint, leading off: “At a time when the weight of scientific evidence would seem to call into question the Bible’s account of history and the God who set it in motion, the Virgin Mary enjoys a kind of free pass.” Question: From whom?
Later, she contrasts “fact-based” with “faith-based.” It doesn’t take too long to conclude that Brubach feels she has ventured into what she regards as Bizarro-World.
But “Bizarro-World” is likely to be the first phrase that enters the mind of those moderate-to-liberal Catholics who don’t mind sitting in the back of the Times church of secular, “reality-based” news, news analysis and opinion (shading into each other more often than the newspaper would care to admit) but who won’t sing from its quizzical hymn book concerning matters of religion. After all, how are they otherwise to account for the Gray Lady’s decision to publish Brubach’s piece in T, its style magazine?
Style? Did I miss something? Aren’t there more logical places for pieces like this? The paper’s Saturday column on religion? An op-ed piece? The Book Review? Why place it among articles on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Chloe Sevigny, Mick Jagger, or the Kardashian-Jenner clan?
Oh, wait—T has another piece, by one Suzy Menkes, considering nuns as “fashion inspirations” for Parisian and Milanese designers.
If you ask me, the editorial judgment of the masterminds at T is more preposterous than any belief in the Immaculate Conception.
Because, really, even aside from the patently ridiculous decision to place Brubach’s pouting pensees in this sort of editorial vehicle, there’s a more fundamental question: Is she (and/or her Times editors) even functionally literate about her assigned subject? Three points bring this into question:
1) The title of the piece is, of course, a pun, but its use—and Brubach’s constant references to “the virgin birth”—raise the question: Does she even understand what “immaculate conception” means? The constantly juxtaposed references to “immaculate conception” and “virgin birth” suggest that, her clucks of approval about the “feminist” and “scholarly” Marina Warner book to the contrary, she has collated the two very different ideas. (For an explanation of the “Immaculate Conception,” click here.)
2) Bruback states that Mary has entered “the realm of divinity,” but Catholics claim no such thing.
3) Brubach claims that Mary is a “minor character” in the New Testament. Has she ever read the Gospel of Matthew or, especially, Luke? Has she ever measured the amount of space given to her instead of St. Joseph?
Quick, now: do you recall the Times taking on after Yom Kippur, Ramadan or Kwanzaa on the eve of these religious occasions? Neither can I.
Brubach and the Times could have taken another, more objective tack in this piece, one typified by the new “Sacred Journeys” special issue of National Geographic (the issue with an image of Mary on the cover).
They could have considered why Protestant-raised Kathleen Norris came to consider the mother of Jesus a force for female empowerment in works like Meditations on Mary. They could have asked why the convention-flouting 19th-century feminist icon Margaret Fuller came to feel likewise before the end of her tragically short life. They could have speculated about the meaning for our time in a poor peasant woman challenging the power of the greatest empire of her day by accepting the puzzling birth of her child.
But no. In the cult of Mary, we learn, “A woman’s right to her own sexual pleasure has no place here.”
Some may wonder why New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan hasn’t mounted the pulpit at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to denounce the article and the Times. Simple: the whole thing is so ignorant and hilariously predictable that it will be as ephemeral as the Kardashians exalted in the same issue of T in which Mary is debunked.
You can call Brubach a 21st-century feminist, but she is still serving up the same old prejudice--the charge by mid-century author Paul Blanshard equating Catholicism with the Kremlin--that’s become practically an article of faith at the Times.
Once again, the Newspaper of Record finds itself coping with the same phenomenon noticed by its first (and best) “public editor,” Daniel Okrent, who noted several years ago: “If you are among the groups the Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn’t wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you’re traveling in a strange and forbidding world.”
Yes, Bizarro-World.
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