IN A LETTER to the Editor Mr. Evelyn Waugh calls
me a booby, and no doubt he is right—though not, I think, for the right reason. He takes me to task for saying last week : 'to the abbess, the deification of the Mother of God was a heresy. The way things are going, it looks as if the heresy will soon be dogma.' It is indisputable that the cult of the Virgin Mary has grown enormously during the last hundred years. (In a previous letter Mr. Waugh said that his children were taught 'in some respects a fuller and more precise faith than that of the martyrs of the third century.' It is certainly fuller in respect to the Virgin Mary, since in the third century there was no cult of Mary Whatever.) In 1854 we had the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and six years ago the Assumption. There is no Sign that the development of Mariology is slowing down; in- deed according to Dr. Miegge's The Virgin Mary (Lutterworth) It is speeding up. The next step is expected to be the definition of Mary's co-Redeemership. Mr. Evelyn Waugh might say that even if the dogma were defined Mary would still be human, and secondly that it will not be defined. As to the first, techni- cally and theologically he would be correct. but the practical result of the dogma would be to put Mary on a level with the Trinity—for many Roman Catholics she is almost on that level already. My dictionary gives as its first two meanings of 'deify': )to make a god of' and 'to exalt to the position of a deity.' I should have thought that on any vieW the dogma of co- Redemption would, at least within the second meaning of the word, 'deify' Mary. As to the other answer Mr. Waugh might Make, I can only say that if we had both been living in the first half of the nineteenth century Mr. Waugh might well have called me a poor booby fOr telling him that he would soon have to believe in the Infallibility of the Pope.
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