The Society of Mary

The Society of Mary (Marianists)

Marianist Ideals

When Rev. William Joseph Chaminade, Founder of the Society of Mary, was exiled from his beloved Bordeaux during the French Revolution, he went to Zaragosa, Spain. There, as a refugee from a war that threatened to destroy the very fabric of the society and the Church he loved, he spent many hours in the cathedral before the revered statue of Our Lady of the Pillar. Kneeling in prayer, this man of God began to understand deeply the shape of the Christian mystery: its energy, its pain, and the hope of its Good News.

The shape of the Christian story, he realized, is Jesus. If the Church of France were to be reborn, it had to re-tell and re-live the story of Jesus, especially in community. Through believers who reproduced in their communities and their ministries the faith and dynamism that had inspired the original Jerusalem community, the rebirth of the Church could occur.

This image of the Jerusalem community led Father Chaminade to entrust the thrust of community building and multiplication of Christians to the inspiration and energy of Mary, the Mother of God. Although Mary is mentioned few times in the recording of the gospels for early Christian communities, she was for these communities the preeminent symbol of Christian discipleship. She is, as the Second Vatican Council proclaims her, "the first among believers."

Mary is to be for Marianist communities the model of discipleship, simplicity, and hospitality to both the action of God in her personal life and the action of God as demonstrated in the community. Father Chaminade believed if communities adopted these Marian attitudes, they could recreate the Church of France. Our "alliance with Mary," as Father Chaminade called it, is to be the binding force, the energy that will enable communities to become images of a people of saints -- dynamic images of the Church. As professed Marianist religious, we seal and state our commitment and our constant striving toward these attitudes of Mary at our perpetual profession by our Vow of Stability. We receive a gold ring to symbolize this commitment.

As with all of us, the language of Father Chaminade was conditioned and formed by the theology and spirituality of his time. Our brothers and sisters in Latin America and South America today speak to the church community of a new imaging of Mary: the woman who in her fidelity to her discipleship and her simplicity stands with the poor and oppressed in the hope of the Magnificat, "that the Most High God has indeed visited us and is with us. Our God will indeed remember the promise of mercy, will shine like the dawn from on high, will bring the haughty low, and raise the poor to new heights." Mary is for them a radical sign of hope in a world not unlike the world of Father Chaminade. Each age of the Church will be given new insight into re-articulating and re-imagining the unfathomable mystery of God, who chose a woman of the earth to bear to it, historically and for all ages, Jesus the Christ.

Today communities of men and women, single and married, lay and religious continue to gather and bind themselves to the image and energy of Mary as they search to bring Jesus' saving message to all through communities of hope and communities of faith.