| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 81 – June 2009 |
|
DID SAINT MARY MAGDALENE COME TO PROVENCE?
« After the glory of the Lord’s resurrection, the triumph of His Ascension, and the sending of the Paraclete, who filled the trembling hearts of the disciples (they still feared temporal evils), and gave them knowledge of all languages, all those who believed were in the company of the holy women and Mary, Mother of Jesus, as St. Luke the Evangelist relates.
« The Word of God was spreading, and the number of the faithful was ever increasing. Through the Apostles’ preaching, thousands obeyed the word of the Faith and abandoned their possessions. Because none of them kept anything for himself, all their goods were put in common, as they had one and the same heart and one and the same spirit among themselves.
« The Jewish priests, along with the Pharisees and the Scribes, were burning with the fire of envy. They provoked persecution in the Church, put the first martyr, Stephen, to death, and chased most of the other witnesses of Jesus Christ away from Judea.
« While the storm of this persecution was raging, the faithful whom it had scattered each went to the place in the world that the Lord had assigned them to announce the Word of salvation to the Gentiles. At that time, blessed Maximinus, one of the seventy-two disciples, was with the Apostles. He was a person to be recommended for his perfect integrity, well-known for his doctrine and for his ability to perform miracles. St. Mary Magdalene stayed in St. Maximinus’s company just as the Blessed Virgin Mary had stayed with St. John the Evangelist, to whom the Lord had entrusted Her. St. Mary Magdalene abandoned herself to this holy disciple’s religious solicitude.
« This is why St. Mary Magdalene, who had joined him, travelled with him to the sea at this dispersal. They boarded a vessel and landed safely at Marseilles. After disembarking there, following the Lord’s inspiration, they went to the county of Aix, abundantly propagating the seeds of the divine Word. Day and night, they attempted to bring to the knowledge and worship of God Almighty through their preaching, prayers, and fasts, the local people, who were incredulous and had not yet been regenerated by the baptismal waters.
« The confessor and pontiff St. Maximinus governed the Church of Aix for a long time, assiduously attending to preaching, driving out demons, raising the dead, giving sight to the blind, making the cripple walk, and healing diseases of all kinds.
« As the time drew near, however, for St. Mary Magdalene to be freed from the prison of her body, she saw Jesus Christ, to whose service she had been so perfectly devoted. He called her, through His mercy, to the glory of the heavenly Kingdom, in order to give forever the food of heavenly life to her who had faithfully provided for Him during His temporal life, when He had taken on a human appearance. She died on the eleventh day before the calends of August, the angels rejoicing that she come share the company of the powers of Heaven, and that she had been deemed worthy of enjoying the splendour of glory and to behold the King of kings in all His magnificence.
« St. Maximinus took her most holy body, embalmed it with various spices, and placed it in a worthy mausoleum. He then erected a basilica, a beautiful piece of architecture over these blessed remains. People point out her white marble tomb; it is engraved with scenes representing how she had merited the forgiveness of her sins when she came to find the Lord in Simon’s house, and also the act of piety that she rendered the Saviour in view of His burial.
« Finally, when the blessed bishop Maximinus saw the time draw near that the Spirit had revealed to him he would be taken from this world to receive the reward for his work from the supreme Judge’s goodness, he ordered that the place of his burial be prepared in the aforesaid basilica, and that his sarcophagus be placed next to the body of St. Mary Magdalene.
« Indeed, after his holy death, he was buried with joy by the faithful, and both saints have rendered illustrious this place by signal miracles, accomplished through their intercession, in favour of those who pray to them for the good of their body or soul… »
A VENERABLE TRADITION…
So reads the early account that narrates St. Mary Magdalene’s arrival in Provence, and the hidden apostolate that she carried out there under the protection of St. Maximinus, one of the “seventy-two” (cf. Lk. 10:1). « This account, Father Damien Voreux writes, has the precision, the conciseness of a martyr act. You might think that you were reading a page from the Acts of the Apostles. » (Sainte Marie-Madeleine. Quelle est donc cette femme? Paris, 1963, p. 37) As for the relics of the saint that he mentions, we venerated them last April in the crypt of St. Maximinus, on the word of the current rector of the basilica and of the prior of the Dominican community of La Sainte-Baume.
But are this account and these relics truly authentic? It would be today’s trend to doubt it, to reduce the crypt of St. Maximinus to the level of a mere anonymous antiquity, and to muse upon the gullibility of those who still believe in the Provençal “Magdalene legend”.
Nonetheless, the defenders of this venerable tradition have not given in, far from it, as can be seen from the “Cahiers de la Sainte-Baume” : sixteen captivating issues published between 1987 and 2000, written for the greater part by Brother Phillipe Decouvoux du Buysson, guardian of the Grotto during this period. Let us simply mention here an argument in favour of the authenticity of the above account.
One of the bases for rejecting or accepting the apostolic traditions in Provence is a “Life of SS. Mary Magdalene and Martha”. The attribution to Rabanus Maurus (780-856), the renowned abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Fulda and Archbishop of Mainz, is undoubtedly false. The text, nonetheless, dates to the ninth century in the judgement of the meticulous Bollandists.
In his foreword, the author of this “Life” cites several more ancient accounts:
« In order to promote the excellence of this account, I first deemed it useful to gather the various writings of the Evangelists on these personages into one coherent narrative, and then faithfully to expose the events that happened after the Ascension to these friends of the Lord, according to what our Fathers have taught us on it through Tradition and left us in their writings. »
... DATING BACK TO THE FIFTH CENTURY
Among these writings, is found an “Apostolic Life”. In his “Hitherto Unpublished Monuments on the Apostolate of Saint Mary Magdalene in Provence” (1848) Fr. Faillon thinks he can trace it back to the fifth or sixth century, before the Saracen invasions. In it a « beautiful basilica » is mentioned that no longer existed after the Saracen devastation of Provence. Its foundations, however, were unearthed during the excavations of 1993-1994. Furthermore, a “ Life of Mary Magdalene” was known in the early seventh century because St. Didier, also known as Géry (590-655), Bishop of Cahors, mentioned it in his letter to Abbess Aspasia to incite her to stay constant in her conversion:
« Touched by your tears, I have already given you the story of this woman remarkable among all the others in the Gospel. In this story, you will find the worthy fruits of the penance that she did and the joy that filled Heaven before the angels of God when she who had previously been a sinner earned the certainty of salvation through her tears. » (quoted by R. P. Sicard, O. P., Saint Mary Magdalene, 1910, Vol. I Tradition and Critique, p. 167)
St. Didier was in a fine position to know this “Apostolic Life”, and to recommend it to his spiritual daughter, as his brother Syagrius had been prefect and governor of Marseilles during the reign of King Dagobert.
On the other hand, Pope St. Gregory the Great had just determined once and for all in the Latin Church, the identity of the three women mentioned in the Gospel, i.e., the fact that the sinful woman who repented, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, are one and the same person. « The one whom St. Luke called the sinful woman is the very same one from whom, we believe, seven demons were driven out, according to Mark’s account. » (Homilies on the Gospels, 591-593, ed. Saint Magdalene, 2000, p. 422) His enlightened commentary was authoritative, and we may say that throughout the entire Middle Ages, with a few exceptions, a full millenium passed as people delighted in this Gospel truth, and grew in faith and devotion for this repentant sinner, who became Christ’s perfect disciple.
CALLED INTO QUESTION
It is not until Protestantism appeared in the sixteenth century that both the fact that the Gospel personage is a single person and the authenticity of the Provençal tradition were called into question. It is worth noting that those who denied the identity of the three Marys also denied the venerable tradition of her sojourn in Provence. Both negations result from the same state of mind.
Lefèvre d’Étaples started by provoking a violent controversy in Paris in 1517 in a letter to the abbot of St. Maximinus in Provence; in this letter he claimed to demonstrate that it was an imposture to identify the three women as one. (cf. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the three Marys debates, Sheila M. Porrer, Droz, 2009). In 1519 St. John Fischer, the scholarly Bishop of Rochester, gave him a well-aimed reply that Noël Beda, the Sorbonne’s courageous syndic, endorsed. King Francis I then had to intervene to prevent Lefèvre’s condemnation.
One of the French humanist’s arguments was that the Hieronymian martyrology mentions « a feast of St. Martha and St Mary, the sisters of Lazarus », on 19 January, i.e., a different feast day than that of 22 July, when St. Mary Magdalene’s memorial is celebrated. From this, he inferred the existence of two women. But it was realised a while later that it was a copyist’s mistake and that, in fact, the martyrology of St. Jerome was referring to a memorial of « Marii [Marius], Marthæ, Audifacis et Abacuc », Persian martyrs of the third century. That is not too brilliant on the part of the “leader of evangelical humanism in France”!
In the next century, the Jansenist Jean de Launoy published his “Dissertation sur la mensongère venue en Provence de Lazare, Maximin, Madeleine et Marthe” (1641) to maintain that this tradition was recent because it had only appeared in Provence in the 11th century. This provoked a general outcry of people from Provence against the Sorbonne doctor. At the same time, several liturgists already using hypercriticism persisted in distinguishing the « three Marys », to the point of influencing Bossuet himself.
The quarrel then periodically revived up until the mid-19th century, when the publication of “Hitherto Unpublished Monuments” of the scholarly Sulpician Faillon seemed to silence rationalist criticism. That was when there arose from within the Church herself ecclesiastics who did not want to be outdone by their scientist colleagues. They reviewed in great detail the most well-established Christian traditions with their critical reason. Such was the case of Mgr Duchesne, who inaugurated Modernism in the Institut catholique de Paris, and published “The Legend of Saint Mary Magdalene” (1893). It was the necessary preamble to the attacks of his student and successor Alfred Loisy, who was to bring this movement of reform and general revision into the realm of exegetical criticism and dogma itself.
TRADITIONALIST REACTION
Fr. Maximin Sicard, who was the guardian of La Sainte-Baume at that time, wanted to accept Mgr Duchesne’s challenge. He started writing a full three-volume history of St. Mary Magdalene. « Given the renown of Mgr Duchesne, who was a member the Institut and director of the French School of Rome, Fr. Sicard had many difficulties making himself heard in the debate about this illustrious and venerable tradition. Even among his Dominican confreres, although they have been so privileged in their service of the apostle of Resurrection, the religious encountered much opposition and many jibes. » (Cahiers de la Sainte-Baume n° 7, p. 18)
But he was backed by the Master General of the Order, Rev. Fr. Cormier, whom Pope Pius X held in high esteem, and whom he called « mio sancto ». He intervened in this affair in a very wise manner by writing on 12 March 1909 to the Provincial of Toulouse:
« As for reality of St. Mary Magdalene’s apostolate in France, to incline towards favouring the tradition is in conformity with the Catholic spirit, and furthermore, for our Order it is a question of heartfelt devotion [the Saint is the second patroness of the Order since the thirteenth century]. We must not sympathise with the opponents in the name of progress or out of fear of a certain school of thought’s censure. Even from the viewpoint of reason, our position is as worthwhile as theirs.
« They think that if the fact of the apostolate were real, it would have been impossible for the past centuries to have remained silent about it, because of the human mind’s tendency to record what it sees and admires.
« Yet for our part, we say: if the fact were wrong, it would be morally impossible, taking into account the laws and tendencies of the human mind, for such a strange fallacy, so bereft of intrinsic credibility, to establish itself, take root and spread to the point of becoming the Church’s tradition. This moral impossibility appears greater to me than the other one, and as the strength of authority is added to this philosophical reason, our support can only do us credit, especially when the obsession and vainglory of criticising becomes a general trend in treating sacred History as in treating the Scriptures.
Today, this remains the position of Brother Philippe Decouvoux du Buysson, who has done his best to safeguard this tradition that is still well-rooted in Provence, in order to keep the flame of devotion to her holy Patroness burning.
A CONTROVERSY THAT IS STILL PERTINENT
Mgr Duchesne has found, in recent days, a worthy imitator in Mgr Saxer, who is the current President of the Pontifical Academy of Archaeology in Rome and of the Pontifical Committee of Historical Sciences. He brought disgrace upon himself during the carbon 14 dating of the Holy Shroud of Turin in 1988. (cf. CCR n° 237, The Evidence of a Scientific Forgery, p. 8-18) He is cited in the present article solely on the grounds that his works are considered authoritative in the scientific and ecclesiastic world, which is not very favourable to the veneration of saints and relics after the aggiornamento of Vatican II.
Fr. Victor Saxer began his career with a thesis on “The Veneration of Mary Magdalene in the West” (1959), in which he claimed to demonstrate that this veneration did not exist during Christian Antiquity and that it “did not emerge from the fog of legend and the limbo of development [!]” until the tenth century in the West, in England and Germany, then at Vezelay in Burgundy, during the eleventh century, and finally in Provence in the thirteenth century! How did this take place?
« Once it had been transplanted to Latin lands, veneration of the Magdalene started to develop in a purely literary manner: it was only after martyrologies were penned and sacramentaries listed the feast that sanctuaries and relics appeared, as though stone monuments and fragments from the holy body had materialised from the meditation and prayer of the High Middle Ages [sic!]. » (Le culte de Marie Madeleine en Occident des origines à la fin du Moyen Âge, Cahiers d’archéologie et d’histoire n° 3, Paris-Auxerre, p. 54-57)
As for the crypt of St. Maximinus, he writes that « the best archaeologists agree that the monuments themselves have nothing to do with the early veneration of the holy apostles of Provence, and among them, of St. Mary Madgalene. They were only related to that cult from the eleventh century onwards in hagiographic legends… The monument of St. Maximinus itself is nothing other than a funerary chapel of some rich Christian family of the Gallo-Roman or Merovingian era. » (ibid., p. 47) We shall demonstrate that these affirmations have been contradicted by recent archaeological discoveries.
Twenty years later, Mgr Saxer signed the article “Mary Magdalene” in “Catholicism, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow” (Vol. viii, Paris 1979, col. 631-638). In it we find a summary of Modernist thought and biases: according to him, the “mediaeval Magdalene” was born from the (unenlightened) faith of monks and the faithful; thanks to the blows of (Protestant, Jansenist, rationalist) criticism, today she is dead and buried. He is glad about it, because « from her ashes can emerge a new Mary, more consonant with the Gospel and history ».
SCIENCE BACKING UP TRADITION
Brother Phillip Decouvoux, for his part, begins by rehabilitating tradition:
« Alongside history, which is congealed in documents and monuments, fortunately there is tradition, which orally conveys to us the real-life past. Tradition is a living memory, always advancing from one generation to the next. It is not pure legend, a product of the imagination of a certain era. It can be traced, because it also has its documents and monuments, but they are not in sufficient number nor reliable enough to be considered “History”... Of course, almost all of these documents are refused by detractors in the name of supposed scientific and historical rigour. A comma, a cedilla, an iota would be enough to label a certain number of documents as “fakes”. The elimination is really too systematic not to be suspected of having subjective a priori, something quite blameworthy for minds that like to think that they are enlightened. This is the a priori: the utter refusal to consider that the Provençal tradition has so much as an appearance of likelihood. Why? For fear of appearing ridiculous? Such fear of ridicule (in whose eyes?) induces paralysis and sterility. At that rate, it makes us become experts in negation.
« As the guardian of the Grotto of La Sainte-Baume, my reasoning is different. Referring to the intelligent and cultivated men and women who have given credence to this tradition, I prefer initially to greet it favourably and to contemplate its entire richness and profundity. Up to now, I am far from being disappointed. Nevertheless, I am ready to submit to negative criticism on the day when it will be able to give me serious and scientific identification of the sarcophagi in St. Maximinus, and their historical origin – Who? Where? When? How? – of the so-called “pious legend” or “mystification”! Because the emergence of a legend is all the same something of the historical order: it can be dated, localised, identified... » (Cahiers de la Sainte-Baume nos 4 et 5, 1988, p. 2)
SCIENCE BACKING UP FAITH
This complex historical question will be the subject of a future article. Let us start by opening the Gospel in an attempt to elucidate the irritating exegetical question: are there one or three Marys in our Lord’s public life?
As for Mgr Saxer, he is more in favour of division: « Since the recent progress in biblical sciences, we tend to be more and more in favour of distinguishing them. Indeed, it would seem reasonable to admit that there were at least two: Mary of Bethany, who would also be the anonymous sinner, and Mary Magdalene. » (Catholicisme, ibid., col. 632)
No! On the contrary, progress in true biblical sciences tends to identify and unify the three Marys. Here, we may cite the remarkable article of André Feuillet, P. S. S., published four years before the aforesaid article by Saxer. It shows that if « we must use simple clues here, assuredly numerous yet usually rather tenuous and which are, when taken separately inconclusive, proof can still be made by convergence of probabilities, a method commonly employed in the realm of history. In this case, the convergence of the abundant pieces of evidence ends up giving us the feeling, if not of certitude, at least of great likelihood. » (Les deux onctions faites sur Jésus, et Marie-Madeleine, Revue thomiste, Vol. lxxv, July-August 1975, pp. 357-394)
So, let us follow this French scholar, a model of truthfulness and scientific rigour, but also first and foremost let us follow our Father, the Abbé Georges de Nantes, who has made several times the same demonstration, and who was able, better than anyone else, to penetrate the mystical and ardent heart of Mary Magdalene, « the disciple whom Jesus loved ».