"Extravagant Devotion"

The Church of England Newspaper last week looked hard at Pope Pius XII's prayer to the Virgin Mary, composed for the opening of the Marian Year (TIME, Dec. 14), and found in it implications of "rank heresy."

What specially roused the Anglican weekly were such words of invocation as: "Enraptured by the splendor of your heavenly beauty . . . we cast ourselves into your arms . . . Convert the wicked, dry the tears of the afflicted and oppressed, comfort the poor and humble . . . protect the Holy Church."

Said the Church of England Newspaper: "This prayer transplants faith from Christ to the Virgin Mary . . . And what, we may legitimately ask. is left for the Holy Spirit? The Virgin Mary, apparently, displaces the Third Person of the Trinity as well as the Second."

Such "extravagant devotion" to Mary, the paper said, "is what might be expected of a church under the domination of a celibate hierarchy. The normal development of their personality through family life is forbidden them; they must perforce find a substitute to occupy the place a wife should have in their imagination."

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