Published in 2011 as Présence de Marie.  Histoire, spiritualité, fondements doctrinaux, this 2014 publication brings to English speakers the mature if occasionally idiosyncratic Marian insights of Father René Laurentin. A historian, foundational Vatican II theologian, religion journalist in Le Figaro and on French television—and most famously—historian/champion of Marian (and other) apparitions, Laurentin died in 2017, just weeks short of his 100th birthday. It will be up to each reader of this stimulating book to decide for herself whether Laurentin has succeeded in reconciling his cool theological head with his burning Marian heart. 

The book contains an introduction, six chapters, endnotes (with scholarly abbreviations), and a 17-page appendix of “Relevant Passages.” This is not a book that engages with Liberation or Feminist Theology, although Laurentin leaned liberationist in his 1969 Développement et salut (Liberation, Development and Salvation, 1972); but Laurentin’s theology has always resisted easy categorization. Nor, despite his advocacy of Marian apparitions does Laurentin take advantage of Catholic anthropologist Robert Orsi’s call (most recently, History and Presence, Belknap 2016) to take apparitions seriously as “abundant events.”

In the lead-up to Vatican II, Laurentin was a consultant on Marian theology, subsequently serving as an official expert at the Council. Laurentin has consistently affirmed, as he explains in the book’s Introduction, that Mary’s “was not a presence in and of itself’ but that Mary is the “sole human cause of [God’s] divine presence on earth.” For Laurentin, the term “presence” is preferable to such Marian titles as coredemptrix which “seems to put Christ and the Virgin Mary on the same level” or mediatrix, which “makes us forget that Christ is the only mediator between God and humankind” (xiii). He seeks in this book to “arrive at an authentic contemplative theology that is well grounded in Scripture and Tradition” so as to “enliven the faith and give Mary her true place in the life of the Church and ecumenism” (xii). Above all. he aims to “clarify, vivify, and deepen our connection with Mary” (xiii).

Laurentin’s unique mix of intellectual acumen and nuanced Mariology is fully on display in the chapters that follow. The long first chapter, “The Presence of Mary in Scripture” resonates with Vatican II”s call for a theological grounding in Scripture. Mary’s presence is identified in Old Testament passages to which Laurentin applies traditional Patristic and medieval typology. An interesting example of his approach: Genesis 3:15, for which Laurentin simultaneously corrects Jerome’s influential mistranslation (“she,” rather than the original Hebrew “he,” will bruise your head) while insisting that the passage correctly rendered still has a “dynastic” aspect that “involves the image of a mother” (4). Each New Testament appearance of Mary is systematically parsed to demonstrate its particular revelation about the Virgin’s presence and its meaning. Laurentin is particularly eloquent on the subject of the Visitation, the Magnificat, and the Crucifixion.

Two brief chapters follow, addressing Mary in the Liturgy and in Local Churches. Chapter Two surveys the history of Mary in liturgy, prayer, and devotions to demonstrate that “Mary is present in every Mass, in the fabric of the liturgical year…and throughout the whole life of the Church” (60). In only ten pages, Chapter Three turns to diversity across churches, a framework that encompasses differences in Marian iconography, a rather liberationist note on the Virgin’s apparition to Juan Diego, and a succinct discussion of Marian apparitions.

Chapter Four, “Witnesses in Tradition” is the book’s beating heart. Laurentin surveys Mary’s presence in the “mystical life of the churches” (72) with a chronological anthology in which Laurentin weighs his sources for their awareness of Mary’s presence as well as the implications thereof. He takes us from John 19:27 (“The disciple took her into his home”) and the apocryphal Protevangelium of James through the Church Fathers all the way up to Severino Ragazzini who died in 1960. From the seventeenth century on, Laurentin’s sources are mostly Francophone and most often mystics. A number of these are women, such as Mary of the Incarnation (d. 1672) and Marie-Reine de Jésus (d. 1938). In fact, the longest single discussion (8 pages) is devoted to the seventeenth-century mystic, Mary of Saint-Therese. The appendix at the end of the book provides even more passages on the same themes, as if the author could not bear to leave anyone out!

The final two chapters distill all that went before; here Père Laurentin attempts to “discern the foundations, nature, character, and timing of the presence of Mary” (138). His discussion is something of a Mariological tour de force very much in the spirit of the original thinkers of Vatican II for whom, it must be repeated, Mary was not at all an afterthought but a being whose presence could be more fully encountered through faith and grace. On the one hand, warns Laurentin, “God’s role is always primary” (149), yet it is Mary “whom God has established in the summit of love in Christ…both a point of attraction and a help, an immeasurable maternal effusion…Mary has founded the Communion of Saints” (152). The book ends with a call to be open to Mary’s presence, “a presence that is universal, maternal and fraternal, discreet, and leading to Christ, an invitation without being pressured to give of ourselves, which is one of the main fruits of [her] presence” (164). In sum, this book is for those who come to Mary, in the words of Paul VI (Marialis cultus, 1974, 67) with “devotion [that] consists neither in sterile or transitory affection, nor in a certain vain credulity, but proceeds from true faith, by which we . . . recognize the excellence of the Mother of God, and we are moved to a filial love towards our mother and to the imitation of her virtues.’