The lack of a mother in Evangelicalism is one of the main things that God used to bring me into the Church. That might be unusual. Not sure. It’s not just that most of what the Church and even the reformers believed about the Blessed Virgin has been scrubbed from Evangelical teaching. The Church as our mother is gone as well. Along with it, motherhood itself to a large degree, although there are many Christian women of all kinds returning to the home. I could not find a coherent theology and philosophy of sex and gender in Evangelicalism. IMO, that lack of coherence has done damage to Evangelicalism. Evangelicals understand the aspect of complimentarity in a marriage. Man and women complement one another.
Some Evangelicals understand that Christianity is patriarchal, and it is. What I didn’t see in Evangelicalism is matriarchy. Patriarchal Evangelicalism is odd and has led to a number of epic failures in families. No, not all, but I could tell you stories of amazing successes and some horrible, horrible failures - but I won’t here. Are there more successes than failures? I have no way to know that. The patriarchal movement is not my cup of tea, even though I read a lot of the literature on the subject. I always wondered where the matriarch was. If there are patriarchs, there have to be matriarchs.
Motherhood is in Evangelicalism in a way, but not like in Catholicism. Catholics see motherhood and fatherhood on full display every time we enter a church building. Our Blessed Mother is at Jesus’ right hand, and Jesus’ foster father, Joseph is at His left hand. Father, Mother, Son - the nuclear family. The traditional Holy Family looks down on us every time Mass is celebrated. It’s a strong and unmistakable statement. Father. Mother. Children. It’s been that way since the beginning of creation.
St. Pope JP II lost his mother and after that he found comfort in our Blessed Mother. I can’t find where I read that, so take it FWIW. I heard him preach in Santiago de Chile back in 1987. I was watching on television, but what struck me was how Christ centered it was. It didn’t make sense since his motto was “Totus Tuus” which is "the abbreviated version of the Marian consecration according to de Montfort”. Now it makes more sense to me. Mary leads us to Christ. I am not Marian per se, but I understand how being Christ centered and Marian are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The fact that this great man found comfort in Mary as his mother makes sense to me. My mother passed away. I felt like a motherless child. I was happy to read JP’s comments about how he devoted himself to our Blessed Mother. Make of it what you will. Here’s something that no longer made sense to me. Evangelicals think that Mary is dead. It is a grave sin to pray to the dead. Catholics pray to the dead saints, so we are sinning when we pray to saints.
Jesus taught that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who are not dead. They are alive with God. There’s more to it than that, but the gist of it is that Catholics are not praying to dead saints.
Protestants tune out Catholics at that point, but anyway... Catholics don’t worship Mary and the saints alive in Heaven with God, either. We ask them to pray for us as we would ask other Christians for prayer, but that’s another point that doesn’t make sense to Protestants. We respect them because they are in God’s presence in a way that we are not yet.
Even sola scriptura believers should recognize the contradiction in “saints are dead, so praying to them is necromancy". God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. Things didn’t add up for me anymore since prayer to the saints as in asking them for prayer is a very ancient practice in the Church. The Church is very clear about not worshipping any created being, not even the Blessed Virgin. Asking for a christian to pray for us is not worship. In that sense we pray to the saints - and I do. We usually ask Christians that we respect to pray for us, knowing that it is likely they will. How can all the ancient saints and millions of Christins through the ages be practicing idolatry and necromancy by praying to the Saints in Heaven? It’s possible, but not likely. I believe that I am in good company. Make of it what you will.
Protestants strain the gnat when they focus on dogmatic pronouncements. The problems in understanding what the Church is teaching are much deeper than whether or not Mary is perpetually Virgin and other dogmas that non Catholic Christians find odd and wrong. The confusion in Protestantism, IMO goes to the very nature of what it means to be a man and woman created in the image of God. Was Mary just a body that God used to make a baby? What does that say about God? ...and so forth. What IS woman? What IS man? etc... Some Protestants like to discuss those deeper issues, but still miss the mark, IMO.
Enter a Catholic Church. Contemplate the images at the front of the sanctuary. Understand why they are there.
https://aleteia.org/2016/07/08/let-us-pray-the-earliest-known-marian-prayer/
A LOT more could be said, and has been said. These are not some secret doctrines that have been hidden from humanity and just now revealed. The practice of venerating and praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary goes way back to the early Church. Here’s an interesting article talking about a prayer to Mary that dates from AD 250. I’ll end with this.
The earliest known Marian Prayer, like the Gospels, is written in Greek. That is why, in it, the Virgin Mary is called “Θεοτοκος”, the “Bearer of God”, which is already a theologically relevant detail (as we will try to explain). This prayer, as explained on Trisagion Film’s Website, was “found on a fragment of papyrus that dates all the way back to approximately AD 250”, only a couple of centuries after the Death and Resurrection of Christ, approximately a century before Constantine and the Edict of Milan but, more importantly, two centuries before the Third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus, in which the Virgin Mary was proclaimed “Mother of God”.
