Depth Mariology: An Advent Pilgrimage to the Marian Grottoes of the Midwest

Dear Notre Dame,

A professor from the evangelical Wheaton College lecturing Notre Dame about the Virgin Mary could be compared to a Waffle House fry cook discoursing on flambé technique at Eleven Madison Park. But seeing I had occasion to speak to you about Mary thanks to a kind invitation from the enterprising Jacques Maritain Center, and seeing my affection for your institution has only intensified since my visit, I have worked my remarks delivered on that occasion into a letter, addressed from one Midwestern Christian educational institution to another.

Driving from Wheaton, Illinois, to South Bend, I easily crossed the terrain once traversed—with far more difficulty—by the mound-building cultures, the Illini Indians, the Potawatomi after them, and by Father Jacques Marquette, even if they were all spared dozens of billboards for fireworks and strip clubs. On arrival, I was rewarded not with a sign that read “Votre Dame University,” but Notre. She is Our Lady indeed, and the fact that I am an Anglican does not change that. The Church has, and can only have, one mother, and she is the mother of us all. The warm glow of Evangelicals and Catholics Together, who issued a joint statement about Mary well over a decade ago, seems to have dissipated.

The Benedict XVI Catholics who sponsored such conversations have enough to worry about in the wake of a different pontificate, and evangelicals appear to be too busy self-destructing to be concerned with too much else. Even so, it’s not unfair to maintain that the Virgin Mary remains an ineradicable bond between all Christians. Even the Church of the East, that communion which many still unfairly label as mere “Nestorians,” do not deny her importance.[1] On the contrary, they honor Mary well, and at Wheaton, so do we. A large woven icon of the Virgin hangs near the altar of my church keeps watch over each of our Eucharistic celebrations, which are thick with the smell of incense. I am aware of no impending threats to haul her away.

Maybe our faded ecumenical ethos can be somewhat refreshed not by issuing yet another joint agreement, but by a sweep of mutually affirmed Marian negations. Mary is not exotic seasoning for those whose faith requires some additional spice. She is not a sentimental crutch for those who have unresolved maternal issues that might better be addressed through counseling. She is not just a psychological symbol for those seeking to get in touch with their feminine side. (Long before Jungians counseled men to “encounter their anima,” Christian sang with Mary, Magníficat ánima méa Dóminum.)

Mary is not the Trinity’s plus one, upgrading Father, Son and Holy Spirit to a more symmetrical four. She is not a camouflage goddess masquerading as an innocent mother to allow paganism to infiltrate the church. She is not Asherah in disguise, still less is she a clever demon seeking to turn Christians away from her divine son. Mary is not merely a decoy devised by Machiavellian clerics so that “regular” Christian women can be suppressed. She is not a mascot for chastity to deny us sexual fulfillment. She was not raped by a Roman soldier, still less was she raped by God. Each of the above arguments have been made at book length. Because these reductive ideas are so attractive, popular films have been made arguing for several of these positions – but those who are Christian thankfully reject them all.

It is perfectly fair for a Roman Catholic to follow such ecumenical negations from an Anglican with, “But how high is your Mariology?” In other words, “Do you subscribe to subscribe to the infallible papal declarations of 1854 (Ineffabilis Deus) and 1950 (Munificentissiumus Deus)?” The question of high Mariology is a good one, and it must be posed. I would like to answer it by arguing for the lowest of possible Mariologies, a Mariology which, I am convinced, can still unite us. But by arguing for a “low” Mariology, I do not mean to flatly deny Mary’s sinlessness or her assumption. By “low” I do not mean I subscribe to the Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson’s suggestion, articulated in her 2003 book Truly Our Sister, that Mary has been too exalted.[2] I do not believe giving women more of a place in the church means we need to bring Mary down. I don’t think Mary has been exalted enough, especially since the Second Vatican Council. As Michael Martin has argued, the exaltation of Mary need not diminish mortal women, any more than the exaltation of Christ diminishes mortal men.[3] What I mean by a low Mariology is instead a deep Mariology, a depth that is perfectly represented by Notre Dame’s justly famous grotto.

This takes me to the topic of Native Americans I just touched upon, and to their widescale eviction that made academic institutions like Wheaton and Notre Dame possible. In the wake of a Trump victory, as our country corrects from the egregious excesses of the left, I hope calling attention to the forcible eviction of nearly 1000 Potawatomi Indians from this area is not a residual and dated form of wokeness, but just a plain recitation of what actually took place. To call this eviction a form of “ethnic cleansing” would not be too strong.

The Potawatomi, as I’m sure you know, converted to Catholicism thanks to the work of the Jesuits, whose ministry in this area was interrupted by the suppression of the order in 1773. In the nineteenth century, it is these Potawatomi who requested the presence of Catholic priests associated with your early founding to maintain their Catholicism. Ill-considered, reckless use of the term “colonization” is a standard feature of academic discourse today. To certain audiences, deploying this vocabulary can either be a way of scoring points, or be a prerequisite to even being heard at all. To other audiences, calls to “decolonize” anything are subject to immediate ridicule. I’ve listened to more than a few talks at universities in this area that begin with a “land acknowledgment” that betrays—owing to the way the speaker pronounces the word “Potawatomi”—that the speaker looked the term up an hour before their talk, so I sympathize with the cynicism. But this at least about your history should be clear: Responding to Potawatomi requests for Catholic missionaries is not “colonization.” Request for Catholic presence by the Potawatomi is the reason you are here, and you have a right to be.

But what happened soon afterward most certainly can be classified as “colonization.” In 1838, as you know, Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy was passed.[4] The Pokagon band of Potawatomi, who are still just north of you in Dowagiac, Michigan, secured permission to stay owing to their Catholicism. This was the band that requested the presence of Catholic priests. There was, however, concern that other bands would seek to avail themselves of the same removal exemption, and that had to be stopped. And so, after promising to offer some provisions, General John Tipton—whose father was killed by an Indian—gathered nearly 850 Potawatomi not far from Notre Dame into a church. But instead of receiving provisions, these Potawatomi were marched away.

This is known of course as the Trail of Death, a northern equivalent to the Trail of Tears. I recently tuned into a Notre Dame football game. As the game began, your head coach was asked what he told his players before the game, and his instant and emphatic response was, “Violence. I told them they need to be violent.” At half time, the same coach was asked again what he was going to tell his players. His immediate response was, “We’ve got to be greedy.” I know full well that your coach, who recently became Catholic, would not advocate such vices off the field. But it is fair to say, nevertheless, that both violence and greed played a considerable role in “clearing” this land so that institutions such as ours could exist.

The most Christian answer to such a predicament in 1838, of course, would be to die with the Potawatomi, and that was the response of one of your own, Father Benjamin Petit. He is buried within your Log Chapel, along with Father DeSeille, also involved in your founding, who died in the arms of the Potawatomi who he loved and who loved him. It was the work of these priests who prepared, and consecrated, that land that is now Notre Dame. How I wish we had a record at Wheaton that was the equivalent to your ministry with Native Americans. That said, we do have abolitionism in our favor, a message trumpeted by our first president, Jonathan Blanchard, a near exact contemporary of your first president, Father Sorin. Our analogue to your Log Chapel, and to Father Petit, is our humble memorial to a man James Burr, who died trying to free slaves in Missouri, and who wished to be buried on Wheaton’s campus because of its stance against slavery. But, as Father Blantz puts in his history of your institution,

Notre Dame had enrolled no Black American students in the first hundred years of its existence, and that was not by accident. Many of its students hailed from the South where strict segregation ruled, and the university feared that the presence of Black students might be a source of friction and conflict or might deter southern white students from applying.[5] Perhaps our respective institutional histories show that only together does Wheaton and Notre Dame have enough to be proud of.

It is good that our respective histories are not as concealed as they were in the last century. The work that both of our institutions have done in our respective “institutional reviews” was not a capitulating to a tide of wokeness. Notre Dame is better because of the newly prominent recognition of the Potawatomi in your main building and the foregrounding of Potawatomi art in your new museum, and Wheaton is better because of the renewal of our abolitionist founding that our admission policies at one point betrayed. As many gleefully proclaim “the end of wokeness,” consolidating these legitimate gains will be important. Returning to the founding charisms of our respective institutions was never wokeness anyway. It was ressourcement.

Speaking of such gains, in 1988, on the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Trail of Death, a group of Potawatomi descendants of the survivors of the Trail of Death, along with non-Indian sympathizers, began a commemorative caravan to mourn the occasion, and this group has met every five years since. One year, I joined them.[6] Along the way, every dozen or so miles, we prayed at the sites where individuals died along the way. It has been the work of a lifetime for some Indiana residents to place markers on each of these sites of martyrdom, which we know about thanks to the careful records that were kept. The year I went, Bob Pearl, a Potawatomi elder, an ancestor of those who were removed, joined us while in his nineties. He has since died. Bob was a faithful Catholic, as were most of those who were evicted, and as most of the descendants who joined us still are today.

Indeed, the entire experience ended at St. Mary’s Mission in Kansas, the terminus point of the Trail of Death, with a Catholic Mass. On that occasion we met more descendants of survivors of the Trail of Death who joined us for the celebration. One of Citizen Potawatomi member of the caravan pointed out during the Sanctus that an eagle was circling above us. It was a triumphant conclusion to a sobering journey, and spirits were high. As we lingered after the Mass, though, a member of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi, perhaps noticing some self-satisfied smiles, asked a few of us to come with him. The Prairie Band has traditionally been more resistant to Christianity, and for good reason. Our guide walked down, deep down, into a ravine. He explained to us that this is where the people deposited here had to spend winter, and is likely where many of them were buried. There was a well at the bottom of this ravine, but it wasn’t a holy well. The Prairie Band elder was telling us that there was a level of depth, sorrow and suffering that our upbeat Mass might not have been adequately addressed. I was taken aback by that challenge issued in that ravine, and have been thinking about it ever since.

But I now have an unexpected answer to it. For as I was leaving the mission that day, I saw a Lourdes-style grotto, with an unremarkable statue of Mary next to it. I suppose it could be dismissed as irrelevant Catholic kitsch. But perhaps the grotto represents Marian subterranean depth that surface Christianity so often lacks. After all, Mary knows something about exile. I can’t read Revelation 12 anymore without thinking of the Trail of Death: “The woman was given the two wings of the great eagle so that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time, and times, and half a time.” Mary in Revelation 12 represents the Church, and so it was she—symbolically speaking—who froze to death in that Kansas ravine. In was she and her son who helped sustained Father Benjamin Marie Petit (which is his full name).

The depth of that grotto is an answer to an overly exalted, saccharine Mariology. Some might object that Lourdes as a place, which all replicas grottos are referencing, is not especially deep. Though it precedes it by a century, the upper basilica at Lourdes (1871) does indeed resembles Cinderalla’s Castle at Disneyworld (1971). But as anyone who has actually visited Lourdes could tell you, the site itself disproves this assertion. For the Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception leads you not upward, but downward to a cave, where the original Marian apparition to an uneducated peasant girl occurred. According to Ruth Harris’s great book on Lourdes, this cave was a “wild, unkempt, a place that children and the poor knew well.”[7] This description reminds me of the ravine where our culture deposited the precious Potawatomi.

We sentimentalize Mary’s words to Bernadette, which were more than just “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Mary, it seems to me, was calling Bernadette down, and the entire church with her. During one of the apparitions, she told Bernadette to kiss the ground. We see Bernadette as sweet and serene – the crowd saw her “scratching the earth with her hands, drinking the dirty, salty water, tearing up wild cress and eating it.”[8] But only Bernadette’s humiliating actions is what enabled her to discover the holy well. Maybe when we think of Bernadette on the ground at Lourdes we should think of Sonia’s words to the Roskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, addressed to those of us who live in the Midwest who still benefit from the ejection of the Potawatomi: “Go to the crossroads, bow down to the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it.”[9]

I welcome to the revival of Midwestern regionalism we’ve been experiencing thanks to the work of Jon Lauck. But I prefer something I’ve called “penitent regionalism,” and I think G.K. Chesterton, who as you know spoke at the dedication of your football stadium, might agree. When he wrote his poem “The Arena,” dedicated to your university, he had in mind the gladiatorial arena of Christian martyrdom. But his poem can be reread with the Kansas terminus of the Trail of Death as well:

But for us the Fates point deathward 
   In a thousand thumbs thrust downward…

She whose names are Seven Sorrows and the Cause of All Our Joy,
   Sees the pit that stank with slaughter . . . [10]

Grottoes have been endlessly replicated, and these frequently cheap reproductions would probably not qualify for most as a great Catholic architecture. Still, if we string all these grottos together, especially here in the Midwest—from South Dakota to Iowa to Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio—I think they do essential work for us. Though the immigrants who made them probably did not have this in mind, the grottoes might be considered markers of the Trail of Death long before more recent commemorative efforts began. And not only that. Because Mary is no respecter of persons, these grottoes can mark the memory of pioneers who were murdered by Indians as well. They mark crimes against lynched African Americans, and crimes against the unborn as well. Those who take offense at this reference to all suffering, not just those of minorities, to Harris. She reports how Bernadette’s eyewitnesses themselves commented about how her apparition ushered in the “seemingly spontaneous creation of a Christian collectivity that erased class and status.”[11] All of this, for me at least, is also evoked in the soot-stained ceiling of your grotto.

Going further, I wonder if there is an entire spirituality contained in this dense network of grottoes, for as the early church frequently inveighed, Mary represents not just herself, but all Christians. The gold helmets of your football team admirably evoke this Marian dimensions at all believers, reflecting your Golden Dome. Adding a Marian statue on top of each helmet, rhinoceros-style, would be impractical, and probably against athletic regulations, but it would drive home the point. Still, without the grotto to offset it, your gold Madonna atop her dome might lead you into hubris, proving Elizabeth Johnson’s point about the risks of overly-exalted Mariology or even vindicating Protestant critiques, however unfair they sometimes have been. If the gold helmet represents the Marian dimension of all Christians, it is important to remember that there is a grotto inside us all as well.

Cyprian Smith, in his wonderful short book on Meister Eckhart, The Way of Paradox, puts it this way: “We must first enter the formless Abyss, both in God and in the depths of ourselves, in the soul’s Ground. From that we emerge reborn into the life of communion represented by the Trinity.”[12] Mary, for Meister Eckhart, was the model contemplative. It is sometimes though that these Eckhartian depths are the unique province of Catholics. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere, from Jakob Böhme, to Valentin Weigel, Johann Arndt, William Law, W.R. Inge and Evelyn Underhill, Protestants have inherited this tradition as well. Underhill’s spiritual director, the great Catholic writer Baron Von Hugel, conceded that she would not become Catholic, helping her discern a call to pursue mystical depths in her own Anglican tradition instead.

I think we can find a common cause in these Marian depths more than coming to some new formal agreement about the Virgin, however laudable that aim might be. In a Vatican address to Catholic bishops in 2012 (see: Kevin Hughes, “Ordinary Mysticism of the Unnamable Present”), the Anglican theologian Rowan Williams advised that contemplation “is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit.” Considering the frenetic culture of our respective Christian institutions, I think the same could be said about the need for contemplation in our universities. Williams points out that Christians across confessional lines in pursuing contemplative depth, whether at Bose or Taizé, sometimes result in unexpected evangelistic success. “Those who know little and care less about the institutions and hierarchies of the Church these days are often attracted and challenged by lives that exhibit something of this.” Mary’s silence, her “pondering [these things] in her heart” (Luke 2:19) can become the silence of all Christians as well, if that is, we bother to descend to the grotto within.

Mary’s depth and darkness, which peppers the Midwest in countless grottoes, of which yours is preeminent, represents all of this, the depth of Indigenous suffering which was the price of settlement, and the depth of contemplation. A Notre Dame without the Mary on your Golden Dome would be a pity. A Notre Dame without a Log Chapel or a grotto would not even be Notre Dame. It is good that we Christians, we spend so much time engaging Plato and Aristotle on this continent. But should not North American Christian spend equal time studying the Indigenous wisdom of this continent as well, wisdom which is also fulfilled by Christianity? Still, I wonder if your grotto already represents just such an engagement. Indigenous theology is frequently less written as it is experienced. The womb of the sweat lodge and the womb of the Virgin, which these grottoes, might not be very separate things.

As I was enjoying your campus’s gorgeous basilica, with its magnificent collection of tiny, painstakingly labeled fragments of Christendom’s holiest places, I asked a kind docent if I could see the crypt. She immediately replied, “You don’t want to go there.” I reassured her of my interest, and she only reasserted. “There is nothing of interest in the crypt.” I managed to convince her of my intentions, and she reluctantly led me to what she considered to be its unimpressive, darkened interior. There I found a perfect, quiet, unvisited place to pray, even if had to repeatedly apologize for my desire to see it. Like this well-meaning docent, we are sometimes embarrassed to introduce people to the contemplative tradition, showing off our famous scholars and cultural achievements instead.

Just as it was difficult to access the crypt, I was initially unable to get into the spiritual nucleus of your campus, the humble Log Chapel, as it was locked. But I was told that the way to access it was to first knock on the door to of the Old College nearby, which is now an undergraduate seminary. I followed this counsel, but a November rain was blanketing the campus as I arrived at the Old College, which meant—I assumed—that my mission had little hope of success. After I knocked, an undergraduate seminarian came to the door. When I expressed my intention, his eyes lit up and he was off to get his raincoat and the key. We entered the Log Chapel (at least an accurate replica of the original which was burned), and beheld a darkened, humble frontier cabin, which contained the remains of Fathers Baron, DeSeille and Petit, and the living Eucharistic presence of Christ.

The seminarian took me into the sacristy, and there we beheld not tiny fragments of Christendom’s most noteworthy accomplishments, but fully intact and carefully preserved liturgical instruments from the more humble triumphs of Catholicism’s mission to the Indians of the Midwest. There was a censer, communion set, rosary and mitre that belonged to Bishop Baraga, without whom the Ojibwe language as we know it today would not exist. I had visited his shrine on Lake Superior, but they do not have items as significant as this. Then there was a monstrance used at the time of Father Marquette at his mission at St. Ignace. I had just visited the site where body was recently re-interred in 2022 by request of Native Americans themselves. Those who think all this is “colonization” might consider the claim that the sunburst monstrance itself is result of Indigenous culture of the Americas reflecting back to European culture, for the monstrance is what helped wean Meso-Americans from worship of the sun.[13]

While there is almost nothing left—not even a marker—at the sacred place in Illinois where Marquette preached to thousands of Illini Indians 350 years ago, at least this Log Chapel still stands at Notre Dame. Your Log Chapel is one of the holiest places in the Midwest, without which it is impossible to understand what it means to be a Christian in this land, and I almost missed it. As the young seminarian and I exited the chapel to go back into the rain, the lights were extinguished and the Log Chapel, expect for one votive candle, grew dark again, matching the grotto.

Maybe both of our wealthy campuses—each with very good football teams—need to access this darkness and depth as never before, absence those turf virtues of violence and greed. “[A]s we grow more familiar with the pacific and nonobjectifiable depths of divine reality sustaining us in being,” writes Brian Robinette, “so will we discover deeper capacities for living freely and compassionately with our fellow creatures. The breath elongates. The shoulders drop… The heart opens.”[14] Perhaps we can even meet in those “depthless depths,”[15] where Christ is born in the womb of silence. Or, to use the language with which my tradition is more familiar, “born again.”

With affection,

Matthew J. Milliner
Professor of Art History
Wheaton College

EDITORIAL NOTE:  The Undergraduate Maritain Fellows hosted Professor Milliner for their inagural lecture on 19 November 2024. Professor Milliner’s talk was entitled, “The Global Grotto: A Subterranean Mary for the Universal Church.” This essay is a version of the lecture.

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Tags: Advent Depth Grottoes Marian Mariology Midwest Pilgrimage