The Virgin Mary as New Eve

Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-1882) and John Henry Newman (1801-1890), leaders in the Oxford Movement that revitalized the Anglican Church through the study of the Church Fathers and an emphasis on liturgy and sacraments, had been very close friends; but after Newman's reception into the Roman Catholic Church on October 9, 1845, the two did not meet again for twenty years. When they finally chanced to meet, Newman discovered that Pusey had just completed a polemical treatise identifying obstacles to Canterbury's reunion with Rome-notorious among them, Catholic beliefs about the Blessed Virgin Mary. Newman felt compelled to write a rebuttal, which Manfred Hauke describes as "one of the pearls of Marian theology of the nineteenth century." Os Justi Press is proud to present it to readers today in a handsome, affordable, and convenient format, with a superb historical and doctrinal introduction by Fr. Thomas Crean, OP. From the Introduction: "The Letter to Pusey was called forth by an unexpected crisis, and completed with Newman's prodigious industry in just over a week.... He wished to encourage all that was sincere in Pusey's desires for union with Rome and also to dissipate his misapprehensions. Equally naturally did he wish to defend Catholics from what he considered Pusey's unfair accusations. But he also wanted to take the opportunity to mark out his own position and at least by implication to criticise what he took to be the doctrinal and devotional exaggerations of some of his fellow converts in the areas of Mariology and ecclesiology.... Newman, in his reply, displays not only his lively supernatural faith but also his panoply of natural gifts: scholarship, historical imagination, precision, the ability to produce illuminating analogies, and what may be called a gentlemanly toughness of mind."