Hello and welcome to Focus, the Catholic Answers podcast for living, understanding, and

defending your Catholic faith. I am Cyigh Kellett your host, delighted to be here with you in the new year and talking about a new book that we have here at Catholic answers, Bible Mary, the mother of Jesus in the word of God. Father

John Weiss is the author of that book and we welcome him to talk about ways forward in talking about Mary in the Christian community.

Father Weiss is a priest of, is an Opus Day priest in Chicago and we're awful glad to have

him here. Hi, Father. Hello, thank you.

Good to be here. Well thank you and one of the chapters in your book is new insights and

openness for Mary and in there you talk about I guess maybe

that this is a time of opportunity would be one way to put it to talk about Mary

what's your thinking there? Well my my thought is that there's been a number of Protestant authors and scholars that have started exploring Mary a little bit more in depth and they tend to stick to the more literal

elements of it but they I think there's a there's a sense that Mary's been left

out of much of their theology and preaching and they feel like

something is missing. Part of that is that they're missing the feminine elements. They see so much of the masculine

emphasized in the Protestant world and they realize they would like to get some of that feminine, you know,

gentleness into the Christian teaching that the Catholic Church tends to have more naturally.

Some of it is just women that have not been able to have children,

being able to relate to Mary, you know, as a virgin and not not having

a child or those that have lost a child in a shopping center or something and you know feeling that panic and they

can relate to Mary as they lose the 12 year old Jesus Jesus returning to Nazareth, you know, they just start to relate to

Mary in ways that, you know, most of us men don't even think of. And so there is this openness to Mary that I discovered just reading

some of these Protestant authors and saying, hey, this is a good opportunity.

Let's leverage this in order to get to explore,

marrying more in depth.

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