The Cambridge University Press journal Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society has its roots in the progressive re-visioning of Roman Catholic theology after Vatican II, frequently understood as aggiornamento, and is committed to scholarship that is grounded in the Catholic incarnational/sacramental tradition. Horizons also fosters diverse scholarship across the fields of religious studies and theology, and is dedicated to a broad ecumenical perspective, a wide range of theological methods, and an intensive engagement of faith with culture.
“In accordance with this design, Mary the Virgin is found obedient, saying, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to your word’ (Luke 1:38). But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin.”
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.22.4, trans. Roberts and Rambaut
In his letter to the Romans, Paul of Tarsus articulated a theology of history based upon an antithesis, as the apostle set forth a contrast between Adam, whose “trespass led to condemnation for all,” and Jesus, “whose act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as through the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so through the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Romans 5:18-19 NRSVue). Over a century later Irenaeus of Lyons, in the course of an extended literary battle against docetic Christologies, crafted the preceding feminine corollary to Paul’s antithesis. The succeeding theological tradition would eventually set Mariology on a collision course with sociopolitical movements for women’s emancipation in the modern era. As Catholic theology shifted away from Scholastic and dogmatic theological methodology towards more inductive and historicized approaches after the Second Vatican Council, a paucity of biblical data about the mother of Jesus threatened to marginalize Mary in constructive systematic theology, despite her central location in Christian devotion and lay piety. After all, what do the New Testament gospels reveal about Mary of Nazareth? Combining the very different infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, readers learn that she was betrothed to Joseph, visited by the angel Gabriel, visited her kinswoman Elizabeth, gave birth to Jesus, and anxiously sought her lost son for days before finding him in conversation with teachers in the Jerusalem temple. The Fourth Gospel recounts Mary at the wedding at Cana and also at the crucifixion, but does not mention her by name.
Marina Warner’s 1976 book, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, was a pioneer volume that examined the way in which Marian devotion shaped gender norms and expectations in Roman Catholicism. For Warner, Mary is “one of the few female figures to have attained the status of myth.”[1] Written in the context of Euro-American second-wave feminism, Alone of All Her Sexconfronted readers with the inescapable ambiguity of a powerful feminine symbol ensconced within the traditions of a patriarchal Catholic Church. Mary is both a creature and a divine intermediary, both a virgin and a mother, an active agent and an intercessor. During the latter half of the twentieth century, Catholics’ understanding of the Marian “myth” had undergone development and sparked controversy. A quarter century before the publication of Warner’s book, Pope Pius XII had further developed Catholic dogma in his 1950 apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus, which declared that at the end of her life Mary’s body and soul were assumed into heaven. When Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Tardini solicited propositions for the upcoming Vatican Council from Church leaders in 1959, hundreds of responses were received, split between respondents who urged the Council not to create new Marian titles and other respondents who wished the assembled bishops to define Mary’s title as Mediatrix. These preconciliar splits foreshadowed the later debates at Vatican II, which included a failed attempt to place the topic of Mary in a separate document rather than within the Constitution on the Church. The vote to keep the schema within what would become Lumen Gentium was one of the closest at the Council.[2]
Published twenty years after Vatican II’s close, Elizabeth Johnson’s 1985 essay in Horizons, “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Woman,” thus engaged with a Marian tradition that had developed significantly in the previous generation, confounding stereotypes that the Church’s understanding and devotion to Mary was static and antimodern. Johnson undertook a task of Mariological retrieval in the light of the concerns and challenges raised by Christian feminist theology. Acknowledging the myriad of critiques that Marian tradition had, in fact, served in part to denigrate women, Johnson also posted a constructive question: “In what ways might this tradition be critically reinterpreted in such a way that itwould serve the goal of liberation and true mutuality between womenand men?”[3] That tradition, stemming from patristic writers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Augustine, used the Eve–Mary contrast to elevate the mother of Jesus while simultaneously denigrating all other women. “The ‘Madonna-whore syndrome,’ of which this issue is a classic example,” Johnson wrote, “enables men to love and respect their ideal of woman in Mary but to ignore or dominate concrete real women with impunity and with immunity even from the searchings of their own conscience."[4] Even when such dichotomous understandings of women are replaced with interpretations of femininity and masculinity that emphasize complementarity, the result is a limitation of possibilities for women’s fulfillment.
Faced with such daunting theological obstacles, Johnson bravely set out to reinterpret the tradition by looking to historical study of the gospels. Exegesis can serve to recover the humanity of one particular first-century Palestinian woman, often buried beneath centuries of mythicization. Another possibility for retrieval was to follow upon Vatican II’s ecclesial path by understanding the mother of Jesus as a symbol of the community of redeemed humanity known as the church. In this ecclesial understanding promoted by the Council, Mary is not a symbol for sinful women but an anthropological model for both men and women, a person who demonstrates the incarnated reality of genuine Christian community. Johnson expanded the research trajectory of this Horizons essay in her 2003 book, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, which combined historical research and constructive theology to promote a resymbolization of Mary as someone who is part of the Church rather than one who hovers above it.[5]
Forty years after the publication of Johnson’s essay, this virtual issue of Horizons features two responses to “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Woman” as part of the celebration of this journal’s fifty years of publication. The editors of Horizons asked our participants to reflect on the relevance of Johnson’s contribution to Mariology from the vantage point of the current time. In her response, “Mary’s Body and the Realities of Childbearing,” Jessica Coblentz begins by describing the vandalism directed against a statue of Mary in Austria last year. Esther Strauss’s artwork “Crowning” was part of an exhibition in the Roman Catholic cathedral in Linz, and its depiction of Mary in the act of giving birth to Jesus provoked both devotion and outrage before a vandal decapitated this representation of the Mother of God. Coblentz explains how the attack on “Crowning” is also an attack on the lived reality of motherhood in the church. Mothers do not give birth to their children in picturesque tableaux in pious settings devoid of pain, blood, healthcare bills, and hospital bureaucracies. Men’s failure to appreciate the embodied material challenges of motherhood belies their professed devotion to Mary. Coblentz highlights how recent attacks on artistic representations of Mary and Ruth Bader Ginsburg illustrate pressing questions for how women’s agency can be exercised. Both the US Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision striking down a constitutional right to abortion, and the Synod on Synodality’s halting its deliberation on women’s ordination to the diaconate, demonstrate that gender will continue to be an ideological battleground for both state and church.
In her essay, “Rethinking Mary from the Ground Up: A Response to Elizabeth A. Johnson’s ‘The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women,’” María Del Socorro Castañeda also calls for a contextual Mariology and claims that Johnson’s essay needs further attention to social particularities. “Johnson's approach,” she writes, “tends to universalize women's experiences, overlooking the cultural specificity that shapes how Mary is understood in different cultural contexts.” Women experience different realities; white women experience Mary differently than Latina women. What might seem to women within one culture or within one economic class as Mary’s submission may be interpreted as active agency by other women in different socioeconomic locations. Building upon research from her book Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America, Castañeda argues that working-class Mexican women see in Mary a sign of feminine independence from men.[6] These women do not experience Mary only within the context of the universal Church; they encounter the mother of Jesus within their immediate families. Yet while those women with whom Castañeda converses value Mary’s role as their spiritual mother, they reject a Marian appellation of Sister: “For them, Our Lady of Guadalupe represents something far more sacred and revered—far beyond the familial dynamics of sibling relationships.”
The “reality of women” to which Johnson’s 1985 essay referred is one which continually evolves, like the theological explanations of Mary of Nazareth over the centuries. “A theology,” Bernard Lonergan wrote, “mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.”[7] Traditionally Catholics have understood that in her role as MediatrixMary mediates between God and humanity. What Elizabeth Johnson, Jessica Coblentz, and María Del Socorro Castañeda have shown in their writing is that Mary’s role as Mediatrix extends to the sociological realm. Mary mediates Christians to each other. Within our particular cultural matrices, Mary mediates to the members of her son’s body our hopes and fears regarding family, gender, power, and community. What comes next remains to be seen, but Johnson provides a prediction for the future: “It seems a sure judgment to say that the future of the marian tradition is closely tied with the future history of women in the church, and that it will be regenerated or remain collapsed of its own weight depending in large measure on what happens in that history.”[8]
[1] Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Random House, 1976), xxv.
[2] See Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, OP, “The Universal Call to Holiness,” in Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46–51.
[3] Elizabeth A. Johnson, CSJ, “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women,” Horizons 12, no. 1 (1985): 121.
[4] Johnson, “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women,” 124.
[5] See Johnson, Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints (New York: Continnum, 2003).
[6] María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles, Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[7] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), xi.
[8] Johnson, “The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women” 135.