Most contemporary Catholics are familiar with the practice of using female images and feminine pronouns to describe the Christian Church. For many feminist theologians, this is often seen as problematic when it is employed in uncritical ways, positing a female church paired with a male God, “seeing it as the legacy of an anachronistic patriarchal system that should be discarded in favor of more modern and progressive images of Christian discipleship” (xii). In this well-researched and readable volume, Cristina Lledo Gomez investigates this use of female imagery for the church, tracing its roots in the early church, and suggesting that these images can continue to speak to the church today.

In her first chapter, Lledo Gomez grounds her examination of female ecclesial images in the pre-Christian practice of naming cities as female; the presentation of Jerusalem as mother, daughter, widow, and whore in the Hebrew Scriptures; several New Testament passages that align “Mother Church” with the reign of God; and its use in the early church to understand martyrdom and to confront heresy. The next four chapters trace the development of female images of the church in Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose, and Augustine. Lledo Gomez argues that the church as woman and mother is always mediated through idealized images of the ancient Roman woman: materfamilias (the mother of the patriarchal family), univira (the wife to only one man), matrona (the virtuous wife and mother), and virgines (the virgin dedicated to the goddess Vesta). Of particular note is her discussion of Augustine's understanding of his mother Monica as the perfect example of the Roman matrona and his employment of an astonishingly wide variety of female metaphors for the church as a way of countering heresy. Thus, “The female church Augustine presented appears as his mother Monica, but also as the Roman mother, virgin, and wife, as Mother Jerusalem, as the female figures of Psalm 45, as the new Eve, and as Mary as virgin and mother” (139). The final chapter in the book looks at the ways that Pope Francis uses female images of the church; Lledo Gomez argues that Francis’ language not only echoes official statements of the twentieth century, but is also grounded in his relationships with real women.

The strength of this book is the care with which Lledo Gomez traces the development of female images of the church in the patristic material. By placing these images in their historical context, she not only makes their meaning clearer, but also makes the images become richer and more robust. In articulating a feminist retrieval of these images, Lledo Gomez names the challenge: “If the virgin-bride church was discarded today in favor of some other more relevant metaphor, we would be left without a metaphor to convey the intimate relationship between the church and Christ. At the same time, we would also be left with a metaphor that reinforces patriarchy. It is the dilemma of conveying the nature of the church mined from its rich tradition, but not at the cost of women” (179). Lledo Gomez calls the church to attend to the female images of the church, recognizing their rootedness in the patriarchy of the Roman Empire and their promise for more capacious and just understandings of the relationship between the church and God.

I was left wishing for even more. First, the book skips over the intervening centuries between Augustine and Francis. Tracing this theological history probably would have made the book unwieldy; however, the reader is left with the impression that the metaphors endured unchanged so that twentieth-century theologians are picking up where Augustine left off. Second, Lledo Gomez calls for a feminist retrieval of female images of the church, but she does not systematically unpack what these retrieved images might be. Nevertheless, this is a valuable text, probably of most use for the graduate or advanced undergraduate classroom. And hopefully, Lledo Gomez will follow up with subsequent books tracing the images from Augustine through the modern era and laying out a systematic reclamation of the female images of the church.