Introduction
Catholic theological perceptions of females and sexuality cannot progress without attending closely to perceptions of Mary in the church. This distinctly Catholic question, given Mary’s place in the broader Catholic imagination, has been explored extensively over Christian history. In that light, my focus here is on theology and papal teaching regarding Mary from the era of the Second Vatican Council to the pontificate of Pope Francis. That is, Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, and the influential thinkers who shaped their Mariological perspectives. This narrow exploration of recent Catholic teaching and practice regarding Mary and Marian devotion necessarily limits this discussion further within the anthropological concept of complementarity, as it emerged in the twentieth century and beyond, and the disparity of its application within the church. I am particularly curious about its relationship to the Marian thinking that came to be embedded in Catholic ecclesiology over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
As neither a Mariologist nor an ecclesiologist, I address these questions in the light of my previous work. Having explored female sexuality and development, menstruation, bodies, and blood elsewhere,Footnote 1 I will not detail the journey to this focused consideration of Mary. Briefly, I suggest that Catholic sexual theology, specifically regarding females, suffers from a scarcity of accounts of sexuality and reproduction that adequately reflect their diverse and complex embodied experiences, particularly in regard to procreation and menstruation.Footnote 2 From considerations of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures’ engagements with female reproductive realities via questions of purity, covenant, and relationship to the holy,Footnote 3 to reflections on contemporary adolescent female sexuality in relation to an early Christian articulation of Mary as a virginal, reproductive, and liminal figure in the Protoevangelium of James,Footnote 4 I have come to understand that until Marian theology, spirituality, and devotion more adequately reflect an embodied Mother of God, official Catholic sexual theology will remain inadequate for females, and females’ roles in the church will be accordingly circumscribed.
My resulting focus examines the relatively recent articulation of the theological anthropological concept of complementarity within Catholic teaching and theology regarding gender and sexuality, as a key artifact obstructing female flourishing in both theory and practice.Footnote 5 This theological anthropology is intimately joined with Mary across theologies, including ecclesiology, and sexuality. Along with other feminist scholars, I perceive Mary’s place in theological history as the Virgin Mother, Mother of the Church, and Mother Church, as more of an ideal than as an embodied woman.Footnote 6 An alternative, parallel recent history of Marian thought and Mariology (from the nineteenth century on), however, bolsters the particular anthropology of gendered and sexed complementarity and is in turn baked into contemporary ecclesiology: gender and facets of the church seem inextricably linked. This Mary emerges primarily, although not exclusively,Footnote 7 from influential Catholic male thinkers, such as Dietrich von Hildebrand,Footnote 8 Louis Bouyer,Footnote 9 and Hans Urs von Balthasar.Footnote 10 Her identity is both elevated and diminished given her usefulness in particular contexts and her ideal (but not necessarily real) femininity is, I suggest, central to the church’s trouble with so-called gender ideology,Footnote 11 gender theory, and gender equality and equity.Footnote 12 The term “gender ideology” is employed within some circles of Christian and Catholic theology and some socially and politically conservative circles;Footnote 13 it indicates views sympathetic to a strictly binary anthropology, based in the predominantly male/female biological presentation of sex, as equated with gender.Footnote 14 Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz, as well as Elizabeth S. Corredor trace concerns related to gender to the 1990s, to the publication of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and global discussions pertaining to women’s well-being and flourishing.Footnote 15 As I explore in the following, the theological anthropology that counters such gender ideology leans heavily on particular Marian perceptions in Catholic thought.
In this article, I trace some theological influences that initiated the twentieth-century focus on the concept of gendered complementarity, its Marian ties, and its ensuing embeddedness in some articulations of Catholic theological anthropology, sexuality, and ecclesiology. I begin with a brief discussion of complementarity as it has developed over the past century in Catholic theological anthropology. This discussion is followed by an overview of Marian theology leading up to the Second Vatican Council and the complex history of Mary’s inclusion in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium. I follow this overview with an exploration of Marian thought in contemporary post-Vatican II popes: Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI (once Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger), and Francis. I conclude with an exploration of females’ and Mary’s embodiment to question the adequacy of a sexual and anthropological theological construction of complementarity, gender, sex, and ecclesiology built upon a binary presuming a very specific understanding of Marian femaleness and femininity.
Mary, Complementarity, and Catholic Theological Anthropology
In the early twentieth century leading to Vatican II, we encounter a burgeoning theological anthropology based explicitly on the concept of complementarity. Three influential thinkers from the early to mid-twentieth century are prominent in ensuing papal theological discussions of Mary, sexuality, gender, and anthropology: Dietrich von Hildebrand, Louis Bouyer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In the following discussion, I attend to each of their constructions of Mary and females that impact subsequent Catholic teaching and theology regarding females, gender and sex, embodiment, and sexuality.
In personalist theological and philosophical discourses on purity, marriage, and the nature of man and woman, Dietrich von Hildebrand wrote of the interior disposition to purity as regards one’s sexuality, sexual appetite, and sexual expressions.Footnote 16 He proposed that in embracing sex and sexuality as gifts given by and oriented toward God, we authentically express love for another person (“for a thou”)Footnote 17 in their concrete reality. For him, spousal love possesses a grandeur that is unmatched by other forms of human love and is the only context in which sexual expression communicates the fulfillment of the “beautiful and glorious reality which is destined by God’s will to play a fundamental role in man’s life.”Footnote 18 In his defense of the essential nature of marriage as between man and woman, von Hildebrand outlines the necessary complementarity of woman as feminine and man as masculine in the fulfillment of God’s wish for human relationship. That is, men and women differ essentially and metaphysically in the I–thou communion of spousal reciprocity.Footnote 19 This complementarity is further expressed in the mystery of the indispensable connection between love and unity (the primary meaning of marriage) and procreation (the primary end of marriage), apparent in loving spousal sexual union, a total self-giving to the other, in marriage.Footnote 20 In this light, von Hildebrand outlines the implications of complementarity: woman is the receptive principle in the natural order, whereas man is the “giving, fertilizing factor,” particularly regarding the “external aspect” of their relationship.Footnote 21 In relation to God, however, both man and woman are receptive (and thus constituted, in some sense, of the feminine; in creation, we all receive from God):
But this metaphysical femininity belongs also to mankind as a whole in relation to God. Since within the natural order the male is in the spiritual sphere, i.e., in his relation to the world and human life, predominantly the creative and generative principle, he is better fitted to fulfil in the supernatural order also the giving function of the priest as the representative of Christ. Nevertheless, in this supernatural order his masculine role is confined entirely to his office—as an individual soul he must be just as receptive in relation to God as the woman, for in this order in which the Divine and the human meet, the male, inasmuch as he is a human individual, is purely receptive, that is to say, metaphysically feminine.Footnote 22
In this complementarity, the Blessed Virgin Mary serves as the pinnacle image of woman, particularly insofar as she, as a creature, is most like Christ: “She, Queen of all Saints, is womanly in the highest and most sublime sense of the word”;Footnote 23 she is “the purest of the pure.”Footnote 24 Although her holiness could be captured in a man, her femininity could not. For von Hildebrand, complementarity is key to both theological anthropology and the ordered nature of the church.
Hans Urs von Balthasar advances the personalist Catholic development of complementarity in theological anthropology and ecclesiology.Footnote 25 His particular articulation takes form in his perception of the Marian/Petrine dimensions of the church:Footnote 26 Mary, the church, is the feminine reality to which all the church belongs, whereas Peter is the masculine and hierarchical protector, minister, and administrator of the church, the masculine reality to which only men can belong, as he claims was articulated by Jesus himself.Footnote 27 For Balthasar, the church is feminine receptivity. Like von Hildebrand, Balthasar is keen to embed ecclesiological roles within a complementary theological anthropology. He further seems to purport that women’s lack of ministerial power in the Roman Catholic Church is actually more powerful than other forms of tangible power in the church: women seeking ministerial office would be “exchanging more for less.”Footnote 28 He thus chides feminists and others for suggesting females be accepted to ordained ministry: “There can be a demand for ecclesiastical office only when there is a failure to appreciate the real dignity of women in the Church (as Church). Such a demand levels out, and thereby neutralizes, the mystery of the sexes, instead of bearing [auszutragen] it to its open, perfected tension and fruitfulness.”Footnote 29 He pointedly notes that “Mary is not a feminist.”Footnote 30
Balthasar’s articulation of a decidedly feminine church with a decidedly masculine ordained ministry is a quite biologically specific proposition, while being simultaneously inattentive to actual physical bodies. For example, his narrative account of Mary’s suffering at the birth of Jesus removes her body from the actual birthing process to propose that Mary was somehow exempt from physical pain and typical parturition: “At the birth every pain was dissolved in pure light. How her womb opened and closed again we do not know, and it is superfluous to speculate about an event which for God was a child’s game, something much less important than the original overshadowing by the Holy Spirit.”Footnote 31 This proposition leads to further perceptions of Mary’s virginal character in relation to the perfection of Jesus and invites a vocation to the virginal life that, in its conscious renunciation of sexual expression, leads to Christian fruitfulness.Footnote 32 Balthasar’s Mary and Marian aspect of the church—feminine, virginal, fruitful, serving, and receptive—create an image of Mary that is impossible to replicate in the lives of embodied and frequently bleeding Christian women.
Along with early church fathers,Footnote 33 Balthasar also places Mary in the line of redemption as the second Eve, whose obedience rectifies the disobedience of the first. Her feminine character, echoed in the nature of the church, is so because of her “ontological gratitude, which both receives the gift and passes it on. And the masculine office, which has to represent the true giver, the Lord of the Church (albeit within the church’s feminine receptivity), is instituted in her only to prevent her from forgetting this primary reality, to ensure that she will always remain a receiver and never become self-assertive possessor and user.”Footnote 34 The mystery of Mary’s feminine character is bound inextricably with the mystery of the church, that is, they “penetrate and illuminate each other perichoretically” and share an “archetypal identity.”Footnote 35 In this light, in its femininity, the church, like Mary, must not shine a light upon itself but rather, through “service and ‘domestic economy,’”Footnote 36 prepare a place of refuge for the Lord.Footnote 37
The final scholar of influence in church teaching and theology that I consider here is Louis Bouyer. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) singles out Bouyer’s Woman in the Church,Footnote 38 as having a particular influence on Ratzinger’s own development of a theology of women—the line of women in Scripture— from Eve through Mary. In his earlier work, The Seat of Wisdom, Bouyer traces the development of Mary as the Mother of the Redeemer and the church back through Jewish Scripture.Footnote 39 In concert with early church thinkers and Balthasar, Bouyer proposes Mary as the second Eve in relation to the second Adam, Christ. His dialogue between the Genesis texts of the Creation and the New Testament leads to a reading of Mary as the ultimate fulfilment of the male/female relationship, the structure of the church, and the divine constitution of femininity and masculinity in both.Footnote 40
Bouyer further elaborates on these themes in Woman in the Church, as a means of ensconcing masculinity and maleness in the priesthood. In addressing “A Female Priesthood?,” Bouyer points to the necessary complementarity of woman and man, “without which the pretended equality of woman would be nothing but an annihilation of her originality and proper identity, which motivates the limitation of the priestly ministry to men.”Footnote 41 In support of this complementarity, Bouyer turns to the roles of woman and man through Jewish and Christian Scripture, outlining the feminine nature of wisdom and the Shekinah in Israelite literature, even while the Christian God is singularly male. With an emphasis on the differences between masculine males and feminine females, he proposes that masculinizing women constitutes a misunderstanding of the “mystery of woman” and would ultimately “result in undermining her dignity and finally reach the point of denying her the right to exist.”Footnote 42 In fulfilment of this mystery, males and females necessarily have complementary vocations in the world and in the church, masculine and feminine, respectively. In support of these necessarily binary vocations, Bouyer turns to stereotypical perceptions of females and males that bolster the receptivity, interiority, and piety characteristic of femininity, and the activity, public outspokenness, and leadership characteristic of masculinity.Footnote 43 Indeed, woman’s fullness is always in relation to God and, without exception, in “her maternal vocation.”Footnote 44
Pope John Paul II, although influenced by the scholars outlined previously, was himself a profound presence in the development of contemporary Catholic notions of complementarity. The theology of the body that grew from his Wednesday sermons early in his pontificate, between 1979 and 1984, which were subsequently published in a book of the same name, has shaped theological anthropology over the past fifty years.Footnote 45 Given that his pontificate spanned almost twenty-seven years, there was sufficient time for his construction of a theological anthropology of complementarity in those early sermons to wend its way throughout both teaching of the churchFootnote 46 and contemporary theological discourse.Footnote 47 In his distinctive theology, we find the seeds of now common concepts and phrases that continue to hold sway in Catholic theological anthropology, for example “the nuptial meaning of the body”Footnote 48 and the mutual self-gift of man and womanFootnote 49 as an antidote to the original solitude of man experienced in creation.
Further, Pope John Paul’s unique reading of Scripture, both the Hebrew and Christian texts, embeds the creation of sexual difference into the ontological meaning of male and female, sex and sexuality, and gender and bodies.Footnote 50 Particularly potent to the construction of his theological anthropology is his early exposition of the Genesis 2 creation story.Footnote 51 From Genesis 2:23 (“This one, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called ‘woman,’ for out of ‘her man’ this one has been taken.”), John Paul II gleans the understanding that “knowledge of man passes through masculinity and femininity. These are, as it were, two “incarnations” of the same metaphysical solitude before God and the world. They are two ways of “being a body” and at the same time a man, which complete each other. They are two complementary dimensions of self-consciousness and self-determination and, at the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body.”Footnote 52 As Luke Timothy Johnson points out, such a theological reading encounters the pitfalls of “deriving ontological conclusions from ancient narrative texts” and thus determines the conclusions Pope John Paul II draws when “description subtly serves as prescription.”Footnote 53 Pope John Paul II’s theological anthropology of complementarity remains central to contemporary Roman Catholic magisterial articulations of sexuality and related questions.Footnote 54
Mary and Vatican II
Karl Rahner provides a simple and succinct articulation of Mary’s place in the Catholic tradition in the mid-twentieth century:
The divine motherhood of the blessed Virgin is therefore God’s grace alone, and her own act, inseparably. It is not simply a physical motherhood, it is her grace and her deed, placing her whole self, body and soul, at the service of God and his redemptive mercy to mankind. And since this divine motherhood—as an act of faith personally made—belongs intrinsically to the history of redemption, it gives Mary a real relationship to us, for we are living in the history of redemption which she has decisively influenced.Footnote 55
Yet Elizabeth JohnsonFootnote 56 notes that the Marian tradition had evolved into something quite extraordinary in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the proclamations of the Doctrines of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IXFootnote 57 and the Assumption by Pope Pius XII.Footnote 58 The result of the flourishing Mariology of the time was a “view of Mary as the unique, immaculately conceived virgin mother of God par excellence, graced with perfect virtue, the totally obedient, humble handmaid who was also the Queen of Heaven with power to intercede for our salvation, and who was assumed body and soul into heaven.”Footnote 59 Johnson notes that evolving away from the theological thought of the day, even while meeting the devotional needs of the church, Marian theology had reached a crossroads on the journey to Vatican II:Footnote 60 either its more extreme elements were to be renewed and reintegrated into a Christocentric theology based more explicitly on original and early Christian sources (ressourcement) or it was to continue to develop “new conquests for Mary with more titles, privileges, and dogmatic definitions,” such as coredemptrix.Footnote 61 Johnson’s observations are akin to Hugo Rahner’s identification of the tension between the dogmatic and the “over-enthusiastic” devotional schools of Marian thought (that is, tension between devotion to Mary as the Mother of God and as the Mother of the Church) contemporary to Vatican II.Footnote 62 Indeed, in his journal as a consultor to the Theological Commission of the Second Vatican Council, Yves Congar traces the Marian discussions (ultimately brought to fruition in chapter 8 of Lumen Gentium) from the July 1960 pre-Council consultations to the November 21, 1964, proclamation of the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, Lumen Gentium.Footnote 63 Over the course of four years, Congar’s many mentions of Mary and the various competing Mariologies at play depict the tensions described by Hugo Rahner and Elizabeth Johnson.
The practical course taken at this twentieth-century crossroads is manifest in the inclusion of Mary within Lumen Gentium. Laurie Olsen provides intricate detail from the Vatican Apostolic Archives of the discussions leading up to and including the vote on October 29, 1963, during which the Council Fathers narrowly opted to include a Marian chapter within the document on the church rather than to produce a free-standing document, which many thought would have been better able to expand upon Marian doctrine.Footnote 64 In effect, it articulates a more minimalist, ecclesiotypical position placing Mary among the community of believers, based upon the gospels (that is, “ecclesiotypical because it envisioned Mary as herself simply the recipient of grace and a special member of the community of the church”), rather than dedicating a doctrinal document solely to articulating Marian theology, devotion, and piety, as a christotypical “Marian maximalism” (that is, “christotypical because it envisioned Mary as an altogether special creature whose privileges paralleled those of Christ”).Footnote 65 In the years following the Council and Lumen Gentium, a good deal (although not all) of enthusiasm to further advance the role of Mary as Mediatrix, Redemptrix, and Mother of the Church waned.Footnote 66 Although the Marian chapter might well have required compromise for the proponents of the various Mariologies at play prior to the Council, still the document is now generally understood accurately to represent current Catholic teaching with “genuine wisdom and elegance.”Footnote 67
Mary and the Popes: Pope Paul VI
Pope Paul VI’s role in the Marian discussions at Vatican II began as Council Father Giovani Montini, Archbishop of Milan, prior to his election as pope on June 21, 1963. He first declared a wish to honor Mary with the title Mater Ecclesiae on December 5, 1962, during the first session of the Council.Footnote 68 Later, as Pope Paul VI, he further noted this preference on six occasions, finally declaring Mary Mater Ecclesiae in his discourse on November 21, 1964 (the day of the promulgation of Lumen Gentium) at the conclusion of the third session of the Council.Footnote 69 This declaration was not without controversy.Footnote 70 Although not the first (or even the first pope) to use this title, Pope Paul declared Mary Mother of the Church in a move that had been deliberately avoided by the Council, likely because of its ambiguous history in the Christian tradition.Footnote 71
Following Vatican II, popular piety and devotions to Mary waned in the face of a theological renewal to the early sources of the church and the church’s engagement with the modern world, particularly in Western industrialized nations,.Footnote 72 The marked drop in Marian devotions in these Catholic cultures coincided with a broader theological shift toward modern Scripture scholarship and focus on the Eucharist, and an increasingly skeptical and ecumenically minded Christian community.Footnote 73
In response to the waning Marian focus in many church communities, ten years after the Council, Pope Paul VI wrote the apostolic exhortation Marialis Cultus, partly as a means of reviving Marian devotion in the Western world in line with the invitation from the Council to see Mary in this new light, that is, governed by reflection on biblical, liturgical, ecumenical, and anthropological principles.Footnote 74 Here, Mary is given pride of place next to Jesus but remains clearly subordinate in the realm of grace. With a plethora of titles and roles, Mary takes her place as a model of discipleship to all. Although Paul VI clearly recognizes the shifting roles of women in historical context,Footnote 75 Mariology is soon thereafter taken up into the theological anthropological space of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s, Louis Bouyer’s, and Hans Urs von Balthasar’s complementarily gendered and sexed ecclesiology, an anthropological principle that remains a somewhat unresolved aspect of contemporary Marian thought, ambiguously tied as it is to Mary’s actual person and body.
Mary and the Popes: John Paul II
There is a complex relationship between the written work of Pope John Paul II and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). Their close working affiliation throughout John Paul II’s pontificate on matters theological while Ratzinger was the Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981–2005), facilitated a cosupportive environment of theological development. Thus, I consider them here not as of one mind but, rather, as of mutual influence in the evolution of their thinking. Pope John Paul II is well known for his Marian devotion and integration of Mary into his pontificate. On March 25, 1987, the Solemnity of the Assumption, John Paul II offered the encyclical letter Redemptoris Mater to initiate the Marian year. Here, like Pope Paul VI before him, he takes up Vatican II’s concern to understand Mary’s place in the incarnation and to place her squarely within the life of the pilgrim church and the mystery of Christ,Footnote 76 and he further reiterates her blessed yet clearly not apostolic status.Footnote 77 Her motherhood, however, defines her mediation in the Christian church, her role as a model of motherhood for the church, and her status as Mother of the Church.Footnote 78 His pointed emphasis on Mary’s femininity in relation to women discloses an idealized image of women as somehow compared to Mary’s perfection:
This Marian dimension of Christian life takes on special importance in relation to women and their status. In fact, femininity has a unique relationship with the mother of the Redeemer … the figure of Mary of Nazareth sheds light on womanhood as such by the very fact that God, in the sublime event of the Incarnation of his Son, entrusted himself to the ministry, the free and active ministry of a woman … women, by looking to Mary, find in her the secret of living their femininity with dignity and of achieving their own true advancement. In the light of Mary, the Church sees in the face of women the reflection of a beauty which mirrors the loftiest sentiments of which the human heart is capable: the self-offering totality of love; the strength that is capable of bearing the greatest sorrows; limitless fidelity and tireless devotion to work; the ability to combine penetrating intuition with words of support and encouragement.Footnote 79
Pope John Paul II offers a narrow overall characterization of Mary that does not capture the reality and diversity of her, or of women in general, and mothers as human persons; his Marian perceptions move hand in hand with his theological anthropology of complementarity. Gender and sex are ontological categories for Mary (and, indeed, for every person); her model for women is thus essential to his construction of male/female and masculine/feminine humanity. A year later, in his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, John Paul II recounts how the “Fathers of the recent Assembly of the Synod of Bishops” tackled the problems associated with understanding women and men.Footnote 80 In his unique biblical exegesis, John Paul II concludes that the heart of women’s dignity and vocation is motherhood via femininity, all of which finds its origins in the exemplar mothers Eve and Mary.Footnote 81
At the time of its promulgation, Redemptoris Mater was introduced by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in which he contextualizes the encyclical within contemporary feminist discussions of Mary, on the one hand, and liberationist discussions of Mary, on the other hand.Footnote 82 He finds both perceptions of Mary wanting and ultimately endorses Pope John Paul II’s theological reading of Scripture interpreting itself Footnote 83 and thus makes way for his particular scriptural basis of Mariology and theological anthropology.
John Paul II’s articulation is intricate and relies upon his anthropological reading of female/feminine and male/masculine complementarity, and is summed up thus:
While the dignity of woman witnesses to the love which she receives in order to love in return, the biblical “exemplar” of the Woman also seems to reveal the true order of love which constitutes woman’s own vocation … The moral and spiritual strength of a woman is joined to her awareness that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way… But this entrusting concerns women in a special way—precisely by reason of their femininity—and this in a particular way defines their vocation … Thus the “perfect woman” (cf. Prov 31:10) becomes an irreplaceable support and source of spiritual strength for other people, who perceive the great energies of her spirit. The “perfect women” are owed much by their families, and sometimes by whole nations.Footnote 84
Although Pope John Paul II refrains here from distinguishing the Marian (feminine/serving) dimension of the church from the Petrine (masculine/hierarchical), one must consider that he has in mind the Marian musings of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and Louis Bouyer. Balthasar’s articulation of the Marian/Petrine dimensions of the church fits particularly well with John Paul II’s anthropologically determined roles in the church.Footnote 85 For Balthasar, the church is “feminine receptivity,” and so too it is for Pope John Paul II. In this light, the theological anthropology of complementarity espoused in Catholic teaching disperses into all areas of theology, including ecclesiology, sacraments, moral thought and action, and sexuality. No plainer evidence of his thinking is there than the apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, in which John Paul II declares the question of the ordination of women to priestly ministry to be closed and that “this judgment is to be definitively held by all the church’s faithful.”Footnote 86 Reiterating key points of the Declaration Inter Insigniores,Footnote 87 Pope John Paul II identifies three initial barriers to the ordination of women to the priesthood: the church’s constant tradition of ordaining only males; Christ chose only men as his apostles; and Scripture does not identify women as apostles. Although he does not elaborate on the “other theological reasons” articulated in Inter Insignores, those reasons conform to the nuptial mystery of the church (that is, the gendered aspects of the church) and the specific maleness of Christ and ordained ministers’ performing priestly ministry in persona Christi. In keeping with Inter Insigniores, he invokes the dignity of Mary in the church as an indication that women are not disparaged by exclusion from ordained ministry because Mary was not ordained and yet is held in highest esteem. In a similar vein, the 2025 summary letter of the so-called “Petrocchi Commission” (initiated by Pope Francis) to Pope Leo XIV considering female admission to the diaconate reflects the points regarding tradition, Scripture, and Christ’s maleness as barriers (at this time) to women entering ordained ministry.Footnote 88
Mary and the Popes: Benedict XVI (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger)
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, embeds Mary in the anthropological ecclesiology of the complementary Marian/Petrine facets of the church.Footnote 89 Like Pope John Paul II, he engages Balthasar in his theological determinations of both the church and sex/gender. Ratzinger clearly sees Mary as the feminine dimension of the church, toward which Pope John Paul II is pointing in Redemptoris Mater and toward which we ought to be orienting our ecclesiology: “The Church must relearn her ecclesial being from Mary. Only a conversion to the sign of the woman, to the feminine dimension of the Church, rightly understood, will bring about the new opening to the creative power of the Spirit, and so to Christ’s taking form in us.…”Footnote 90 Ratzinger further proposes a biblical reading for the reification of binaries regarding both sex and gender, and ecclesiology. In his introduction to Redemptoris Mater, he takes up the understanding of the biblical Mary he espoused in his 1977 work Daughter Zion, that is, the female line in the Bible that starts with Eve and ends with Mary.Footnote 91 He develops Bouyer’s idea of the “female line” that extends from Eve (through Sara-Hagar, Rachel-Leah, Hannah-Penina)Footnote 92 to Mary, and thereby bolsters the complementary gender binary of the line from Adam to Jesus. The role of Mary is foretold in Hebrew Scripture following the line of the barren women through whom God brings fruitfulness and salvation to the people of Israel.Footnote 93
Elsewhere, Ratzinger engages each of the Gospels in more depth, identifying Mary as prophetess, magnifier of God through the mystery of the cross, grieving mother, and blessed, each characteristic comingling with the others.Footnote 94 The crux of Mary’s place in the church is as the mother to the incarnate word, the womb that bore God, and the embodied flesh from which Christ becomes human: “Joseph stands for God’s fidelity to his promise to Israel, whereas Mary embodies the hope of humanity. Joseph is the legal father, but Mary is the mother by virtue of her own body: that God has really become one of us depends on her.”Footnote 95 She becomes the church as the new Holy Tent, the dwelling place of God. “Her Yes becomes the meeting place in which God obtains a dwelling in the world. God, who does not dwell in buildings of stone, dwells in the Yes given with body and soul; he whom the world cannot encompass can come to dwell wholly in a human being.”Footnote 96
Although he relies heavily on the same theological anthropology articulated by von Hildebrand, Balthasar, and Bouyer, Ratzinger (and later, as Pope Benedict) refrains from directing Mary’s love and purity, her virginity and her motherhood, explicitly only to women. He offers a robust Marian figure accessible to all by her various virtues: “Men and women of every time and place have recourse to her motherly kindness and her virginal purity and grace, in all their needs and aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their moments of loneliness and their common endeavours. They constantly experience the gift of her goodness and the unfailing love which she pours out from the depths of her heart.”Footnote 97 There is a hint of a Marian body in Ratzinger’s incarnational theology, however, there remains recourse to complementarity embodied in the church via the Marian and Petrine dichotomy, which itself disembodies Mary as a person, in favor of Mary as an ideal. The feminine nature of the ecclesial Mary still tracks the binary nature of female/male, feminine/masculine, but she is not a model specifically to females alone.
In Ratzinger’s Marian theology, although a model to the church as a whole, Mary is still in line with Balthasar’s Marian/Petrine church. Mary cements sex and gender perceptions in a particular theological anthropology while also cementing the roles and place of all persons within the church. In the intertwined theological anthropology and ecclesiology of complementarity, we find a mutual bolstering of an idealized and disembodied Mary. Drawing again on Balthasar, Ratzinger proposes that, because the church itself is female/mother (Marian principle), all persons, regardless of sex or gender, are feminized simply by their belonging in the church. Males can therefore be feminine (as church) and gender/sex fluid, which is not biologically based. By contrast, however, the Petrine principle is wholly biological and limited to males only—sex and gender here are rigid and strictly biologically based on Jesus’s maleness, shutting females out of ordained ministry.
Mary and the Popes: Francis
Revisiting recent Catholic Marian thought situates Pope Francis’s twenty-first-century Mary. Unlike his predecessors, Francis has no formal works that explicitly explore Mary, Marian theology, or her place in the church, but he does offer scattered references to her in speeches, homilies, and prayers, for example, and has a deep affection for the image of the church as a mother, modeled on Mary. He drew from tradition and his predecessors in his perceptions of Mary and further welcomed Mary of and for the people. Pope Francis also had a well-known affinity for the eighteenth-century image of Mary Untier/Undoer-of-Knots,Footnote 98 an image depicted in a painting by Johann Georg Schmidtner, circa 1700, based on St. Irenaeus of Lyon’s parallel between Eve and Mary: “The knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith,”Footnote 99 a reference also featured in the Marian chapters of Lumen Gentium.Footnote 100 After a powerful encounter with the painting in Augsburg while a student in 1986, Jorge Maria Bergoglio brought prayer cards home to Argentina, where a broader following developed for the Mary who intercedes to help us solve our knotted and vexing problems.
Like most other popes, Pope Francis invoked Mary in prayer, spoke about her on days of her solemnity, invited us to entrust our lives to her, and did himself entrust all of humankind to her on more than one occasion.Footnote 101 He visited Santa Maria Maggiore prior to and upon return from each of his apostolic journeys, as well as before and after each hospital stay.Footnote 102 He typically prayed before the Marian icon Salus Populi Romani (“Protectress/Health of the Roman People”) prior to leaving and upon return from his journeys, which is the same image he brought into St. Peter’s Square for his extraordinary Urbi et Orbi address at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps this Marian icon, with a long-standing connection to Jesuit formation and spirituality,Footnote 103 also informed Pope Francis’s own Marian devotions and affinity for popular piety.Footnote 104
Without a sustained discussion of Mary, however, we are left to extrapolate Pope Francis’s vision of her for the church and for women, from his various short homilies, invocations, dedications, prayers, and reflections over his eleven years as pope. In that light, I present a few points that are consistent with Francis’s references to and articulations of Mary.
Over time, Pope Francis depicts Mary with numerous and varying titles, roles, and activities, most prominently, Mother. Very early in his pontificate, he invokes her in a prayer with the Italian Episcopate, asking the “Mother of silence” to “purify the eyes of Pastors with the eye-wash of memory” to the origins of a “prayerful, penitent Church”; the “Mother of the beauty that blossoms from faithfulness to daily work” to “lift us from the torpor of laziness, pettiness, and defeatism” and “to clothe Pastors” in the compassion that facilitates unity and helps us to “discover the joy of a humble, brotherly, serving Church”; and the “Mother of tenderness” to envelop us in “patience and mercy.”Footnote 105 This prayer follows his homily to the same bishops, in which he calls them to humility, presence among the lowly, inclusivity, hope, faith, and vigilance against careerism. Mary here seems to be both a supporter and a symbol of Pope Francis’s concern to return the church to its initial poverty and humility. Although seemingly passive, she does a good deal of heavy lifting in his call for reform of clericalism.
For Pope Francis, Mary is Mother of a particular sort. Within various of his invocations, homilies, and addresses, he depicts motherhood within a mode of benevolent sexism akin to his predecessors and the influential theologians who shaped their thought:Footnote 106 the “maternal mission of all mankind,” “tactful maternal witness,” “gentle and loving mother,” for instance, characterize not only the church, but all women within the church.Footnote 107
Mary is so closely united to Jesus because she received from him the knowledge of the heart, the knowledge of faith, nourished by her experience as a mother and by her close relationship with her Son. The Blessed Virgin is the woman of faith who made room for God in her heart and in her plans; she is the belief capable of perceiving in the gift of her Son the coming of the “fullness of time” (Gal 4:4) in which God, by choosing the humble path of human existence, entered personally into the history of salvation. This is why Jesus cannot be understood without his Mother … Likewise inseparable are Christ and the Church—because the Church and Mary are always together and this is precisely the mystery of womanhood in the ecclesial community—and the salvation accomplished by Jesus cannot be understood without appreciating the motherhood of the Church.Footnote 108
Pope Francis here touches on the gendered complementarity of the ecclesial facets of the church: salvation, male, and Jesus complement motherhood, female, and Mary in both human reality and church structure. This is so precisely because Francis explicitly interchanges motherhood with womanhood: the characteristics of the mother are the characteristics of woman, as exemplified in Mary. Mary wears the mantle of woman—of listening, of decision, and of action, depicting an ambiguous, multifaceted Mary.Footnote 109 Mary can, for instance, be a contemplative woman (sometimes silent, sometimes pondering), the summa contemplix.Footnote 110 Thus, in addressing contemplative women, Francis calls on Mary as a model of a woman with the time and ability to be silent and listen: “Moved by the love each one of you has for the Lord, let your bodily tongue fall silent and allow that of the Spirit to speak. In this, Mary Most Holy can serve as your example. She was able to receive the word because she was a woman of silence—no barren or empty silence, but rather one rich and overflowing. The silence of the Virgin Mother was also full of love, for love always prepares us to welcome the Other and others.”Footnote 111
By contrast, the Mary of action who moves “in haste,” appears in Pope Francis’s Message for the XXXVII World Youth Day 2022–2023.Footnote 112 Far from the listening, silent Mary here is engaged in the world “of life and movement” following the Annunciation. She visits Elizabeth with the certainty of God’s plan for her: “Mary becomes a temple of God, an image of the pilgrim Church, a Church that goes forth for service, a Church that brings the good news to all!”Footnote 113 On this occasion, it serves that Mary is a woman of action, ready to evangelize the presence of God among us; she is a model to young people in her haste and vigor.
The interesting contrast of the contemplative Mary to the active Mary demonstrates that Mary is tasked to do whatever work is necessary to facilitate the communion of humanity with the divine, without the sense that Mary was a real woman whose authority would have been consonant with her environment and society.Footnote 114 Mary is the model for contemplative women insofar as she is a silent bridge to the Lord. She is the model for activity insofar as she enacts the eternal Yes to God’s invitation to host the divine and to bring God tangibly forward into the world.
It seems Pope Francis subscribes to a perception of “woman and mother” as ontologically equivalent:
We need mothers, women who look at the world not to exploit it, but so that it can have life. Women who, seeing with the heart, can combine dreams and aspirations with concrete reality, without drifting into abstraction and sterile pragmatism. And the Church is a Mother, this is what makes the Church feminine. For this reason, we cannot find a place for women in the Church without allowing the heart of the Woman and Mother to shine. This is the place of women in the Church, the great place, from which other places, more concrete and less important, are derived. The Church is Mother, the Church is woman. And since mothers bestow life, and women “keep” the world, let us all make greater efforts to promote mothers and to protect women.Footnote 115
In such a construction, women are depicted within the confines of the traditional role of mother. While being a mother itself is frequently an aspect of womanhood, it is not the only aspect and it is not so universally. Thus, women who fall outside of the construction also fall outside of the image of Mary, the ideal woman. Neither does this construction consider the complexity of actual bodies that do not neatly fall within binary sex or gender; outside of these categories, such persons have no tangible space in this sexed and gendered construction of church. The disembodied Mary, whose own motherhood is linked inextricably to both virginity and salvation in the person of Christ, her son, is in no way attainable by actual women, even in the least complex sexed and gendered situations.
Thus, when Pope Francis called for a theology of women (albeit informally), a new theology that accounts more deeply for the “feminine” aspects of womanhood, with motherhood at its center, he envisioned a particular type of Mary at the heart of this new theology.Footnote 116 Here we see the continuation of his predecessors’ commitment to a complementary theological anthropology and ecclesiology that limit the place of females in both social and ecclesiological roles according to their feminine genius.Footnote 117 These limitations are further demonstrated in the call to promote mothers and protect women, which belies the global reality that we do not now adequately promote mothers and protect women. In the binary construction of masculine/protector/male and feminine/vulnerable/female, the protectors are males, which further belies the reality that women need protection by males from other males, precisely because of the lingering complementary social (and ecclesial) constructions of hierarchy and power.Footnote 118 Lastly, this call ignores the reality that women have been doing theology since early ChristianityFootnote 119 and have long been articulating a formal theology of women more akin with our own experiences than with the anthropological constructions apparent in Catholic teaching, of which Pope Francis must have been aware.Footnote 120
Pope Francis also relied on the Marian/Petrine feminine/masculine dichotomy to characterize both appropriate roles in the church, and the church itself.Footnote 121 He inherited a tradition expressing a narrowly constructed vision of Mary as mother and as woman. In accord with the history and tradition of the church, she is all things at any given time and for any given reason, excepting, of course, male or masculine. Pope Francis’s perception of Mary’s femininity, however, serves as a stumbling block to women in the church. When Mary is fixed into an idealized sexed/gendered self, the whole of female life in the church hinges upon her oddly absent yet tangibly complex female body—the very reason Christ was born into humanity, his redemptive sacrifice, and our hope for right relationship with God. Not unlike his predecessors, Pope Francis simultaneously holds Mary up as a model to the church and distances her from actual human/female experience, particularly the reproductive experiences of menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, parturition, and menopause—the blood of life, which reflects the relatively recent idealized gendered constructions of both anthropology and ecclesiology in some Catholic thought. The problem here is not, of course, with the bodies themselves—all bodies are at home in God’s house—rather, the problem is with the limited construction of complementary bodies mapped onto roles in the church. A complementary anthropology fixed onto authority—Marian and Petrine—in the church is more a function of historical practice than of ontology. The ontologically embodied argument is belied by the possibility of males being feminine in the ecclesial understanding of the church in relation to Christ.
Pope Francis’s steadfast commitment to Mary’s idealized nature (and thus perception of women) was complicated by his willingness to appoint women to places of (limited) authority within the church, such as appointing women to the Dicastery of BishopsFootnote 122 and to vote in the Synod on Synodality,Footnote 123 while still withholding from them the authority of ordained ministry. It is difficult to discern Francis’s intentions with these contrasting views, except to say that the complementarity of the church as Marian and Petrine informs his thinking in complex ways.Footnote 124 Pope Francis seems to have adopted the constructs laid before him by Popes Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI, and leans into the particular gender construction of a narrowly construed complementarity.
Toward an Embodied and Complex Mother of God
Mary’s disembodied place in the structure of a complementary anthropology and ecclesiology is enmeshed with an inadequate Catholic sexual theology for females. Inattentive as these theologies are to actual females’ experiences of bodies and sexualities, their vulnerability is masked by a benevolent sexism encapsulated within the sense of the Marian aspect of the church—the female, the feminine—as somehow superior, without any substantive agency or authority within the church or, in some instances, over their own bodies. This understanding of Mary impedes females’ flourishing, particularly their sexual flourishing, not least because it is an impossible standard for womanhood but also because it is constructed, monitored, and controlled primarily by a select group of men and yields disparate outcomes for males and females.
By contrast, recognition of an embodied Mother of God identifies the experiential realities of female bodies in general.Footnote 125 Like Mary, women’s diverse bodies ache, bleed, birth, excel, suffer, nurture, heal, rest, and flourish, among other things. Explicitly to recognize Mary’s embodied humanity via her joys and suffering as an actual, historical woman in the world opens the door to discourses more amenable to female flourishing, particularly sexual flourishing, than those encountered in a binary complementarity, and nurtures an ecclesiology inclusive of all members of the church. Such an ecclesiology transcends narrow gender constructions in favor of the abundant diversity of human bodies and vocations.
What might be included in such a theology? By way of conclusion, I offer a few thoughts. First, recognizing an embodied Mary pulls away from idealized theological constructions based upon a narrow perception of complementarity as strictly sexually and biologically based. These constructions obscure attention to experiential bodily realities. If females are to be more like Mary, Mary must in turn be more like females: they must witness their diverse bodily experiences in the image of the Mother of God.Footnote 126 Further, they must witness this diversity in portrayals of Mary that claim to speak authoritatively on matters of faith and practice. Given the robust dialogue pertaining to Mary in the life of the church in advance of and during the Second Vatican Council’s deliberation on its doctrinal constitution on the church, it seems the Marian stakes include nothing less than the church, males and females, and power and hierarchy.
In this light, further theological investigation into Mary, menstruation, and meaning would contribute to understanding her as a sexual and reproductive female. Although not all females menstruate now, have menstruated, or will menstruate, to attend to menstrual realities claims Mary’s body back from an idealized purity that admits of no real attachment to reproduction, even though she is the Mother of God.Footnote 127 Although there is insufficient space here to elaborate on this point, it remains focal to my own understanding of Mary, females, sexuality, and the church.
Second, complementarity articulated concomitantly in theological anthropology and ecclesiology cannot be useful when constructed to fit within narrow, physicalist definitions of and unequally implemented masculinity and femininity.Footnote 128 The same perplexing Marian/Petrine complementarity that restricts females’ access to ordained ministry as the masculine, Petrine aspect of the church allows males’ access into the feminine, Marian aspect by way of their receptive character simply by belonging in the church. Such an application of access to feminine and masculine aspects of the church contradicts the strict complementarity meant to deny females access to ordained ministry and seems, perhaps inadvertently, to open the door to a more equitable assessment of roles in the church. Females are further told that their roles in the church are somehow more important by way of their exclusion from full participation. The explicit link of Mary to the feminine aspect of the church is further meant to indicate equal respect for females, regardless of ordination and privilege, because she herself is exalted in the church without having been ordained.
Third, responding to legitimate queries and explorations into sex, gender, and human flourishing with blanket relegation to “ideology” obfuscates the reality that human experiences of sex and gender are complex and varied. If human persons are investigating the validity of a theory of complementarity, it likely is because the theory does not universally correspond with reality. Given the Catholic tradition of openness to inquiry into and understanding of creation, such explorations ought to be welcomed in the furtherance of insight into the unfolding of humanity in the image of God.
Fourth, in the twenty-first century, perhaps we can dispense with theologies, anthropologies, and ecclesiologies that conflate womanhood with motherhood. As wonderful as each of these experiences can be, they are not equivalent and nor ought females be made to believe they must be. Mary was a woman and a mother, and exemplary in both roles. It is unnecessary to burden females with expectations that do not necessarily reflect their diversity of experience and circumstance. This conflation demeans the legitimate and fruitful participation of females in all realms of human experience outside of motherhood, including in the church. Further, the conflation of womanhood with motherhood diminishes female experiences that do not include motherhood.
Fifth, rather than telling women what they are or ought to be in relation to Mary and the church, theology ought rather to reflect women’s real experiences in articulations of what womanhood is. It is bewildering to be told how to live the mystery of womanhood authentically by a celibate male, with little inquiry into women’s concrete lives. Females’ voices and experiences are well documented and accessible across the global church. And despite some historical perceptions of the relative silence of women in church history and theology, there is a plethora of evidence, as noted previously, to suggest that women have never been absent from or silent about life in the church.
Recounting the recent theological and papal history and construction of Mary in the church, complementarity, and ecclesiology offers insight into possible future inquiries aiming to integrate females and males more equitably into Catholic theology (sexual and otherwise). Far from advocating roles based solely on physical bodies, which would clearly both continue to delimit women’s roles in the church and somehow solidify the perceived gendered differences thereof, I suggest a divestment of roles based on sex and gender, and on complementary theological anthropology and ecclesiology, to allow for the fluidity of human expression and vocation in the work of the Spirit and an authentic exploration of actual sexual bodies. If males can be feminine and receptive in the church regardless of embodiment, then certainly females can be masculine and active. Far from circumscribing bodies and roles based upon a narrow reading of the physical body in relation to ecclesiological aspects, the church could reap the benefits of allowing for gifts of the Spirit to articulate themselves within and beyond the bodies in which they reside.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
