Contemplate the Maternal Priesthood of Mary.
By Karen Darantière
“It’s so insulting to keep on saying that the only valid role that will get the approval of this pope is to be nurturing, is to be a mother, while you can be nurturing and mothering and be a priest.” (1) So says Miriam Duignan, an advocate of female ordination and of abortion, in response to comments against the female diaconate made by Pope Francis, recently reiterated by Cardinal Fernandez. One cannot help but wonder at the extraordinarily successful propagandizing which has enabled this incongruous coupling of “only” with “mother”. Future generations will be dumbstruck by how readily women espoused such a degradation of their most sublime vocation. Undoubtedly, such feminists nonetheless nurture a glimmer of hope due to the Pope inviting the Synod on Synodality to discuss the possibility of the ontologically impossible. For, after duly debating thesis and antithesis, the Synod may render a synthesis more suited to their tastes. (2) However, a better response might be proposed to disgruntled feminists: Turn your gaze upon Mary, who alone is both Mother and Priest.
“A Priest Before God’s Altar”: The Mother’s Share in the Priesthood of the Son
Tradition teaches us that Our Lady participated uniquely in the priestly oblation of Our Lord, from Her consent at the Annunciation to Her steadfast stance at Calvary, as Father Serafino Lanzetta explains. The Mother of Sorrows at the foot of the Cross was like a priest before the altar, as portrayed by St. Therese of the Child Jesus in her poem entitled Why I Love Thee Mary:
For thou − His Mother − there didst stand, that awful day, on Calvary;
As a priest before God’s altar, at the cross so thou didst stand.
And to appease the Father’s wrath, didst offer up, O Mary!
Thy Jesus, our Emmanuel, at God’s supreme command. (3)
As the sacrament of Holy Orders marks priests with a special character, through the anointing of the Holy Spirit, configuring them to Christ the Priest, so the Blessed Virgin possesses the analogue of an indelible character in Her ontological quality as Immaculate Mother of God, thanks to which She is truly able to offer Her Son on the Cross for the salvation of souls. The power to offer Christ’s sacrifice, conferred by priestly ordination, is granted to Mary through Her Immaculate Divine Maternity. In celebrating the Holy Mass, the priest re-presents the unique sacrifice of Christ, which is also that of Mary. Indeed, Pius XII states that “it was she who, free from any personal or hereditary fault, very closely united to her Son, presented him on Golgotha to the eternal Father, joining to this offering the holocaust of her rights and her love as a mother.”(4) Moreover, Benedict XV affirms that Mary “as much as it belonged to her to do, immolated her Son to appease the justice of God, so that it can justly be said that she redeemed the human race with Christ.” (5)
“Love in Suffering”: The Essence of Mary’s Maternal Priesthood
The Son of God willed that the His Mother share in the selfsame sacrificial suffering He Himself endured, as St. Therese says:
Since Heaven’s high King has willed it so His Mother and His dearest
Should know the anguish of that night the torn heart’s deepest woe,
Then are not those, who suffer thus, to Mary’s heart the nearest?
And is not love in suffering God’s highest gift below? (6)
The saintly poetess expresses lyrically the profound truth that God’s greatest grace here below is “love in suffering”. Our Lady’s love-drenched tears for Her dying Son, as well as for all of Her spiritual children who would be born from the dawn to the end of time, such is Her greatest grace. The beautiful – and today very timely – devotion to the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady enables us to contemplate Her “love in suffering” from Her morning sacrifice at the Temple of Jerusalem, when Simeon announces that a sword will pierce Her Heart, to Her evening sacrifice, when She suffers a co-passion with Christ at Calvary. That Her spiritual priesthood is synonymous with “love in suffering” is a truth expressed by Jean-Jacques Olier when he reflects upon the prophecy of Simeon:
“she learned a truth and received a prophecy, … which is that these pains and sufferings foretold by the prophets would be hers, and that the same sorrow which was to cause the death of this victim would cause the death of the priest who presented it that day in the Temple, who was herself.” (7)
Hardly has She placed the newborn Babe on the altar, when, hearing these prophetic words from Simeon’s lips, She foresees, present before Her mind’s eye, that sacrifice to come. Her Maternal Heart, overflowing with salvific sorrow, will die alongside Her Son, and yet continue beating. Such is the depth of Her love in suffering that She will, for the love of all Her spiritual children, pursue Her earthly pilgrimage, though with a sword permanently plunged into Her Immaculate Heart. Thus Her morning sacrifice is bound up with Her evening sacrifice, as Father Frederick Faber reveals in his meditation on Mary at the Foot of the Cross:
“With effort unutterably beyond all grace ever given, except the grace of Jesus, Mary lifted up her heart to the Father, joined her will to His in this dire extremity, and, in a certain sense, as well as He, abandoned her Beloved. She gave up the Son to the Father… She had done this at the outset in … the Presentation of Jesus, and it was consummated now.” (8)
Then, he leads us to contemplate the unsurpassable reverence with which She tended His Sacred Body:
“Let us gaze at her once more, as she swathes the Body in the winding-sheet. How like a priest she seems! How like a mother! And are not all mothers priests? For, rightly considered, all maternities are priesthoods. Ah, Mary! Thy maternity was such a priesthood as the world had never seen before!” (9)
This supernatural mystery has as its analogue, on a natural level, the love of the mother for her infant, due to her natural maternal sentiment and her innate sense of the sacredness of human life. It likewise calls to mind the deep reverence for the Sacred Host which holy priests demonstrate. There is thus a similitude between the priestly and the maternal vocations, both of which involve self-offering, the giving of one’s life for the love of God and of the littlest among us.
“Are Not All Mothers Priests?”: Overcoming the Anti-Marian Spirit of Feminism
“Are not all mothers priests?”: This rhetorical question expresses a beautiful truth much in need of being reaffirmed nowadays. All mothers are priests in the sense of self-giving love, of the reverential care given to the most helpless of us all. This Marian spirit, the essence of motherhood, is diametrically opposed to feminism, the anti-Marian spirit par excellence. Thus, not only does the demand for female ordination contradict the express will of God for the Church, but it also implies a repudiation of the very nature of womanhood. Contrary to a superficial glance at the feminist demand for ordination, which would mistakenly lead us to believe that feminism exalts women excessively, the exact contrary is true: the feminist vision, by demeaning maternity, degrades women. It likewise degrades the priesthood, which is seen as a human, not divine institution, subject to time and place and malleable according to the human will, rather than subject to eternal decree and dependent upon the changeless divine will. The human will first takes precedence over the divine, then the latter dwindles and finally disappears. Above all, the anti-Marian spirit of feminism stands in stark contrast to the mystery of Mary’s Maternal Priesthood, to both the humble selflessness and the exalted status of the Immaculate Mother who embraces Her Son’s self-offering for the salvation of souls.
The spirit of Our Lady is wedded to the Holy Spirit, whereas the spirit of feminism is wedded to the unholy spirit of sexual liberation − better qualified as enslavement − along with abortion. While the Spirit of Mary says Fiat, the anti-Marian spirit of feminism says Non Serviam. Selflessness turns into selfishness, so that, rather than hearing the echo of the Incarnate Word: “This is my body, given up for you”, which the Blessed Mother utters in unison with Her Divine Son, we hear the perverse satanic lie: ‘This is your body, given up for me’. Faced with this mutilated vision of femininity, the sole remedy resides in a renewed sense of maternal self-offering and of sacrificial love, of which Our Lady is the exemplar. The sacerdotal yearnings of feminists will be fulfilled by contemplating the unique maternal priesthood of Mary, which will enable the scales to fall from blinded eyes so that all women may embrace once again their greatest grace: the sublime selflessness of motherhood.
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Notes:
1. Nicole Winfield, “Catholic reform debate launched by Pope Francis leans away from ordained roles for women,” The Associated Press (2 Oct 2024). Accessed 15 Oct 2024. https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-reform-women-lgbtq-f8b42b57dcf7ef77dbd3f406780217ed.
2. Anyone familiar with the French educational system will easily recognize one of its bedrocks, namely, the Hegelian-style outline every pupil is taught to reverently follow in dissertation writing: thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
3. The original poem, in French alexandrines, here transposed into English verse (in iambic heptameter), goes thus : « Marie, tu m’apparais au sommet du Calvaire/ Debout près de la Croix, comme un prêtre à l’autel/ Offrant pour apaiser la justice du Père/ Ton bien-aimé Jésus, le doux Emmanuel.» (Thérèse de Lisieux, Œuvres complètes, (Paris : Éditions du Cerf, 2006) : 755)
4. Pius XII, Encyclical Mystici Corporis (29 June 1943).
5. Benedict XV, Apostolic Letter Inter sodalicia (22 May 1918).
6. « Puisque le Roi des Cieux a voulu que sa Mère/ Soit plongée dans la nuit, dans l’angoisse du cœur ;/ Marie, c’est donc un bien de souffrir sur la terre ?/ Oui souffrir en aimant c’est le plus pur bonheur! » (Thérèse de Lisieux, Œuvres complètes, 754.)
7. Jean-Jacques Olier, Écrits sur la Sainte Vierge (Paris, éditions Honoré Champion, 2020): 108.
8. Father Frederick Faber, The Foot of the Cross; or, the Sorrows of Mary (Veritatis Splendor Publications, 2014): 304.
9. Ibid., 387.
