Delicate discussions have abounded for generations about Mary’s perpetual virginity. Catholic tradition has long held that she remained a virgin pre-, in-and post-partum. Without getting too graphic, some Church Fathers even saw Jesus’ passing through the locked doors after the resurrection as an allusion to his similar biological feat as an infant. As regular Mass attendees know, the Confiteor (I confess to almighty God…) names Mary as “ever-virgin.”
Other Christian traditions are not so firm on this point. Most of which I am aware accept that Mary “conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit” without sexual intercourse, but some do not deny that she and Joseph could possibly have had marital relations after the birth of Jesus. Much of this conversation surrounds the mysterious biblical description of James as “the brother of the Lord.”
Catholicism teaches that this is either a half-brother from a possible previous marriage of Joseph or simply a kinsman or cousin of the Lord (a legitimate translation of the term in that day), and that Mary was constant in her chastity and celibacy.
Joseph, the patron saint of a happy death because he likely died in the presence of his wife and divine son, was traditionally recognized as much older than Mary and this fact also comes to bear in discussions of their conjugal life.
Mary is often described as the “New Eve,” the woman prefigured in Genesis who will crush the head of the serpent and later described in Revelation as clothed with the sun and defeating the Great Dragon. Her spiritual motherhood plays an important role in Catholic honor paid to her. It was her great Fiat, her free consent to God, that made the divine plan of redemption possible. One of my favorite theologians Karl Rahner describes this “Yes” beautifully in a passage I quote often:
“For our salvation you said Yes, and for us you spoke your Fiat; as a woman of our race you accepted and bore in your womb and in your love him in whose Name alone there is salvation in heaven or on earth. Your Yes of consent ever remained, was never revoked, even when the course of the life and death of your Son fully revealed who it was you had conceived: the Lamb of God, taking on himself the sins of the world, the Son of Man, nailed to the cross by our sinful race’s hatred of God, and thrown, him the Light of the world, into the darkness of death, the lot that was ours.”
Mary’s adoptive motherhood of every person is universalized in those moments which Christians believe serve as the axis of all human and cosmic history, on a nondescript Friday afternoon in Jerusalem.
While in his death throes, a beaten and condemned Jew looks down from a Roman torture device to which he has been painfully affixed, upon his closest friend and grieving mother and encourages them to develop a special and permanent relationship: “Woman, behold your son. Son, behold your mother.”
In that instant, the consent Rahner describes above is somewhat reversed, for the disciple John’s “Yes” becomes our own. Our eternal relationship with the dying Man and his Mother is sealed and the world is forever changed.
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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