December 5, 2004

‘Blessed are you among women:’ Mary and the mission of the Church

Jesus, in telling people their sins are forgiven, brought them face to face with their sinfulness. Confronting our sinfulness leaves us uneasy at best and hopeless at worst, unless we believe God can and does forgive us. The Church exists because Christ died to save us from our sins. The Church is sometimes resented because people resist being reminded that, without God’s forgiveness, they are trapped in their sinfulness. It’s frustrating to hear a Gospel of forgiveness if you believe you’re sinned against but are not yourself a sinner. Yet the liturgical season of Advent, which we follow throughout the month of December, is to prepare us to welcome one who forgives our sins. Christ comes as a savior, or he doesn’t come at all.

What can we say about the Blessed Virgin Mary in speaking, as we have for these several months, about participating in the Church through baptism and faith? What does she bring to the considerations we’ve made about participation in the Church’s governance, in ministry, in mission and in holiness? The feast celebrated on December 8 each year tells us something important about Mary and her relation to the Church. This year the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the day when the Archdiocese is consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, marking both the original dedication of the diocese to the “Immaculate Mother of God,” made by Bishop William Quarter, first Bishop of Chicago, in 1843 and the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of Mary’s being free of all sin from the first moment of her conception as a dogma of the faith on December 8, 1854.

In recognizing in faith that Mary was saved before being touched by sin, by contrast to the rest of us who are saved after having known and experienced sin, we come to see in Mary her divine Son’s greatest success in the conquest of sin. She is Mary most holy, the first in the communion of saints. Prepared by the Holy Spirit to be the mother of God’s only begotten Son, she is also, in the communion of saints, the one who most desires that her Son’s work for our salvation not be in vain. What mother wants her son to fail? Mary desires our salvation far more than do we. She therefore works for the success of the Church’s evangelizing mission.

She watches over the body of her Son which is the Church as she watched over the physical body of the Son born of her own body. She prays and cares with a mother’s heart for all those who live in Christ. God makes us holy in our different roles and responsibilities. He makes Mary holy as a woman and a mother.

The very vocation of motherhood has been under some attack in the past 30 years, as motherhood began to be considered by some a prison for women. Biological sex was “separated” from gender, which was defined as a merely cultural construct that perpetuates inequality between men and women. In 1975, Betty Friedan interviewed Simone de Beauvoir, the existentialist philosopher of modern gender feminism. Ms. Friedan asked if women should be allowed the choice to stay home and raise their children. Prof. de Beauvoir responded, “Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” (See Saturday Review, June 14, 1975, p. 18).

In fact, it is precisely because women and men are different that women have a unique contribution to make in the greater society. The fact that women do have a choice causes some women to feel torn, but having the choice is an exercise in freedom. Any movement that plays freedom and equality against each other is inherently totalitarian. Listening, however, to the ways women speaking to the Bishops’ Committee on Women in Society and in the Church just last year do, in fact, integrate their faith into both family and work gives great hope for the future.

Mary was always free because she was always free from sin. Never a slave to her own desires, she accepted motherhood as a vocation for the salvation of the world. A woman is therefore “at the center of the salvific event” in which God’s truth and life are mediated to us. Mary Immaculate, “our tainted nature’s solitary boast” (Wordsworth), shows us that the essence of purely human dignity, for men as well as women, lies in radical self-giving, in complete self-surrender. Without such self-sacrifice there cannot be true partnership in marriage and family life, nor collaboration between men and women in society, nor cooperation between God and the human family in the work of salvation. Next to all this, our own often-reiterated claims to autonomy and self-assertion are pretty paltry.

Pope John Paul II, in his 1994 Letter to Women, wrote poetically of the mother as God’s own smile upon a newborn child. From the mother’s delight in her child, all human beings experience the truth that life is a gift, not something we own or have created ourselves. In the warmth of the mother’s smile, the child learns trust in God, the giver of all gifts, and in other people. Women form the human race as something more than a merely human project. When what is particular to them is demeaned, threatened and suppressed, humanity itself is in danger.

Pope Paul VI, writing also of women in 1976, said: “The Church desires that women should become fully aware of the greatness of their mission. Today this role is of capital importance both for the renewal and humanization of society and for the rediscovery by believers of the true face of the Church.” In other words, the Church cannot succeed in her mission unless the baptized see the Church herself as our mother. As controversial as motherhood has become in some circles, even more contested is what every generation of those born of faith and baptism has known: the Church is our mother. She gives us life in Christ. We have unfortunately gotten somewhat used to language about the Church which a son or daughter would never use about their mother, and we are the poorer for it.

This week we contemplate Mary Immaculate, the first of her Son’s disciples, the Mother of the Church. As the Archdiocese is consecrated to Mary’s immaculate heart on December 8, let us focus on the Church’s mission here and come to judge all our works and ministries in the light of their necessity for the salvation of the world. That’s an exercise in freedom. God bless you.

 

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Francis Cardinal George, OMI
Archbishop of Chicago