By DONALD DeMARCO
Mary, the Mother of God, as Coventry Patmore has reminded us, is “Our only Savior from an abstract Christ.” There is implied in this remark an understanding of motherhood that is being challenged in today’s world where motherhood is being eviscerated by politics and redefined by reproductive technology.
Mary conceived Christ, carried Him under her heart, and gave birth to Him. Through her flesh she gave her Son flesh. Her act of mothering provided Christ with a human form, one through which He could grow and feel and suffer as other humans do. She permitted the transformation of a God that we could not see or touch into one who is palpably human and identifiably one of us. She saved us from having to worship an exclusively abstract God.
But she has saved us from something else which may be no less important. She saved us from abstract motherhood. Mary, we should not forget, is the model of motherhood. We should reject its political and technological replacements.
The Biden administration announced recently, in a new policy issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, that the terms “mother” and “father” are offensive. Accordingly, the United States will oblige charities around the world to accept the notion that “mother” and “father” are evil terms (cf. Austin Ruse, C-Fam, February 4, 2022).
Concessions are being made to biological men and women who identify as members of the opposite sex. As a result, the notion of motherhood becomes a kind of political football and is deemed offensive to a biological male who is denied motherhood in the traditional sense of the term. The late Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has stated that a woman who is pregnant is not a mother.
Reproductive technology has also challenged the traditional notion of motherhood. It is now possible to transfer a fetus from one woman to a surrogate woman and then deliver the child to a third woman who will act as a parent. In such cases, the legal mother is in dispute. Writing for the Yale Law Journal, Andrea Stumpf has proposed that legal motherhood be awarded to the one who has the “mental conception” (that is, the one who had the idea first, which could be a male) and not the one who had the “biological conception.”
It should be noted that a mental conception does not have the power of conferring existence upon what it conceives. A child does not come into being through a mental act. Accommodating members of same-sex “marriages,” Spain has officially neutralized mother and father into Progenitor a [sic] and Progenitor B.
In the case of Mary, the model of motherhood, biological conception and the creation of a new human being coincide. She accepts the fact that she is a woman and has no need of a surrogate. Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed the incarnate realism of Mary’s motherhood quite beautifully when he penned the following words:
“I have always envied Catholics their faith in that sweet, sacred, Virgin Mother who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting somewhat His awful splendor, but permitting His love to stream on the worshipper through the medium of a woman’s tenderness.”
Mary saves us from an abstract Savior as well as from abstract motherhood. She is a model for all mothers. As such, she reminds us that motherhood is real, incarnate, life-giving, personal, and loving. These are qualities that are vitally needed in a confused world where nothing seems to be real. Historian Henry Brooks Adams, a descendent from two American presidents, said of Mary: “In the bankruptcy of reason, she alone was real” (Mont-Saint-Michel & Chartres, New York: Doubleday, 1959, p. 361).
Today, it is not an exaggeration to say that we are suffering from a “bankruptcy of reason.” It is now politically incorrect to say that men are men and women are women or that mother and father are in charge of raising children. Motherhood undefiled serves as a stabilizing center for society. Mary’s role as a model of motherhood is vitally needed in today’s world. And as motherhood is given honor to its rightful place, procreation, marriage, the family, and society all benefit.
Mary saves us from an abstract Christianity as well as from an abstract conception of motherhood. She touches us with her tenderness and envelops us with her maternity. She is always the doctor of realism. And the wholeness that she expresses through her motherhood is a healing remedy for our increasingly rationalistic and technological society. She commends her Son to us with all the irresistible persuasiveness of a loving mother whose favor we should find exceedingly difficult to refuse.
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