The timeliness of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God

The Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God has, in modern times, become somewhat confused. Not too long ago, it was the “Circumcision of the Lord” (the account of which remains the Gospel) because, as the Octave Day of Christmas, it coincided with the day prescribed for a newborn male Jew to be marked as part of the Abrahamic covenant. The 1969 Roman Calendar reform restored the ancient feast celebrating Mary’s maternity as the day’s focus (and the same Gospel—Luke 2:19—also mentions how “Mary pondered all these things in her heart”).

The civil New Year, which is the focus of most of the world’s celebration on January 1st, is absent from the Church’s focus this day except, perhaps, in the general intercessions or the priest’s remarks. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of Vatican II, Pope St. Paul VI tried in some sense to “universalize” January 1 by also declaring it “World Day of Prayer for Peace.”

These various themes appear, in on the surface, to clash with each other, though they need not necessarily do so. I believe the recovery of the ancient feast of the Motherhood of Mary was wise and, in fact, prophetic for our times.

Mary’s maternity was the object of Nestorianism, a fifth century heresy. The aftermath of the legalization of Christianity under Constantine involved a series of critical disputes about the Trinity and how Christ–true God and true man–fit into it. Those disputes were of critical significance to understanding the truth about God, but they were also vitally significant in understanding truths about man.

That’s where Mary and her maternity come in.

Nestorius denied that Mary was “Mother of God.” She was not “God-bearer” (Theotokos), he said, but only “Christ-bearer” (Christotokos), the one who bore Jesus. She was the mother of Jesus’s human nature.

Now “nature” and “person” were not just key debates in the ancient world: their implications remain central today. Our “nature” establishes what I am. I am a dog. I am a man. I am an angel. I am God. Our “person” establishes who I am. That man is John. That angel is Michael. That divine person is Jesus Christ. (Dogs are not persons).

The two concepts are interdependent. My “nature” is vital to defining what I am. But there are no generic “natures” running around the world. There are only persons who have that nature: John, Mary, Karol, Cindy. But John, Mary, Karol, and Cindy are not “a-nature” (nature-less) beings: they are precisely human beings because they have a human nature.

When the Church defended the title of Mary as “Mother of God” (and condemned Nestorius) at the Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431, she did so in recognition of the fundamental truths we just discussed. Mary did not mother a “nature.” She mothered a son: Jesus Christ. And that man, Jesus, is human; that man, Jesus, is God. Divine and human nature are not mutually exclusive: it’s not either/or. Jesus is fully “true God and true man” (as Chalcedon taught). He is not merely a man whom God especially liked nor God, masquerading as a human being, whose nature was in some state of suspended animation. Jesus, being true God and true man, is brought into this world by His Mother, Mary, who gives life to a person who is simultaneously both divine and human.

What does this have to do with our world? A lot.

Our secular world rarely talks about “human nature.” We are “all brothers and sisters,” but we are never told what unites us, makes us “brothers and sisters.” The truth is, it’s our human nature which, because we are sinners, also makes us sinful brothers and sisters. That’s not how God intended us to be. It’s how we made ourselves. The proof that it’s not how God intended us to be is the fact that there are human beings–Jesus and Mary–who are truly human, yet sinless.

The contemporary flight from discussing nature is imperative if we are to defend the autonomy of isolated individualism prized by Western culture, called so “constitutive” of “human dignity.” But that isolated individualism relies on a caricature of “freedom” as moral neutrality between good and evil, each a “legitimate” choice. Of course, that is not true of the Archetype of all freedom. God cannot make a world in which evil is good and good is evil, because those actions also analogously have “natures” and are not arbitrarily affixed mere labels.

Because we do not speak of “nature,” we accept the philosophy of the sexual revolution that a whole aspect of human nature–human generativity, the ability to give life–has no inherent significance or value. It is, at best, neutral. If unwanted or improperly timed, it is even “evil.” The contracepting modern world is surprisingly anciently dualistic: in contrast to Genesis’s proclamation that what God made (including the natures he made) were “good,” it sees human beings as having an in-built evil dimension—the ability to get pregnant, to give life, to become a father or a mother.

That mentality was reinforced in American culture by the abortion-on-demand regime of Roe v. Wade. When Dobbs overturned Roe in 2022, it not only upset the legal applecart. More importantly, it introduced irreconcilable cognitive dissonance into the American mind: how could you value what makes you a mother (the child or fetus) while holding to Roe’s dogma that motherhood has no value save the one a concrete woman bestows on it?

That toxin has seeped into the current flight from maternity. Despite contemporary jabbering about the dangers of “disinformation,” one of the most noxious pieces of disinformation receiving widespread currency is the idea that “risking” motherhood absent a guarantee of abortion-on-demand throughout pregnancy is irresponsible, almost a death wish (especially if done in a pro-life state). One would have to imagine that 21st-century American obstetrics is incapable of treating and protecting two patients simultaneously and that getting pregnant in today’s America is akin to doing-it-yourself in a primitive society bereft of medicine.

All this, of course, is propaganda to advance the abortion cause but the toll it extracts on young people, already skittish about becoming parents without all the right “achievements,” supervision (reminding them of their “helicopter parented” youths), and no-questions-asked-unlimited-returns period, is honestly diabolical.

The nature v. person debate appears, of course, in other ways. The fact that we celebrate two lesbians or two homosexuals as “parents” when at least one contributed nothing but a check to that effort is a human form of Nestorianism. When we dismiss the person to whom this child is related as merely the “donor” of an egg or sperm, when we write off the person who “bore” and physically delivered this child as but a “gestational surrogate,” yet gushingly laud the “new parents” who take control of the new life, we are separating “nature” and “person” in ways Nestorius could never had imagined.

What goes around, comes around.

So, for a world that has fallen into such confusion (and consequent anxiety) about the “maternity project,” a calm consideration of the example of Mary, Mother of God, should help. That means, of course, that Mary is not put on a pedestal or shelf, surrounded by pious platitudes. Mary trusted, even if she did not understand: “How can this be, since I do not know man?” Perhaps she did not even consider that others, less trusting than her, would frame her pregnancy according to similar human logic in more insulting ways: “Did you hear what happened to Joachim’s daughter?” Even her fiancé needed more assurance to trust.

Mary undoubtedly faced difficulties, both before and after giving birth. Even if she was pro-life prior to birth, Roman, Judean, and Galilean social policies hardly offered a “seamless garment of life” social safety net for struggling-to-meet couples of working-class men. If the seamless safety net did not come from kith and kin, it was not going to come from Herod, who already showed himself unsurprised at eliminating “populations we don’t want too many of.”

The celebration on January 1st of “Mary, Mother of God” is, therefore, a most prophetic moment to recover a sense of the dignity, value, and worth of motherhood. Americans once articulated what they valued as “baseball, apple pie, and motherhood.” Group sports culture is under challenge, a gluten-free and health conscious public eschew pie, and now motherhood is seen more as threat than reward, much less vocation.

There could hardly be a more pressing time to focus on Mary, Mother of God.