Topic: What do Catholics believe about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary?
Source of this posting: Moderator response
Date originally posted: February 3, 2002
Moderator who originally posted this source: P.Leach
Question: I have heard that Catholics believe that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, was a Virgin even after she gave birth to Jesus? Do Catholics actually believe that? Why?
Answer:
Well, yes, Catholics actually do believe that Mary was a Virgin even after she gave birth to Jesus.
While the magisterium, that is, the official teaching office of the Church, has never formally and infallibly decreed the Perpetual Virginity of Mary as a de fide part of Catholic teaching, this doctrine is part of our belief system. In Eucharist Prayer I, one of the oldest and most venerated prayers of our Church, she is referred to as “Mary, ever Virgin,” so this belief has been part of Catholic prayer, Liturgy, and belief from a very early period.
Most biologists and students of human anatomy would probably scoff at the idea that Mary was a Virgin before, during, and after conceiving, while conceiving, as well as during and after giving birth to her Son. But, Christian faith is not primarily a matter of biology or anatomy.
Catholics have, nevertheless, always asserted that our faith can be discussed and understood rationally. That being said, we do confront some things, as we seek to understand our faith, that make us stand back in awe and wonder at the majestic workings of our God.
Before we throw in the towel on the question of trying to understand the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and murmur “Mystery!”, let’s try looking at this Sacred Reality from another point-of-view. OK?
The Scriptures don’t give us any DIRECT help on this question, but the New Testament does offer some important insights that can point us in the right direction as we try to come a deeper appreciation of the Church’s teaching on this matter.
The first Biblical ‘clue,’ if you will, can be found at the conclusion of Mary’s famous interview with the Archangel Gabriel when he announced God’s desire that Mary become the Mother of Jesus. The angel says, “for nothing is impossible with God!” (Luke 1:37), and to this statement Mary immediately responds, “I am the maid servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say.” (Luke 1:38a)
OK, as we try to come to an understanding of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, we have to be willing to affirm, as Mary herself did, that “nothing is impossible with God.” Even our presuppositions about biology and anatomy, while important and useful, have to be submitted, as it were, to the fact that with God all things really are possible.
On now to our next Biblical set of clues, and these we find in the writings of Saint Paul. Particularly at the beginning of Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth we find some very helpful insights.
Before going much further, I would like to digress for just a minute. One of the problems that many good and faithful people have with the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary is that they approach this dogma (by the way, “dogma” is not a ‘dirty word;’ it’s just a Greek word which means “teaching”) from an anatomical point-of-view. But as I said earlier, Christian faith isn’t primarily an anatomical pursuit. So, I would like to offer another way of reflecting on the question, namely hermeneutical and epistemological.
I’m sure those two words are really helpful and make everything immediately clear! NOT!
Actually, though, the words are helpful. “Hermeneutics” is, more or less, a theory of interpretation; it’s the way we interpret facts or situations. For instance, I try to use a “hermeneutic of love” whenever I try to understand or explain something my family does. Sometimes, in all honesty, my family does stuff that looks pretty nuts to outsiders, but because I love them, I can interpret what they do as not essentially nutty but as ‘unusual,’ ‘piquant,’ ‘endearing,’ ‘charming.’ I think we all have a “hermeneutic” though we may not talk about it that way.
And I would like to invite you to approach the dogma of the Perpetual Virginity of Mary with a different “hermeneutic” than the one that may have governed your interpretation before; I think Saint Paul can help us devise that new hermeneutic.
And “epistemological” is a related-but-different concept. “Epistemology” means something like “the way we gain insight into what’s important” or as some people would say, “epistemology” is a theory of knowledge, that is, how we know. Again, my own worldview has a definite “epistemology” which may or may not be obvious. For example, when I look at the world I tend to respond to people based on a number of things, but one of the things that helps determine how I respond to somebody is whether or not that person is well-inclined toward the University of North Carolina. If you like UNC, then the chances are pretty good that I’m going to try fairly hard to like you. “Liking UNC” is one of my ‘epistemological principles.’
As we try to seek a deeper understanding of the Church’s teaching about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, I would like to invite you to examine your ‘epistemological principles.’ Again, I think Saint Paul can help identify some ‘epistemological principles’ that may help us understand more thoroughly what the Church is trying to get us to accept when the doctrine of the Perpetual Virginity is proclaimed.
Back to Saint Paul and I Corinthians…
One of the most difficult aspects of Saint Paul’s ministry as he traveled around the Mediterranean world two millennia ago was that he was forever encountering people who thought they had all the answers. And since they thought they were so wise, they didn’t think they needed to listen to Paul’s message about Jesus Christ.
So, Saint Paul spent a good bit of time and effort trying to show these folks that, while they might, indeed, be pretty smart and very well educated, they did not have ALL the answers – some, maybe, but not all! In this context, then, we can understand some of what Paul means when he says to the ancient Corinthians:
“For Christ did not send me to…preach the gospel…with wordy ‘wisdom’… Where is the wise person? … Has not God turned the wisdom of this world into folly? …in God’s wisdom the world did not come to know God through ‘wisdom’…For God’s folly is wiser than human beings….” (see I Corinthians 1:17, 20, 21, 25)
In short, Saint Paul is saying that what God has done in Christ Jesus has turned the “wisdom of this world” upside-down. The “wisdom” that made people think they had all the answers has been stood on its head by the life-death-and-resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Paul is proposing an entirely new hermeneutic, an utterly different epistemology than those which had ruled the minds of men and women up until the time of Jesus. This upside-down hermeneutic, this inverted-epistemology means that in the light of what God has done in Jesus Christ the world has to be looked at in a totally new and different way.
In this beginning part of I Corinthians, Saint Paul gives a list of ways in which God has changed everything:
God uses the absurd, the weak, the lowborn, the despised, those who count for nothing. Rather than rejecting these ‘outcasts’ God shows that all things really are possible by using precisely the ones whom the world had decided were useless, worthless, of no use whatever. God changed the world’s way of thinking, doing, and acting. A new hermeneutic! A new epistemology!
Any good student of the Bible will recognize that this ‘new Pauline hermeneutic and epistemology’ is not really all that new. Very similar attitudes can be found in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Particularly in Isaiah, for example 29: 14 and 64:3, these kinds of sentiments are apparent. The classic place, though, in the Hebrew Bible is what the Lord God says to Samuel when the Prophet is sent to anoint the young David, “Do not judge from his appearance…. Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” (I Samuel 16:7)
(I can’t help but refer anybody interested in this way of seeing to Antoine de Sainte Exupery’s The Little Prince, paying special attention to “the secret of the fox”!)
OK, back to Paul’s new hermeneutic and epistemology…Saint Paul was among the first, if not THE first, to put into words what is at the core of the way Christians are invited to look at the world.
The entire Gospel story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, as well as the improbable tale of those first followers who spread the Gospel into all the world is based on Paul’s ‘new’ hermeneutic and epistemology.
Think about it with me for just a minute: Paul is saying that God has turned the ‘usual’ way of looking at things upside-down. Remember: The weak and the absurd are God’s means of showing strength and true wisdom.
Precisely this “upside-down” way of doing things is how God had proceeded in all that Jesus was and did:
These and many other aspects of the Gospel are profoundly ‘counter-intuitive,’ that is, not at all what we would have expected if we rely on the hermeneutic which governs “the wise” who have all the answers.
Saint Paul, following Jesus Himself, invites us to adopt a different approach to the world – an approach that uses the upside-down hermeneutic. Since all things really are possible with God, we ought not be so surprised or scandalized when God chooses to do amazing, unexpected, even unheard of things.
So, what does this have to do with the Perpetual Virginity of Mary? Quite a lot, actually…
To be sure, we need to see the gift of our body, including our sexuality, as a tremendous gift from God. And we need to use that gift in ways that reflect our sincere conviction that the body itself is the temple of God, the Holy Spirit.
Yet, I am not convinced that the Church’s teaching about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary is first and foremost a statement about physical virginity. I do, in fact, believe that God, through singular graces extended to Mary, kept her body in a virginal state even after the birth of Jesus and that she remains ever virgin.
God raised Jesus from the dead, and God is Really Present – body, soul, humanity, and divinity – in the Eucharist. Neither of these amazing and miraculous realities strain my belief. So, I do find believing in the Perpetual Virginity of Mary particularly difficult.
Nevertheless, the hermeneutic approach to this doctrine calls our attention to a reality beyond Mary’s physical virginity. (I want to keep re-iterating that I believe Mary was and is physically a virgin!)
When the Church affirms that Mary is Ever Virgin, the Church is saying that God has done something that “the wise who have all the answers” would not expect or accept.
All of Mary’s participation in the life and death of Jesus is something “the wise who have all the answers” would not expect or accept. Her entire life was a constant exemplification of this upside-down hermeneutic.
Mary was a ‘nobody’ of the grossest magnitude. For starters, she was, after all, a WOMAN in a world which saw women, basically, as property. So, why would God bother to take note of HER?!
Moreover, she wasn’t really even a ‘woman,’ but was, rather, a GIRL in all probability – maybe 13 or 14 years old. Two thousand years ago, the idea of children having any rights at all was incomprehensible. Again, why would the Creator of the Universe deign to acknowledge a girl?
Another aspect of Mary’s unheard of role in the drama of salvation can be found in the fact that the Angel, on God’s behalf, ASKED Mary if she would consent to become the Mother of Jesus. Why would God care to ask the agreement of a girl? God “should” have just told her by announcing the divine intention. How utterly unexpected of an omnipotent God to ask!
Compounding the upside-down-ness of Mary’s role is the fact that the Jewish mindset of two millennia ago presumed, for the most part, a patriarchal, even masculine anthropomorphism with regard to God. While I am sure that the ancient Jewish people “knew” that God was Spirit in a way that transcended coarse identification with “male-ness” per se (as I’m sure modern Catholic Christians don’t make that mistake) the prevailing mind-set would have made God’s willingness to ASK Mary, a female, to participate in the mystery of salvation somewhat difficult to understand.
The ancient Christian assertion that Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb without the help of any man is another of those facts-of-faith that “the wise who have all the answers” would have some anxiety about. “Everybody knows” that a virginal conception just “can’t happen.” Yet Christians know that it did!
So, when the Church teaches that Mary was the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of all Christians, the Church is really saying that God chose as the prototypical Mother one who – because she was and is a virgin – ought not to be a Mother at all. A woman whom “the wise who have all the answers” say simply cannot be a Mother is, by God’s grace, THE Mother.
Maybe these rather long reflections might help you as you seek a better understanding of the Church’s teaching about the Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary. Ask her to pray for you!