Why Mary Is the Ultimate Model and Ideal of All Women

A Reflection from “The Face of the Heavenly Mother” by Venerable Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty

Mary, the Model and Ideal of All Women

Sublime and lovely as the women of the Old Testament are, important as is the role they have played in the history of salvation, they are nevertheless only stars that grow dim before the brightening dawn compared to the most glorious work, the loveliest miracle, of the creative omnipotence of God: Mary, woman and mother. If we gather all that poetry and prose has to say of mothers, all the beauty that brushes and chisels of artists have conjured forth, all the reverence with which knights honored their chosen ladies in courtly service—all this is only a feeble beam compared to the glory of light which radiates in the Mother of God and shines forth from her upon all mothers.

God Himself could raise the mother no higher, give her no greater glory, than that He Himself, who has called the worlds into being, who commands the winds and waves, who holds the primeval mountains in His hand—than that this almighty God should descend to a woman’s womb and become her child; and she, His mother.

God’s infinite wisdom could have found a thousand and one ways to descend to this world and save it. Women should regard it as a great distinction that He appeared in the arms of a mother and fought to the end the good fight of His divine-human life by His mother’s side.

“When God visited on earth, he appeared among men, not with thunder and lightning, not surrounded by wondrous brightness,—no! He smiled in His mother’s arms as the shepherds offered their gifts. The mother’s arms were the most beautiful and the holiest altar” (Eötvös). The only begotten Son of God, Cathrein suggests, wished to say “mother” to a woman and to embrace her with tender, childish love.

God could have liberated man and saved him otherwise than He actually did. He could simply have remitted sins in a great general amnesty. But He did not. Had He done so, His love for men would not have appeared in such a directly tangible way (if that term is permissible). At most, men would have spoken of “the great and gracious God.” But He inscribed His boundless love deep in the human heart, when He wished to say “mother” and be a child like the poorest of the children of men. “Who can measure this love?”

None is Like to Her

God created man first. But woman, not man, appeared first in the Creator’s mind. ‘The depths were not as yet, nor had God made the earth, nor the rivers, nor the poles of the world; before the hills she was brought forth, called from all eternity by the Creator.’ He wished to create a mother, His own Mother. . . .

Mary’s vocation—and God had chosen her for it—was to become God’s mother and so, as the mother of the Savior, to be the immediate auxiliary in God’s becoming man. This vocation gives her immeasurable, incomprehensible dignity. The dignity of the Mother of God is so great that God could not have made it greater, says Pope Leo XIII. When she became Mother of God, she became likewise the Lady of all creation.

What were the consequences of Mary’s maternity? St. Jerome says she brought new glory to Heaven, a Lord and Redeemer and peace to earth, faith to the pagans. She severed the bond of sin, brought the splendor of virtue and the way of life.

God had chosen her from eternity for this dignity. In the Old Testament, He frequently announced her coming and prepared for it by glorious women (Eve, Rebecca, Miriam, Judith, Esther).

No Old Testament Without Mary

Without Mary, the Old Testament would have no goal and no value. She is the woman who is to conquer the infernal dragon, she is the ark of Noah, the reconciling rainbow, Jacob’s ladder to Heaven, the burning bush; she is the rock wherefrom the water of life gushed, the pillar of fire and the ark of the covenant; she is strong Jael, Gideon’s fleece, the tower of David, the temple of Solomon . . . without her, all these become meaningless. The form of the Infant Savior with the Mother is the goal of the patriarchs’ longing, of the prayer of the prophets: ‘Drop down dew, ye Heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the Just One’ (Isaiah 45:8). Even in the heathen night the virgo paritura, the form of the virgin mother, shines like a guiding star.

God’s Mother

According to Nestorius, Mary was only the “mother of the Christ,” she who bore Christ’s humanity. According to our Faith, however, she is truly the one who bore God, the Mother of God. For it was the Son of God whom she, overshadowed by the Holy Ghost, conceived and bore. This is not our belief only since the Council of Ephesus (431) where the fathers of the Council together with the faithful bore witness to this doctrine; the belief is enclosed in Holy Writ itself.

The angel announced this truth, Elizabeth rejoiced in spirit because of it, the apostles and evangelists carried it along, and the faithful accepted it. . . .

In about twelve places, Holy Scripture calls the most blessed virgin the Mother of God. Similarly, the Gospels testify clearly and repeatedly that Jesus is the true Son of God. The divine maternity of Mary is, therefore, a proven fact. Tell me your position on Christ, and I will tell you your position on Mary. To one who sees in Jesus only a wise rabbi of Nazareth, the wonder of Mary’s dignity will be hidden. It will be incomprehensible, even blasphemous, as to the Jews Jesus’ claim to be the son of God seemed blasphemous. Tell me, then, your position on Christ, and I will know what you think of His mother.

Doubtless, it is difficult to follow this mystery in thought. What human understanding could get to the bottom of a divine wonder? But we will try to approach it with human concepts.

Mary did not bear the Divine Person, nor the Divinity. As mother, she bestowed human essence upon the Divine Person. In other cases, when a human being is conceived, a new person comes into existence, a conscious, spiritual being. But in Jesus, the Son of God, the divine consciousness existed from all eternity. In His case, no new ego, no new person, came into existence through the fact that He assumed a human body in Mary, but the identical divine-human consciousness brought the two separate modes of being into a new, ineffable unity.

Hence we can say that, through her maternity, Mary gave human existence to a Divine Person. There are not two Jesuses but only One, who is at once God and man. Mary could say to the God-man Jesus, “My child!” And the indivisible God-man Jesus answered her, “My mother!”

In the birth of human beings, the body is formed in the maternal uterus, but the soul is infused by God. Yet we call our mother not “the mother of our body” but simply mother, because our indivisible beings are constituted by body and soul together. So also the Second Divine Person was united to human nature, and, thus united, Mary was His mother.

The faith of the primitive Church already used of Mary the honorific title Mother of God. The Council of Ephesus excommunicated anyone who did not recognize Jesus as the true Son of God and, consequently, Mary as the Mother of God. Gregory Nazianzus calls anyone who does not honor Mary as Mother of God a godless person.