Every Christmas crèche in the Western world—including our family’s—shows the Holy Family, with a numinous Baby Jesus lying, arms outstretched, all alone. The Blessed Mother is kneeling off to one side, head tilted and arms open in prayer, while St. Joseph stands frozen in awe. There’s a problem amid the solemn beauty, though: No parents ever treat a newborn with such reserve. We hug them. We nuzzle them. It would be inhuman to withhold Mommy’s cradling arms and Daddy’s enveloping embrace. Yet we’ve inherited this image from a thousand years of Christmas crèches. Why? 

The mystery of the Jesus Christ, fully God and Perfect Man, has always been a paradox, a true mystery. How could the Creator of the entire Universe become an infinitesimally tiny piece of the universe He created, “emptying himself” (says St. Paul) or “going all the way down” (in Bishop Baron’s words) to become “the infant, mewling and puking” in His mother’s arms? 

Since the God-Man is a two-sided truth, a paradoxical reality, the faithful may need to stress different sides of that truth in different ages. In antiquity, when many or most babies died within months, babies seemed potentially human, a possibility, but not yet a reality. So our ancestors needed to stress the fact that this slightly “sub-human” Baby is in fact the perfect Creator God, bursting quietly into His own Creation. Thus, Omnipotent Jesus in our crèches: human Divinity.  

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Today, immersed in biological scientism, and taking babyhood for granted, we need to stress His helpless, divine Humanity, as the promise of our own divine adoption. We need to see the redemption of all that is human—including the “mewling and puking,” the dirty diapers, and long teething nights. We need to awaken our wonder of babyhood itself—and maybe crèches with the Holy Family in a group hug. 

This whole issue, “the redemption of all that is human,” needs to be taken a step further. Motherhood has taken a beating recently. Radical feminists insist it’s no more than a brutish animal instinct and therefore sub-human—as if giving birth to a human being is a less-than-human achievement. So, was human birth a facet of the humanity redeemed by the Incarnation and Nativity? Were contractions, dilation, breaking water, hard labour, and placentas baptized into our divine adoption? Did the Baby Jesus suffer being squeezed through the birth canal to become fully human?

The early Church Fathers say “No,” in defense of the Blessed Mother’s perpetual virginity. “Her virginity was untouched in giving him birth, as it was in conceiving him,” Pope St. Leo wrote to the Council of Chalcedon. They go further: Baby Jesus must have had a miraculous birth because a natural birth would have been painful and Mary would no longer be a virgin.

The dogmatic statements of popes and councils clearly insist Mary’s virginity was perpetual. But it’s a step further—and not dogmatic—to insist this required a miraculous birth. Three centuries later, Pope St. Martin I had to confront heretical Docetists, who claimed the Son of God emerged “in an incorporeal way” from His Mother’s womb. 

This could not be, the Pope argued. To be fully human, Jesus Christ had to have a “real birth.” Mary’s perpetual virginity is vital for her motherhood of the Church, so the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “Christ’s birth did not diminish his mother’s virginal integrity, but sanctified it.” There’s no mention of a painless birth or one bypassing her birth canal. 

The hallowing sounds strange to our ears accustomed to athletic young girls from gymnastics, soccer, or medical tests and we do not brand them as no longer virgins. Besides, the Blessed Mother herself defined her virginity more narrowly. “I know not man,” she said. 

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It’s the status of a natural birth—and all that involves—that’s the real issue. Every Catholic mother polled on the issue (admittedly a small sample) scoffs at the notion of a painless birth. Challenged with the possibility of a miraculous and thus painless birth, they seem to think it unworthy of their Blessed Mother to abandon them alone on the gurney. 

Did Mary embrace and thereby intercede with her Son in the definitive experience of half the human race? 

“A woman when she is in labor has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she has delivered, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a man has been born into the world,” so Jesus said. When He learned this from his mother, as part of his “growing in wisdom,” it seems unlikely she ended the conversation with a discomfited, “I don’t really know, but so I’ve been told…”

Surely, since she was sinless, she could not feel pain in childbirth, it may be argued. After the Fall, “I will multiply your pangs in childbearing,” God says in Genesis. “In sorrow, you shall bring forth children.” Yet, while the sorrow may be new with the Fall, perhaps the pangs are simply “multiplied.” So how or why could the sinless mother suffer at all?

Consider a blameless young woman, growing up in a typical rural village, which would be hot-house of resentful old biddies and malicious young upstarts. Meeting them around the village well, she would have been a tantalizing target for their pent-up contempt. For her, however, their malice could not have been “about me.” Enveloped in the love of her spousal Spirit, she’d be awash in the tragedy of their malevolence: as the Church Fathers said about God, non passibilis sed compassibilis—capable, not of passion, but compassion. And real compassion surely hurts. 

Fast-forward 30 years to the Stabat Mater—“the mother standing” beneath the Cross of her bloody and dying Son. Imagine a mother awash in the cruelty of the taunting Sanhedrin and brutal centurions, suffering more than any other human creature ever suffered. Yet, when He could surely have willed it otherwise, the Son of Man—perfectly lovable and (by her) perfectly loved—chose to let His own mother share that with Him. This would be simply shocking unless she was choosing to share joyously (paradoxically) in His redeeming Passion. Ever since, as the Church has known, she’s embraced every mother suffering the loss or crippling of a child.   

Given Mary’s place in the economy of salvation—sharing in the Cross of half of humanity? —can we really suppose the Blessed Mother would deny herself the “full cup” of motherhood? For three centuries, while they themselves were suffering crucifixions, the faithful could not endure explicit images of Christ’s Passion. Until recently, we were agricultural folk living with beasts doing what beasts do so we were squeamish about acknowledging the seemingly bestial in human reproduction. Now we’re seeing the awesome beauty in biology itself. We’ve just begun to grasp the physical and demonstrably spiritual wonder of human reproduction, especially those formative hours and days immediately following birth.   

Give this, what should we make of the recent document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, suppressing (though not forbidding) Mary’s possible titles, Co-redemptrix and Mediatrix? We don’t need them, and she probably wouldn’t want them. We need her as an intercessor, a mother hugging her baby, and not as a numinous monarch, floating above the fray. Likewise, she is the mother of all our Christian Reformed and Evangelical friends, and arguably, she would not want to come between them and her Son—which she surely would, if we celebrated her with those titles. 

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 However commonplace, motherhood is as much a pinnacle of the Imago Dei as all the labors of the Doctors of the Church. It’s time all our expectant mothers, lying on their gurneys, knew that. 

Joseph Woodard is a research Fellow at the Gregory the Great Institute.