Charity registration No. SC002876
Sunday May 2nd. 2010
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Notices
Please take time to read this beautiful article on Our Lady. It
is written by Dominican Sister Mary O’Driscoll, a theologian
who has taught in the Angelicum University, Rome, for many
years, and gives us a new insight to Our Lady from a
woman’s understanding of her.
It appeared in this month’s Intercom
ometimes in our eagerness to honour Mary, we are
inclined to speak of her as if she were not a member of
the human race. Rather, she is perceived as a quasi-
divine being suspended outside time and the
circumstances of daily human living. Indeed,
Catholics are sometimes accused by those of other
Christian traditions of viewing Mary, instead of Jesus Christ, at
the centre of our Christian faith, and even of going as far as
worshipping her.
All this, of course, is no tribute to Jesus' mother - the person
who, precisely because she was a flesh-andblood woman, was
able to give a human nature to Jesus, the Saviour. In her
humanity therefore lies her greatness. In fact, we can say that
Mary is the woman who 'humanised' God! In Galatians 4:4, we
read, 'when the fullness of the time came, God sent forth His
Son, born of a woman, born under the law'. This statement from
Paul, while not directly a reference to Mary, is a confirmation of
the basic reality of the Incarnation, namely, that God's Son,
Jesus, assumed human flesh from his mother.
It might be helpful therefore, in this month of May, when we
honour Mary in a particular way, to reflect on her humanity and
on what it has to say to us about our own humanity.
The Historical Mary
Like all other human beings, Mary of Nazareth was born into,
and lived in a particular historical, sociological, economic,
political and cultural context with which she interacted and
which influenced her. Hers was consequently no rarefied
detached existence in which she was protected from the
hardships and uncertainties of life. She had to question, worry,
reflect, experiment, make decisions, grow up, and grow old as
we do. Contrary to many representations of her, she was not
forever the young
beautiful maiden
of sixteen
idealised in art,
but became over
time a
middleaged
woman with
possibly some
wrinkles and grey
hairs! It was in
and through her
human life that
Mary grew in
holiness and was
transformed by
grace.
One of the happy
outcomes of
Vatican II has
been a renewed
emphasis on
Mary's humanity,
pointing to the
fact that she, like
all of us needed
redemption, had
to walk the way
of faith and
suffering, and
generally was not exempt from the human lot.
The Mother of Jesus
As every mother knows, the act of giving birth is not the end of
motherhood but rather the beginning. And so it was with Mary.
Having brought her son into the world, she suckled him at her
breast, cared for him through the teething process, delighted in
his first babbling words, taught him to walk and trained him in
The Woman from Nazareth
