“And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent . . . to a virgin.”

It would seem gratuitous to point out that the virgin was a woman. What else?

On the other hand, to be Catholic is to be wholly at home with meditation, that is, with the activity in which the Christian believer places himself at the disposal of a text, as it were, and allows that text to draw him along an itinerary of thought in which he finds himself encountering, one after another, aspects of the truth that might perhaps escape cursory notice. Such meditation is no doubt as old as piety itself. We find it already mature in the psalms: When I consider thy heavens . . . what is man? Or, speaking of the godly man: His delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law doth he meditate day and night.

The saints, and all the so-called masters of the spiritual life, teach us about such meditation. Take note of every word in the text. Allow no detail to escape you. Permit your imagination to move into the region surrounding the text. It is a salutary exercise, and your soul will benefit. St. Ignatius Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises, brought the activity to perhaps as high a point of elaboration as it has been brought.

We may permit ourselves, then, to pause over the womanhood of this figure chosen by God for the highest honor ever conferred on a mortal.

Worldly honors have tended to collect on the brow of men rather than of women. The effort to summon women’s names from the crannies of history in order to redress the imbalance in the roster of notables is pyrrhic. The bare record is there, whether we applaud or deplore it. The conquerors, the explorers, the scientists and philosophers and poets and composers, the monarchs and statesmen and scholars: the number of men in the list dwarfs the number of women, mightily as we try to balance the score.

Scandal, frustration, and sometimes rage mark the attitude of our own time when it is obliged to acknowledge the data here. Hence we have witnessed the attempt, as colossal, energetic, and sudden an attempt as has ever been launched in the history of man, to achieve parity for women, if not by rewriting history, which seems to bite back at us, then by taking history into our own hands now and recasting its terms.

It is impossible to be awake at all in our own epoch and miss the fruits of this attempt. Within two decades women have appeared in their millions in the work force. And not only that: the upper echelons, traditionally the province of men alone, find that women have forced the door and will no longer settle for a spindly typist’s chair in the outer office. Attache cases, horn-rimmed spectacles, vocabulary, and a posture and demeanor that announce No Longer Subservient—these replace aprons, soapsuds, chapped hands, and perambulators in the iconography of woman offered by the late twentieth century.

All of this occurs in the public realm. That is to say, this is all the stuff of history. Events occur; movements arise; trends eddy along; sensibilities ebb and flow. These supply the data that make up the history texts.

But to what extent does all of this exhibit fidelity to our humanity, we want to ask from time to time? That is, do the events and trends constitute progress and good health for this creature Man? Or is a disservice being rendered to what we are, say, by the Enlightenment or by the invention of the internal combustion engine or the splitting of the atom? These things occur; do they thereby bear the stamp Well Done? How can we tell what is salubrious, and what calamitous?

To be Catholic is to find oneself asking this question about the great shifts of sensibility and public order that have occurred in our own time with respect to the matter of femininity. A Catholic might wish to ask, that is, about the image of woman. Is the “new woman” of the late twentieth century a figure who may be seen to be in direct descent from womanhood as that has been understood in Christian tradition over the centuries? Or do we see a wholly new shaping of the image, a new image, really?

Ironically, the two answers called out from the two profoundly differing viewpoints on that latter question may be identical. Yes! We hear from those who applaud what is happening—Yes, and let us have more! And, Yes! From those who view the topic with somber misgivings—Yes, and womanhood is being betrayed!

The topic has been canvassed widely. We are speaking here of the Virgin, attempting to order our thinking to the great mystery that Catholic faith perceives in the figure of this woman who is there, with God himself, as it were, at the center.

Catholic vision does not pass lightly over the immense datum that this one, unique and highly favored from among the whole race of men, is a woman, not a man. As we noted earlier, it is men, out of all proportion to women, who seem chosen for great roles: the patriarchs, kings, prophets, apostles, evangelists, bishops, and doctors of the Church are, overwhelmingly, men. But then we find that it is a woman to whom is vouchsafed the dignity next to which the dignity attaching to the offices assigned to all of these men must take an inferior place. They all bore witness to the Word: she bore the Word. There is no comparison.

What does it mean? To contemplate this mystery is to be brought near to the other mystery, hinted at in nearly all mythologies and religions, namely, that in some profound sense, all of us mortals—men and women—are “feminine”, if we are speaking of ourselves in relation to the approach of the gods to us. Ouranos (the sky) pours energy into Gaea (the earth), just as (hint the myths) the male pours energy into the woman. “He” does the initiating: “she” receives.

There is no fructifying if you leave the male alone. Somehow there must be the collaboration of sky and earth, of god and mortal, of male and female, for the thing to occur.

Thus the myths. But we need not linger in such a lush matrix. Language itself seems to testify to some such notion. Psyche: anima: the soul. All feminine. Feminine vis-à-vis what, we might inquire. And this inquiry in its turn brings us to that sense which lies as deeply at the center of the human mystery as any other, namely, our sense that we are addressed by the god at the profound depths of our identity. It is called the religious sense, and to be Catholic is to attach great weight to this. Catholicism is not a “secular” view of man, as though to say we sprouted, who knows how or when, somehow autonomously and impersonally, into being and somehow crawled toward our present physical and psychological stature. No, says Catholicism: Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. The Church takes up St. Augustine’s great utterance. And, Who art thou: that is the religious question, with its imperative corollary, What wilt thou have me to do?

It was the woman in the Christian story of redemption who responded to the Deity in that way. And Catholicism, being a sacramentalist understanding of the gospel, sees the physical as bound to the spiritual in a more-than-random way. Just as bread (and not rice) is to be the sacrament of Christ’s Body in the liturgy, and the Church (made up of humans, not angels) is to be the sacrament of Christ’s presence in the world, and as the man Jesus is, in a perfect sense, the sacrament of God with us, so Mary, in her womanhood, is a similarly apt embodying of all who will say, with her, Fiat mihi in response to the approach of the Deity.

Her womanhood. Here is the crux of the topic before us. To be Catholic is to pause before the quiet fact that this woman achieved the highest dignity ever achieved by a mortal with no fanfare. The Virgin Mary girded on no sword, summoned no army; she did not sail to the Antipodes or scan the stars in order to gain the eminence that Catholic vision sees as her proper rank. Those are the tactics brought into play characteristically by men in order to win eminence, which is not to say that a woman cannot commandeer a ship or wield a sword: Penthesilia, queen of the Amazons, was a great warrior, as was Boadicea, the British queen. Our own time has seen at least three immensely powerful and successful women as prime ministers.

The question is not whether a woman can do this or that. When it comes to the activities that constitute history, few would argue very shrilly that a woman can not do the job as well as a man. Scientist, artist, monarch, conqueror: the sweepstakes seem open to both sexes, if we are speaking of the ability to do the thing.

But we want to probe further and ask, not so much what a man or a woman can do as what he or she is. Again, the question has been widely, and loudly, canvassed in our own time.

To be Catholic is to suppose, first of all, that the fact lying at the very root of our humanity, namely, that we appear as man and woman, is itself the great clue as to what we are. Made in the image of God, we are told: male and female he created them. Somehow in this antiphonality we are to constitute that image. It is not good for man to be alone: this “lack” is there before the fall and the curse. The imago Dei must appear under these two modalities of man and woman, and the two must then, in mutual self-donation, achieve the unity that testifies to, or constitutes, that image. Catholic vision perceives in this protohistoric maleness and femaleness the great ontological cue, so to speak, that hints at what we are.

What is it to “be” a man? Is it to hunt mastodons with a club or sail a ship or build a tower? Indeed, such activities do seem, somehow, to attach themselves to the notion of man. But of course the woman can do all that, if she is so disposed. What can the man do that the woman cannot do?

He can be a husband. He can sire offspring. He can be a father.

Here there is no interchange or role-switching or parity. These perquisites are reserved strictly to the man, and no political movement can make the smallest dent in the scheme. These roles and activities, for good or ill, attach to the male, forever.

What is it to “be” a woman? Is it to stir the pot and rock the cradle and keep the house? Indeed, such activities do seem, somehow, to attach themselves to the notion of woman. But, of course, the man can do all that, if he is so disposed. What can the woman do that the man cannot do?

She can be a wife. She can bear seed. She can be a mother. And she can suckle her young.

Here there is no interchange or role-switching or parity. These perquisites are reserved strictly to the woman, and no political movement can make the smallest dent in the scheme. These roles and activities, for good or ill, attach to the female, forever.

These “roles”, if we may borrow such a frigid word from the behavioral sciences, are witnessed to in the very anatomy of the woman and the man. The roles seem inscribed in their very form. Their bodies say “woman” or “man”. The female body “receives” the man’s questing body. He goes “out” from himself, as it were, in the rite wherein they most exactly constitute the unity that encompasses their two beings, body and soul, and she receives him “in”. That which leaves the man must come to rest and fructify in the depths of the woman.

Who does the giving here? It is an empty question. The man and the woman both know, in this unity they constitute, that to give is to receive, and vice-versa. Mutual self-donation.

Sacramental vision perceives in all of this an icon—a sacrament, even—of what is true. That which presents itself under physical aspects—the female body and the male body—is the epiphany of that which transcends the physical. It reaches to the very identity, the personhood, of each. The man does not merely enact the office of father: he is “father”, somehow, in the depths of his being. The woman does not merely play the role of mother: she is “mother”, somehow, in the depths of her being. (This is why the vocabulary of roles and of “parenting” clanks so dully in the ears of a sacramentalist. Sacramentalism does not live and move and have its being solely in the region of what things do: it wants to know what they are. Bread does not “play the role” of the Body of Christ in the liturgy: it is that Body, in a mystery that will forever madden the one who approaches it with logic, common sense, experiment, or magic; and rice or oats can never enjoy this privilege, which is reserved strictly to wheat.)

The woman, then, in this accounting of things, is mother, in some profound sense that reaches to her identity as woman. The man is father similarly.

What, then, of the unnumbered women who have lived and died barren? Have they been disfranchised? No, says this line of thought: the woman may, alas, have to sustain the loss entailed in the denial of physical offspring to her; but she is nonetheless mother, in a mystery. This paradox, of course, is seen with great clarity in the figures of women religious who have consecrated their virginity to God. No child has opened their womb; but they bring to the life of service and prayer that is their vocation something that no man can quite bring. This is a woman religious: she is an icon of the Church herself, in a way that is not quite true of the man; and, by virtue of her womanhood, she participates profoundly in the aspect of the gospel mystery opened to us in the figure of the Blessed Mother. The Church would urge that the Pope himself is not as “close to the center”, if we may so speak, as a woman whose womanhood is consecrated to God. He is Pope, yes; and as such he is Peter and Supreme Pontiff and Vicar of Christ. He is servus servorum Dei, servant of the servants of God. To this extent he bears pastoral responsibility for the whole Church and focuses in his person the whole mystery of the pastoral office. But he is Peter, not Mary. May we say, in this exalted context, that he is “only” Peter? Whereas, in her very womanhood, a woman participates in an aspect of the mystery of God and man that can never be known in quite such a way by a man, no matter what level of holiness he attains. For, of course, femininity is more than merely biological or psychological, says the (sacramentalist) Church: the body and psyche of the woman suggest what she is. She is a woman—it is an ontological statement, prior to anatomy and psychology, but also declared and exhibited in anatomy and psychology. She does not have a neuter (or worse, androgynous) ghost renting her body temporarily. She is a woman; and for all eternity she will bear the aspect of the imago Dei disclosed by femininity, not masculinity.

But what of your ordinary laywoman? We began with the figure of the woman religious, the one whose virginity is consecrated to the Lord. Does what we say apply to every woman, lay or religious, virgin or mother?

Yes; of course, says the Church. To be woman at all is to be an icon of the divine image, under the particular aspect of femininity. May we venture that it is to have that profound Yes (fiat mihi) inscribed in the very secret of one’s being? The man sets out from home, scouring and ransacking earth and heaven, inquiring, as it were, in his thousand enterprises—his sonnets written, his kingdoms conquered, his seas sailed—What is it? What is it? Who art thou? But to the woman, that which harries the man as a riddle to be cracked or a vista to be charted comes as a tap on the door, or as a still, small voice.

This is delicate language and, hence, perilous. It runs the risk, on the one hand, of tearing loose altogether from its moorings in plain reality and bobbing off into the ozone of fancy like a balloon dangling its string. And, on the other hand, it risks suggesting such a stark difference between man and woman that it would seem to be urging that all men must go forth and seize the god by force and all women must sit quietly and await the tap. To press things that far would, of course, to be falling into the fallacy of wringing the metaphor dry. No metaphor is completely successful. It will work only up to a point. The point hinted at in this manner of speaking about the man and the woman is only that it may be supposed, if things physical are indeed some sort of display of reality itself, that in the two sexes we may see two aspects of what it means to be Man, to be addressed by the Deity, that is.

Is there any sense, in other words, in which the man must learn from the woman how to say Fiat mihi? It is a point to be pondered.

But we were speaking of mothers and laywomen generally, whose response to the divine approach takes a form quite different from that at work in the cloister. Consecrated virginity is an especially vivid icon of wholehearted response to the divine, and one that not only does not exclude all notion of motherhood but rather transfigures the woman’s potentiality as mother into forms of prayer and service not quite repeatable by the man. But what of laywomen, married and single?

The Catholic Church would call all women, as she calls all men, to consecrate their whole personhood to the Lord. If that consecration is not to take a specifically religious (cloistered, or other) shape, then it may, in the case of the single professional woman, take the form of a “secular” consecration. A woman—charwoman or chief executive officer—is invited by Grace to offer what she is, and all that she is (and she is a woman first), to God. Her station as a single person excludes, on the Christian view, the bearing of children, and also the physical intimacy with the man that is itself such a precious gift.

What shall she do, then, with her womanhood? An exact and “satisfactory” answer may never become apparent, for as long as she lives. All that is woman in her may appear to have been blighted by life’s unfairness.

Here we approach holy ground not to be trodden upon by busy and officious bystanders. Indeed, what does become of the great treasure this woman has consecrated?

We can only, with the greatest diffidence, turn to the mystery shrouding the fate of all sacrifices. The holocaust goes up in smoke. The offering is burned to ashes. Nothing is left. The offerer is left empty-handed and abandoned.

Or so it would seem. But holocaust stands on the frontier between the seen and the unseen. Faith clings to the notion that what appears as ashes on the hither side of that frontier is laid up as gold, silver, and precious stones on the farther side.

The trouble here is that no one wants to bustle in with such meliorative remarks when someone is suffering. Who am I to adjure this woman here to pluck up her spirits with the thought that her offering is kept—“kept with fonder a care, / Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it”—by the Divine Spouse himself. It is too easy to whisk things away from the plodding actuality of today’s loneliness. We do not regale the parents who must walk away from the tiny coffin with news of the resurrection. We weep with them, in silence, for the time being.

So it is here. Who is equal to speaking of such things? And yet we do, somehow, want to hear the news from the far country. And we also actually encounter, in some holy woman, the immense tranquillity, generosity, and dignity that follows upon her having in very truth consecrated her singleness to God.

In the case of a woman whose vocation is to the married state, children may be vouchsafed. If this is so, then of course she experiences under particularly vivid physical auspices the meaning of the motherhood signaled by her womanhood. The bearing and suckling of children are privileges reserved strictly to the woman, never to be experienced by the man. Just as the mystery that attaches to our flesh and blood is a mystery no angel can penetrate, so the mystery that attaches to physical motherhood is a mystery no man can grasp.

Why introduce the word mystery here, where all is perfectly clear? Anatomy, biology, and psychology tell us all there is to know about motherhood. It is a routine phenomenon that scarcely seems to call out for exalted vaporizings from eager bystanders.

On one level the objection is apt. But soon enough we all know that we ourselves, male or female, child or adult, married or single, are touched intimately, at the very wellspring of our being, by the phenomenon. We do not need to sentimentalize motherhood (the word itself seems to quiver with the threat of mawkishness, alas) in order to grasp this. For a start, we have no existence at all apart from motherhood. None of us sprang fully armed from the forehead of Zeus. Our mothers sheltered and nourished us from seedling to newborn infant. And, if they and we were fortunate, they nursed us with their own milk. They were, in other words, the custodians of our very existence.

Custodians. Does the word point to something that is true of woman and never quite true of man? Might there be a profound sense in which this custodianship is never altogether to be relinquished by the woman? On the one hand, of course, all mothers must relinquish their offspring if that offspring is ever to reach his own true freedom, stature, and identity. But is there a sense, almost enigmatic, in which womanhood remains the custodian of our very humanity itself?

Such a supposition would arise from what we can all see, all the time, including all the time back through history, namely, that the presence of woman is not only a palpable thing, but that from this presence there radiates something we can only call humanizing. It takes a thousand forms (many of which forms have come under attack in our own epoch, since, we hear, they belong to an image of woman we must repudiate). For example, when there were women present, men traditionally modified the profane and bawdy language that characteristically obtains in purely male haunts. What was this about? Surely it indicated the awareness, on the one hand, that such language was indeed harsh and perhaps, upon reflection, might have a sort of brutalizing effect on things, and, on the other, that women, by their very presence, call such harshness into question. (It is difficult even to speak of such a custom nowadays, since certainly this would be one of the customs most strenuously rejected by recent notions of womanhood. It is not uncommon to hear the legendary “four-letter words” issuing from the mouths of women now—and not, it may be remarked, only from the mouths of the harridans, viragos, and termagants who, as far back as Chaucer, have made themselves noteworthy by adopting such language.)

Or again, pornographic merchandise has traditionally been assumed to have men and boys for its market. Why? For whatever reasons (and it is this “whatever” that we are endeavoring to approach in this sequence) the presence of a woman seems somehow to introduce the note of shame into the otherwise gleeful atmosphere that presides over the men huddled over the glossy photographs or watching the film at the smoker. (Videotapes have greatly altered this scenario as of this writing.) A certain sheepishness colors the face of the man caught with the pictures. “Caught.” Why “caught”? Again, for reasons that are now vigorously repudiated, this subject matter, especially when it is arranged specifically to stir up lust or leering looks, has seemed suddenly to take on a tawdry look the moment a woman arrives.

For to a woman, sex is far more than the random, not to say wholesale, means of gratification that a man, left to his own unbridled imagination, might enjoy supposing. There seem to be inscribed in the very stuff of womanhood the taboos that have from the beginning sheltered the sexual phenomenon against mere debauchery. Might it not be that we see at work here the “spouse” and “mother” for whom sex is knit seamlessly with the whole fabric of life itself, rather than appearing as spangles on that fabric, such as a man might fancy?

And yet again, what of the matter of masculine strife? Fisticuffs in a Dublin pub, duels on the outskirts of seventeenth-century Paris, the fracas at the street corner, shouts and threats splitting the domestic household: rightly or wrongly it has characteristically been the women who interpose themselves and plead for tranquillity. Or, perhaps we should qualify this, since not infrequently women have found themselves at the center of the fracas, themselves shouting imprecations and aiming blows, by saying that insofar as order has been restored, short of the arrival of the police, it will often have been the women who have led the attempt.

These examples are stereotypes, and, since such stereotypes have arisen from the very image of woman under assault in our time, namely, of woman as somehow gentler and even “softer” than man, we can only adduce the examples with a certain diffidence. Perhaps we need go no farther than to reiterate our “rightly or wrongly”: we may all agree that such scenes do, in fact, belong to traditional notions of womanhood and manhood. If the traditional notions need to be recast, then of course we may gaze at the stereotypes with a patronizing gaze, as though to say, “Ha! That’s how they used to think about things!”

To be Catholic, though, is to have the image of a certain woman so deeply implanted in one’s consciousness that one is not altogether free to jettison the stereotype. Indeed, one finds oneself wondering whether what we have in such scenes is not stereotype, which is a fairly superficial thing, but rather archetype. Does it belong to the woman immemorially (archetypally) to try to restore peace and order and to call the man back from his folly and fury? Does the woman have, in her very bones and marrow, so to speak, a commitment to peace and order, especially domestic peace and order, such that her whole instinct is to try to maintain, preserve, and restore this peace and order?

To be Catholic is to have a deeply rooted supposition that such indeed may be the case. For a Catholic always has the Mother of the Lord at the center of his vision as the one from among us mortals who was charged with the custodianship of the Child who, according to the Second Vatican Council, has “united himself in some sense with every man”. In other words, the holy household at Nazareth forms a touchstone by which we may test our notions, not only of households, but of all circumstances that depend on peace and order for their well-being.

In this household, of course, the woman was not called upon to restrain the violence of the man: all we know of St. Joseph speaks of humility, dignity, fidelity, and true-heartedness. And this itself brings us closer to actuality and away from a picture of things that might unjustly be drawn from the examples we have ventured, namely, that the men are all violent and barbarian, and that it is only the women who have rescued things from havoc and collapse. Justly ordered, of course, masculinity exhibits the imago Dei, with all that this means of wisdom, grace, purity, and truth. And it would be to digress from our particular topic here to pursue just how the fall has affected that masculinity, as opposed to its effects on femininity. But perhaps we may say that disorder in the man commonly inclines him to spread that disorder into the exterior world (again, fisticuffs, shouts, tanks, and bombs), whereas the woman, whatever of the Fall tinctures her womanhood, nevertheless wants to protect life and to order surroundings in such a way that life is both safe and amenable.

A sacramentalist would see in the very anatomy of femininity the pattern of this. She is the bearer of a womb that is, in some sense, the archetypal “home”. Safe; warm; intimate; nourishing; dependable; but above all safe. Her entire being attunes her to cherish this child with her very life. Indeed, her whole body is doing this in any case. She is also the bearer of breasts. These are soft, unlike the chest of a man, which is the locale of muscle primarily. They are vessels of nourishment, and of the blandest possible nourishment, namely, milk. It is from quiet pastures, fenced off from traffic and tumult, that milk comes. It is a drink whose very substance speaks of peace, unlike coffee, which issues from the roasting oven, and wine, which has undergone the winepress. And a woman’s arms have been seen, immemorially, as the safest place, not only for her infant, but for her husband. They are not arms equipped first of all for the fight. We do not attach the notion of immense biceps and triceps to the arms of a woman, no matter what may be urged in the public realm in our own decade. It is not that a woman can not fight: anyone who threatens her infant will discover to his rue that there is no zeal like that of a woman whose child is in danger. But the woman of song, story, icon, and Scripture stands forth as mother.

But Deborah; Jael; Rahab; Priscilla: what of these? Is not at least part of the interest that collects around them that they were women who did what they did? That a woman should lead the troops against Sisera, and that a woman should put a peg through his temple, and that a woman should save the spies, and a woman be linked equally with a man like Aquila—one says, “See: who will insist that the woman cannot do such things?” But of course the very point we stress when commenting thus underscores what is so profoundly at work in the image of the Virgin Mary. No one says, “See! A woman can be a mother! A woman can tend the Son of God in her own household!” What she did belongs to womanhood, in some sense forever beyond the reach of the conflict of ideas and the struggle for power.

If all of this is so, then of course the redrawing of the image of womanhood in a way that obscures her identity as mother will rouse misgiving in the mind of a Catholic. Woman, on the one hand, is the only one who can be mother, he will think. No man, however well intentioned and even skilled in household work, can be mother. And, on the other hand, the language of the woman’s whole body speaks of motherhood, at a level that cannot be altered by the altering of one century’s ideas.

A Catholic will see no absolute anomaly in a woman’s being chief executive officer or neurosurgeon or prime minister. What he will demur over would be the attempt to hold aloft the gaining of such offices as in some sense crucial to a woman’s authenticating of herself and the corollary attempt to place the bearing and nurturing of children as in some sense a thralldom, or at least an activity (“parenting”) that has little to do with what a woman is. This will appear to him as a disservice to the fundamental mystery of which woman is the icon.

Hence, also, a Catholic, at least a Catholic who is deeply committed to all that the Church has taught about the place of Mary in the entire drama of God and man and to all that has been testified to in human identity from the beginning—that we have no life at all without our mothers to start with, and that we have a tragically blighted life if we are denied the presence and care of our mothers, and that it is not good for man to be alone, and that it has somehow been the women who have protected human life from becoming altogether brutish—such a Catholic will also demur when he hears harsh and vulgar words issuing from the mouth of a woman and sees the image of woman-as-policeman and woman-as-tough and woman-as-soldier and woman-as-executive almost wholly supplanting the image of woman as spouse and mother in public entertainment. Of course a woman can do all of that, he will agree: but is there a more-than-neutral agenda at work in this busy redrawing of the type, whether that be stereo- or arche-!

In this sense, then, to be Catholic is to have one’s notions of womanhood and manhood rooted in a mystery that reaches all the way to creation, when we both stepped onto the stage in all the dignity that belonged to the two of us severally.