In the latest July issue (30 July 2022) of the English magazine The TabletChris Maunder – visiting lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at St John University in York and author of several publications on the Virgin Mary (his latest volume, Mary, Founder of Christianityis from last April at Oneworld Publications), tells of the disappearance, between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, of a long tradition Marian devotion, which has developed and disseminated an iconography that portrays Mary in priestly robes (an example, dating back to the 7th century, is found in Rome in the mosaic cycle of the Lateran Baptistery of San Venanzio).
In its volume Mary and Early Christian Women, the researcher Ally Kateusz has surveyed numerous examples of images from the early centuries of the Church in which Mary is depicted with the “episcopal pallium” (West) or the “omophorion” (East). Therefore, not only as a priest, but as a bishop. The Virgin is often portrayed in the “postura orans”, her arms at her sides and her hands upwards, in the gesture of the priest presiding over the Mass.
The traditional association of Mary as an image of the Church is ancient. In fact, it dates back at least to the 4th century. Therefore, if Mary is the image of the Church, and the Church is a priestly community that celebrates the sacraments of redemption, it is understandable why these images are born and spread. However, Maunder maintains, a female image (that of the Virgin Mary) in priestly robes caused – from a certain moment on – some embarrassment and perplexity in the Catholic world, ending up being definitively excluded.
A four-phase story
It was the French theologian René Laurentin, who inaugurated his career as an illustrious mariologist in 1952 with a text entitled Marie, L’Eglise et le priestdoce, to identify four periods in the history of devotion to Mary as the “Virgin Priest”. In the first of which, the one that roughly goes from the origins of the Church to the end of the first millennium, the connections between Mary and the priesthood are sporadic.
The idea began to flourish and spread, according to Laurentin’s research, in the early Middle Ages when the tradition took a turn under the influence of the passionate devotion of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and other authors. In the homilies for the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (or the Presentation of Jesus), Mary is spoken of as the one who offers her son, both in the Temple and on the Cross. In a sermon on the occasion of the feast, Saint Bernard addresses the Virgin with these words: «Offer your Son, O Holy Virgin, and present the blessed fruit of your womb to the Lord. Offer the holy victim, acceptable to God, for the reconciliation of all of us ».
The third phase is identified with the era of the Counter-Reformation. There is still authoritative evidence of devotion in Rome, in the seventeenth century, when the Italian poet and playwright Giovanni Battista Guarini, author of The Holy Kingdom of the Virgin Mary, affirms that the position of Mary at the Cross in the Gospel of John is to be considered analogous to that of the priest at the altar. Furthermore, with regard to Christ and Mary, Guarini himself writes that «there has not been, nor will there be, any priest more worthy or holier than them; because they were without sin, which cannot be said of the priests of the New and Old Testament ”.
Also in the seventeenth century, the theologians of the French school of spirituality enthusiastically adopted the theme of the Marian priest. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57), founder of the Saint Sulpice seminary, studies the close relationship between Mary and the priesthood, proposing a Marian priestly spirituality that will have an important influence in the formation of seminarians. The analogy between the function of the priest and that of Mary is founded on the fact that both give life to Christ. The human life of Jesus – Olier writes – was offered to his death on the Cross, and that human life came from Mary; so she offered her own substance for the redemption of the world.
The fourth and last phase in the history of devotion begins with the end of the 19th century, when the book by the Belgian priest Oswald van den Berghe, Mary and the priesthood (1872), is published with a letter-preface by Pius IX. Again in 1906, Pius X commissioned a prayer dedicated to the “Virgo Sacerdos” to which he attached an indulgence. Quoting the Dominican theologian of the fifteenth century Saint Anthony, this papal prayer reads: “Although not clothed with the sacrament of Holy Orders, you were nevertheless filled with every dignity and grace that this sacrament confers.”
Roman perplexities
Despite this devout impetus, even before the end of the papacy of Pius X, the decision came precisely from Rome to suppress devotion to Mary “Virgo Sacerdos”. A decree of March 29, 1916, during the pontificate of Benedict XV, referring to a decision of the Holy Office of January 15, 1913, establishes that “the images of the Blessed Virgin Mary dressed in priestly robes must be rejected”. The suppression was confirmed under the pontificate of Pius XI by the cardinal secretary of state, Rafael Merry del Val, who motivated the decision in 1927 by writing that Mary represented as “Virgin Priest” was an image that “the less enlightened minds would not have been able to fully understand “.
Why suppress such a long tradition with such powerful theological symbolism, Maunder wonders. Sarah Jane Boss, founder of the Center for Marian Studies at the University of Wales, argues that the increasing participation of women in ecclesial laity activities and some initiatives for female ordination that were being supported in other Churches at that time, would have raised a Rome some concern. She therefore preferred to avoid the risk of fueling confusion among the faithful, since those images could make one think that Mary, a woman, had actually been ordained. Hypothesis confirmed by Laurentin, who maintains that the tradition was not suppressed due to theological inconsistencies, but because it associated the priesthood with a woman.
Of course, no one ever claimed that Mary was ordained a priest, Maunder writes. The question is rather whether Mary – as a physical person rather than as a personification of the Church – can be pointed out to the faithful as a model for the priesthood. This position could in fact question the statements of some official documents of the magisterium, such as Inter Insigniores (1976), according to which Christ’s masculinity and his choice of twelve men as his apostles would mean that the ordained priesthood is reserved for men.
A particularly poignant image of Mary the priest is an 11th-century mosaic in the apse of Kiev Cathedral (below). Mary has her hands raised, in the position of the praying person. A Eucharistic veil hangs from her belt. There are many other similar images of Mary in a priestly attitude on the altars of churches in the East and West, some dating back to the early centuries. It is difficult to escape the conviction – concludes Maunder – that the Vatican decision arose not so much from theological convictions, as from the fear that devotion to the “Virgo Sacerdos” could weaken the position of male exclusivity for the ordained priesthood.
A very well-argued reconstruction of the story can be read in the essay by the historian Liviana Gazzetta, “Una memoria cancellata. The cult of the “Virgo sacerdos” and the question of the female priesthood », in Social and religious history research, XL (2011), pp. 179-202.
