Mary is neither “Co-Redemptrix” nor “Mediatrix of All Graces.” Although these titles have been used for centuries in the Catholic Church—even sometimes appearing in papal writings—the church last November officially declared them to be misleading. Why? Perhaps because Marian language has at times been distorted by lopsided language about the triune God.
For believers who have grown attached to such titles, that conclusion is a bitter pill to swallow. In a sense, these believers have become victims of certain ideologues who, driven by anti-Protestant sentiment or preconciliar nostalgia, sought to reimpose a 19th-century mariological style. One wonders whether these theologians, bishops and other clerics realize what they set in motion in the minds and hearts of many of the faithful.
But where did these titles originate? And how did they come to take root in Marian discourse over the centuries?
Looking back over two millennia of reflection on Mary’s place in salvation history and Christian spirituality, one can discern two main causes—both expressions of what I call a “compensatory mariology.” First, our understanding of Christ came to focus too exclusively on his divinity; second, God was presented too one-sidedly as male.
A stopgap mediator
During the first millennium, Mary was generally understood as an image of the church and as a member of it. Within the church, she held a unique place, and her role in salvation history is utterly singular—but she still “stood at our side” because she also was redeemed by Christ.
The French theologian Yves Congar, O.P., showed in his brief yet important 1952 work Le Christ, Marie et l’Église that this perspective began to shift around the 11th century. Increasingly, Mary received more and more her place “above the church,” between humanity and Christ.
From the high Middle Ages onward, the term Redemptrix came into use for Mary, a title that, beginning in the 15th century, was fortunately more and more replaced by Co-Redemptrix. Yet this title, too, is problematic, since the prefix “co-” can be used both coordinatively (as in co-president) and in a subordinate sense (as in co-pilot).
According to Congar, the place that was given to Mary as Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix was largely due to the fading awareness of the Council of Chalcedon’s dogma that affirmed that Christ is fully God and fully human. Over time, Christ was seen ever more exclusively as divine, and his humanity was pushed to the background.
In 451, Chalcedon held that Christ had reconciled the human and divine within himself. Therefore, as the First Letter to Timothy (2:5) says, he is “the one Mediator between God and humanity.” This is reflected in Catholic doctrine, which teaches that while we ask Mary and the saints to intercede for us, to pray on our behalf, Christ remains the sole redemptor and mediator between the human and the divine.
But when the humanity of this “one Mediator” is forgotten—when he is, so to speak, lifted up—a gap opens up between God and humankind. In the second millennium, that vacant space came to be filled ever more frequently by the saints and, of course, most naturally by Mary.
Thus she acquired titles such as Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix—as if Christ himself were a bridge too far. Congar wrote of “a Christ so wholly divine, so exalted, that he appears distant, and we feel the need for a mediatorship of Mary between him and ourselves.”
This “maximalist mariology” reached its zenith in what mariologists call the “Marian Age,” roughly from 1830 to 1950. Under the motto “De Maria nunquam satis” (“Of Mary, never enough”), theologians invented new feasts, new dogmas, new titles. Congar spoke of an out-of-control “galloping mariology,” and the great mariologist, the Rev. René Laurentin, compared its maximalizing development to pathological diseases.
The Second Vatican Council, however, put a stop to this tendency. Though several Council fathers pleaded for new Marian dogmas, a dramatic vote on Oct. 29, 1963, prevented that from happening.
The question that day—should the Council draft a separate document on Mary, or integrate her person and role within “Lumen Gentium,” the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church—was not merely technical or editorial. Behind it lay a deeper question: Does Mary stand above the church or within it? Does she stand on the side of the redeemed (though in an exceptional way) or at the side of the Redeemer? Or, in other words: Is Mary the image of Christ (a “maximalist,” christotypical mariology) or the image and member of the church (a “minimalist,” ecclesiotypical mariology)?
By the slimmest of margins—just 0.4 percent—the reformers prevailed, drawing inspiration from Scripture, the church fathers and the mariology of the first millenium What Vatican II teaches about Mary is now the eighth chapter of “Lumen Gentium” and one of the most important documents of the Council. The fathers of the Council call her the “pre-eminent and singular member of the Church, and as its type and excellent exemplar in faith and charity.” Those who still advocate for the titles Co-Redemptrix or Mediatrix today are therefore often nostalgic for the preconciliar “Marian Age.” They also often refuse, implicitly or explicitly, other reforms of Vatican II.
A feminine image of God
But there is more. Throughout church history, Mary has not only “compensated” for an overly divine image of Christ; she has also compensated for an overly masculine image of God.
God is Father, yet Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church both testify that God also possesses maternal qualities.
“The parental tenderness of God can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,” says the catechism. “We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, though he is their origin and measure: no one is father as God is Father” (No. 239).
The catechism even footnotes several biblical passages in which God is described in feminine imagery.
When God is imagined exclusively as a stern, patriarchal father, Mary easily begins to function as “as a kind of ‘lightning rod’ before the Lord’s justice, as if she were a necessary alternative before the insufficiency of God’s mercy,” as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith notes.
Thus, we understand what is at stake: Whoever misunderstands who God is will inevitably misunderstand who Mary is.
A similar dynamic is at play with the “third Person” of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit. In Hebrew, the word for spirit (ruach) is feminine; in the Greek translation of the Bible, it became pneuma (neutral); later on, in Latin (spiritus), masculine. Yet the biblical tradition points to the fact that God’s Spirit was originally imagined in feminine terms. Throughout history, the Spirit—and thus God—has been masculinized.
Father Congar, in his magnum opus on the Holy Spirit, noted that Syriac Christians from the very beginning called the Spirit “our Mother.”
Father Laurentin rightly observed that, in fact, only of the Holy Spirit could it truly be said that “she” is Co-Redemptrix. Once again, Mary compensates for what has been forgotten in our understanding of God.
Yet alongside the “conservative maximalism” of the Marian Age—and of those who would like to return to it—there has emerged in recent decades a new “progressive maximalism.”
Some feminist theologians, in their justified efforts toward gender equality, have defended the title Co-Redemptrix precisely because it would place a female figure alongside the male Redeemer.
Liberation theologian Leonardo Boff likewise thought along those lines. He spoke of “Mary as the feminine face of God” and even of Mary as “the incarnation of the Holy Spirit.”
Here, too, we find a form of compensation. It is understandable, given that Christianity still bears the wounds of the patriarchal structures in which it arose and from which it has yet to be fully healed. Yet femininity already exists within God, and the Incarnation concerns Christ becoming human (homo), not merely male (vir)—though he did so in a male way.
But when we underemphasize the humanity of Christ or overemphasize the masculinity of God, other dimensions are pushed aside. Those repressed elements seek an outlet—and in the Catholic tradition, that outlet has often been found in Mary.
During the Marian Age, theologians loved to say that Mary was the Queen of Heaven, and that every new feast, dogma or title was another jewel added to her crown. But over time, that crown became far too heavy.
On both conservative and progressive sides, Mary is in some measure deified. The girl from Nazareth would surely scratch her crowned head in astonishment.
How should we talk about Mary today? The recent text from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith gives a beautiful definition: “The Blessed Virgin is the most perfect expression of Christ’s action that transforms our humanity. She is the feminine manifestation of all that Christ’s grace can accomplish in a human being.”
If we understand Mary in this way, we can imagine that every icon of Mary is like a mirror for us. When we, as Christians, look at her, we see how God wants to redeem every human being. We understand that, like her, we are invited to say “yes” to God’s proposal to heal our existence and our humanity. In her, we see the fulfilment of what he has already begun in us—and what, in Christ, will one day be brought to perfection.
Mary is the image of the church, said the Council. She is the image of the redeemed, saved, liberated, healed, reconciled People of God. A promise for women and men. And an invitation to say “yes,” over and over again, to the fatherly and motherly triune God who invites us to welcome him so we can become bearers in a world that is desperately in need of Christ—because it needs redemption, reconciliation and healing.
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