Today Holy Mother Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. While this title can often induce raised eyebrows and even stronger reactions in our Protestant brethren it is, in fact, not only an ancient one but one that also flows logically from her being the mother of Jesus. The Church in no way suggests this as a form of a “quaternity” (vs. the Trinity all Christian denominations profess) but rather as a reflection on the fact that as a mother she is not the mother of a “nature” but rather a “person” – not the “human nature of Jesus alone” but the human mother of the person of Jesus. Catholic Answers provides an excellent summary of both the logical and patristic basis for this title here, with a little excerpt below:
Although Mary is the Mother of God, she is not his mother in the sense that she is older than God or the source of her Son’s divinity, for she is neither. Rather, we say that she is the Mother of God in the sense that she carried in her womb a divine person—Jesus Christ, God “in the flesh” (2 John 7, cf. John 1:14)—and in the sense that she contributed the genetic matter to the human form God took in Jesus Christ.
It is right and fitting that we start each year with a proper calling-to-mind of the one inside whom the “re-birth” of the human race began. While on this side of the veil we may never fully understand just how her motherhood “worked” we can rest well in knowing and remembering that it was indeed a human motherhood and brought about by a uniquely divine act. Now would indeed be a good time to re-invest ourselves in doing our part to bring to fruition that work which was begun so many years ago. I pray Mary will intercede with her Son for us all in this new year to come.
