By Clement Harrold

January 17, 2026

Motherhood is an amazing gift that only women have. Yet so many of our fellow citizens have been programmed to view it instead as a burden, an obstacle to career advancement, or even a disease to be avoided at all costs through sterilization, contraception, and abortion.

If we are serious about restoring the dignity of women in today’s world, then we should start by rediscovering the beauty of motherhood. And there is no better way to do this than by looking to Our Lady, whom Sacred Scripture upholds as the mother of God, the mother of the Church, and the highest honor of the human race.  

Mother of God

In 431 A.D., the Council of Ephesus proclaimed Mary as the Theotokos. This title is a blend of two Greek words: Theos, meaning “God,” and tokos, which means something like “birth-giver” or “bringing forth.” Theotokos thus designates Mary as the one who gave birth to God, and it is usually translated into English as “mother of God” or “God-bearer.”

The identification of Mary as the mother of God follows directly from the dogma of the Holy Trinity: Jesus is God; Mary is the mother of Jesus; therefore, Mary is the mother of God.  

This remarkable mystery is also implicit in the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel. If we look at St. Luke’s use of the title “Lord” (kyrios in Greek), the first ten occurrences all clearly refer to God:

• “And they were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless” (Luke 1:6)
• “according to the custom of the priesthood, it fell to him by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense” (Luke 1:9)
• “And there appeared to him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense” (Luke 1:11)
• “for he will be great before the Lord” (Luke 1:15)
• “And he will turn many of the sons of Israel to the Lord their God” (Luke 1:16)
• “to make ready for the Lord a people prepared” (Luke 1:17)
• “Thus the Lord has done to me in the days when he looked on me” (Luke 1:25)
• “And he came to her and said, ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!’” (Luke 1:28)
• “and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David” (Luke 1:32)
• “And Mary said, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word’” (Luke 1:38) 

Luke firmly sets it in his reader’s mind that God is the Lord. But then notice how Elizabeth greets Mary at the visitation: “And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43). Elizabeth’s greeting sure seems to affirm Mary as the mother of God!

Now a skeptic might fairly respond that kyrios can also simply refer to a human master, and in fact it’s used this way on multiple occasions later on in Luke’s Gospel. While this is certainly correct, the fact remains that within his infancy narrative Luke does seem to be highlighting the startling truth that the divine Lord has entered the womb of a humble maiden from Nazareth.

If we look at Luke’s remaining 16 uses of kyrios in the first two chapters of his Gospel, we again find that the title almost always refers explicitly to God (see Luke 1:45, 46, 58, 66, 68, 76; 2:9a, 9b, 15, 22, 23a, 23b, 24, 26, 39). The only ambiguous verse is Luke 2:11: “for to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord.”  

While it’s possible that this verse is simply identifying Jesus as an important royal figure, this seems unlikely. Of Luke’s 27 uses of kyrios in the first two chapters of his Gospel, 25 of them refer explicitly to God. It seems more likely, therefore, that 2:11 is deliberately proclaiming Jesus as a divine figure, while Elizabeth’s greeting in 1:43 is recognizing Mary as the holy mother of God.  

Mother of the Church

A prayerful reading of Scripture reveals Mary to be not just the biological mother of the divine Redeemer, but also the spiritual mother of all Christians. We see this in St. John’s passion account:

But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 19:25–27)

It strains credulity to say that Jesus’ only concern in this passage is to take care of last minute logistical arrangements before His death, as if He somehow forgot to jot down His last will and testament prior to His arrest. This is a point made by the eminent biblical scholar Raymond Brown in his famous commentary on the Gospel of John:

[W]e doubt that Jesus’ filial solicitude is the main import of the Johannine scene. Such a non-theological interpretation would make this episode a misfit amid the highly symbolic episodes that surround it in the crucifixion narrative. Moreover, the Gospel gives several indications that something more profound is in mind. … A deeper meaning is also suggested by the verse that follows this episode in John: “After this, [Jesus was] aware that all was now finished.” The action of Jesus in relation to his mother and the Beloved Disciple completes the work that the Father has given Jesus to do and fulfills the Scripture. (The Gospel According to John: XIII-XXI, p. 923)

Brown correctly notes that the Gospel offers several indications that something more profound is going on. The first of these is the fact that John’s Gospel never refers to Mary or the beloved disciple by their personal names. Mary is known simply as the mother of Jesus; as for the beloved disciple, he has traditionally been identified as John the son of Zebedee (the same John who authored the Gospel), but he is never explicitly named as such.  

One effect of this literary technique is that both Mary and the beloved disciple take on a more universal role in the fourth Gospel. The beloved disciple isn’t simply John the son of Zebedee; he is a placeholder for what every reader of the Gospel is called to become, namely, one who abides in Christ’s love (see John 15:9; cf. 13:23).  

Something similar can be said about Mary when we pay attention to the inner logic of John’s Gospel. More than any of the other evangelists, John frames the Christian life as the process of becoming alter Christus, ipse Christus—“another Christ, Christ himself” (see, e.g., John 6:56; 14:20; 15:4–5).  

If we listen to what John is telling us, we soon discover that beloved discipleship consists in becoming one with Jesus. But if that is the case, then John’s decision to exclusively refer to Mary as “the mother of Jesus” takes on a whole new resonance. This symbolic nomenclature becomes an invitation to see Mary as our own spiritual mother, precisely because her Son has made us members of His own mystical body.

As early as the third century (around 225 A.D.), the great biblical exegete Origen gave his endorsement to this interpretation:

We may therefore make bold to say that the Gospels are the first fruits of all the Scriptures, but that of the Gospels that of John is the first fruits. No one can apprehend the meaning of it except he have lain on Jesus’ breast and received from Jesus Mary to be his mother also. Such [a] one must he become who is to be another John … Is it not the case that every one who is perfect lives himself no longer but Christ lives in him [see Gal 2:20]; and if Christ lives in him, then it is said of him to Mary, “Behold your son Christ.” (Commentary on John, 1.6)

Origen teaches us that, like the beloved disciple, we must make it our aim to become ever more Christlike. When we do this, we begin to see why it was so important to Jesus to give us His mother even as He was gasping for breath on the cross; He gave her to us so that we could learn from her example and benefit from her maternal care.  

“And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home (eis ta idia).” The Greek phrase used here more literally means “into his own.” It’s a reminder of the universal significance of this action. Beloved discipleship isn’t merely about John the son of Zebedee taking Mary into his home; it is about all of us taking her into our own hearts and lives.

And this makes sense because, as the book of Revelation reminds us, every Christian is a child of Mary: “Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Rev 12:17). 

The Highest Honor of Our Race

When Mass is celebrated on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (December 12) in the United States, the Responsorial Psalm is taken from the book of Judith. The refrain, spoken by the congregation, is a paraphrasing of Judith 15:9: “You are the highest honor of our race.”

The Church recognizes these words as prophetically pointing forward to Our Lady. By reciting them in the liturgy, we are invited to reflect anew on the radical mystery of God taking a poor, simple, Jewish woman as His mother.

In his book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, the secular historian Tom Holland captures something of the grandeur of this mystery:

No human being had been so honoured; no human being raised so high. . . . “O womb, O flesh, in whom and from whom the creator was created, and God was made incarnate.” The virgin mother who had redeemed the fault of Eve, the mortal who had conceived within her uterus the timeless infinitude of the divine, Mary could embody for even the humblest and most unlettered peasant all the numerous paradoxes that lay at the heart of the Christian faith. … Enshrined at the very heart of the great mysteries elucidated by Christianity, of birth and death, of happiness and suffering, of communion and loss, was the love of a woman for her child. (pp. 276–77)

In a world that has forgotten how to honor women as women, Mary stands as an enduring witness that motherhood is not a problem to be solved, but rather a profound gift through which God chose to redeem the world. 

Further Reading

Stephanie Gray Connors, My Body for You: A Pro-Life Message for a Post-Roe World (Emmaus Road Publishing, 2024).

Tim Staples, Behold Your Mother: A Biblical and Historical Defense of the Marian Doctrines (Catholic Answers Press, 2017).