Why did Rome try to ban this image that portrays Mary as a priest?

More than a century ago, senior Vatican figures decided to suppress a traditional devotion promoted for centuries by saints, popes and theologians that portrays Mary as a priest.

Mary at the Annunciation is over-shadowed by the Holy Spirit and thus gives Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, human life; Mary at the Presentation in the Temple presents him to the world; Mary at the Crucifixion has to partake in the sacrifice of her son as the final and necessary act of redemption. The analogies to the priest offering the Mass are clear: Mary carries out in her life journey what the priest performs sacramentally.

The French theologian Rene´ Laurentin launched his career as a distinguished Mariologist in 1952 with Marie, L'E´glise et le sacerdoce (“Mary, the Church and the Priesthood”). He identifies four phases in the history of the concept of the “Virgin Priest”. In the first, from the origins of the Church to 1050, associations between Mary and the priesthood were only sporadic; the idea only began to flourish, Laurentin concluded, in the High Middle Ages, an age of intense Marian devotion.

However Ally Kateusz, a researcher at the pro-women’s ordination Wijngaards Institute, claims that “recent scholarship is recovering more and more evidence of women church leaders in many early Christian communities. Both Jesus’s mother and Mary Magdalene appear to have been important role models for female leaders”. In Mary and Early Christian Women, Kateusz provides several examples of imagery from the early centuries of the Church in which Mary is pictured with the episcopal pallium (West) or omophorion (East). In these images, Mary is not only depicted as a priest but as a bishop. Furthermore, images of Mary from that period often show her in the “orans posture” – with her hands extended to the side and facing upwards – like a priest presiding at Mass.

In what Laurentin describes as its second phase, the tradition takes a passionate turn under the influence of St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and others. Homilies for the Feast of Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary (or the Presentation of Jesus) speak of Mary offer- ing her son both in the Temple and at the Cross. In one sermon, Bernard wrote: “Offer your son, O sacred Virgin, and present to the Lord the blessed fruit of your womb. Offer this holy victim, pleasing to God, for the reconciliation of us all.”

Laurentin’s third phase is the era of the Counter-Reformation. In Rome in 1600, the Italian poet and dramatist Giovanni Battista Guarini wrote The Sacred Reign of the Virgin Mary, in which he saw the place of Mary by the Cross in John’s Gospel as equivalent to the priest standing by the altar. He also writes, of Christ and Mary, “There has not been, and will not be, any priest more worthy or more holy than they; for they were without sin, which cannot be said of the priests of the New, nor of the Old, Testaments.”

The theologians of the influential French school of spirituality adopted the Marian priest theme with enthusiasm. Jean-Jacques Olier (1608-57), founder of the St Sulpice seminary, wrote that Jesus’ human life was offered up at his death, and this human life came from Mary; thus she offered her own substance for the redemption of the world.

The fourth and final phase began in the late-nineteenth century, when the Belgian priest Oswald van den Berghe’s book Mary and the Priesthood (1872) was published with a letter-preface by Pius IX. Marie Deluil- Martiny, who founded the Daughters of the Sacred Heart, composed a prayer to “Marie Sacerdoce”. In 1906, Pius X commissioned a prayer to the “Virgo Sacerdos” and attached indulgences to it. Mary, he said, quoting St Antoninus, the fifteenth-century Dominican theologian and Archbishop of Florence, possessed all the grace and dignity that can be found in the priesthood; each and every human virtue could be attributed to her.

In spite of this momentum, before the end of Pius X’s papacy the first move was made within the Vatican to suppress the devotion to Mary as Virgin Priest. A decree of 29 March 1916, during the pontificate of Benedict XV, refers back to a decision of the Holy Office of 15 January 1913, ordering that “images of the Blessed Virgin Mary clothed in priestly garments are to be rejected”. Such images had been proliferating rapidly at the turn of the twentieth century. The suppression was confirmed under Pius XI by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Rafael Merry del Val, who wrote in the clerical monthly journal La Palestra del Clero in 1927 that the concept of Mary as Virgin Priest was one which “less enlightened minds would not be able to fully understand”.

Why was a tradition with such a long pedigree and such potent theological symbolism suppressed? Sarah Jane Boss, co-founder of the Centre for Marian Studies, suggests that the growing participation of women in lay activity together with the opening of moves to ordain women in other churches made some in the Church anxious that people might think that Mary, a woman, had actually been ordained. Even Laurentin, while faithful to the magisterium, admitted that the tradition had not been suppressed because it was the- ologically incoherent but because it associated the priesthood with a woman.

The eleventh-century abbess and polymath Hildegard of Bingen provides a good example of the tension between the tradition of Mary’s priesthood and the tradition that only men could be ordained. In Scivias, while supporting the widespread reforms of the clergy in her day, she affirms that women cannot be priests – but the same time, she includes some major themes of the Mary-priest tradition.

She writes of a female figure, both Mary and Ecclesia, the Church, offering Christ’s blood on the Cross. Mary’s Annunciation was a model of priesthood, her conception of Christ analogous to the priest consecrating the host. And, although unable to be ordained, in a special and mystical sense, she writes that female virgins have access to “the priesthood and the ministry of [the] altar”.

The traditional association of Mary with the Church seen in Hildegard, which goes back at least to St Ambrose of Milan in the fourth century, might suggest a rationale for the images of Mary as Virgin Priest. If Mary represents the Church, and the Church is a priestly community in which the sacraments of redemption are administered, then perhaps there is nothing controversial about these images. Nevertheless, Mary is a woman, and therefore, inescapably, the image of the Virgin Priest is the image of a woman dressed in priestly vestments.