The Catholic devotion to Mary has never come easily to me.

I know Mary is, for some people, the way they discovered and really developed a relationship with Jesus.

But for me, it was the opposite. Jesus is the one who introduced his Mother to me.

I knew Jesus for several years before I developed or even saw a reason to develop a relationship with his Mother. My devotion to Jesus informed my relationship with Mary.

In fact, it becomes clearer to me every day that love for the Word who revealed himself to us as a newborn babe is absolutely inseparable from love for Mary.

No human baby can be separated from his or her human parents. Even if a parent never cares for his or her child, every parent passes on their genetic material to their offspring.

The same is true of Jesus. You may have thought of this before but it is something that comes back to my prayer regularly: Jesus is genetically 100 percent from Mary.

As Ignatius of Antioch once put it in his Epistle to the Trallians, "He who forms all men in the womb, was Himself really in the womb, and made for Himself a body of the seed of the Virgin."

Jesus must have really resembled his mother!

Jesus was not just deposited into the womb of his mother; he was her true offspring in his humanity. For this reason, in the 5th century, the Council of Ephesus affirmed that we can call Mary "Theotokos," the Mother of God, because Mary gave birth to Jesus who is one divine person with two natures.

The mystery of salvation can never be separated from Mary, the human mother of Jesus. Continue reading

• Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble, FSP, is the author of The Prodigal You Love: Inviting Loved Ones Back to the Church.

The one constant between then and now is a state hostile to free minds and free speech.

The prosecution of the singers from the all-female band Pussy Riot represents a new low in political repression in post-Soviet Russia. But it is also a cautionary tale about the entanglement of church and state.

On Feb. 21, in the midst of Vladimir Putin's campaign to reclaim the presidency, Pussy Riot brought its guerrilla theater to Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Wearing their trademark colorful short dresses and balaclavas, the young women ran out in front of the altar and began a song-and-dance act which opened with a "punk prayer chant": "Mother of God, Blessed Virgin, deliver us from Putin." Subsequent lyrics — only a small portion of which was audible before the group was hustled away — denounced the close ties between the church and the regime ("the head of the KGB is their patron saint").

Maria Alekhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, and Yekaterina Samutsevich were charged with "hate-motivated hooliganism" and held without bail, even though two of them have small children. The charge carries penalties of two to seven years' imprisonment; the prosecution is asking for three. There is no jury, and the judge has shown blatant bias against the defense throughout the trial, which wrapped up Wednesday. The verdict is due next week.

This case is clearly political, and is part of a larger crackdown on discontent. Yet it is also no accident that the group's performance in the cathedral — and not, say, an earlier protest in which they sang a vulgarity-laced anti-Putin song on Red Square — was singled out. Turning dissent into sacrilege, the indictment accused the women of malicious intent to "demean the feelings and beliefs" of Orthodox Christians; in his closing argument, the prosecutor asserted that their lyrics "blasphemed against God." Continue reading