Mary embodies some of my most deeply held values.

As a young, poor woman from Galilee, she represents how God chose to enter into human existence in the most radically humble way.

Her "Magnificat" is one of the most powerful passages in the Gospels. And her own "yes" to God is, of course, the ultimate model of how a human being should relate to God.

These lessons, though, often become muddled when Mary is presented only as a model for women.

As the theologian Elizabeth Johnson wrote in her book on Mary, Truly Our Sister, Mary is often seen as "the ideal embodiment of feminine essence." She continues,

Whether her perfection then serves to disparage other women or to inspire them, her obedient, responsive, maternal image is at play in the community as the norm for women in contrast to men. When combined with an understanding of God and Christ as essentially masculine, the result reproduces in theology, spirituality and church polity nothing less than the patriarchal order of the world, now with divine sanction.

When viewed through this lens, Mary represents an impossible double standard.

The poet Mary Szybist told me that encountering Mary this way damaged her own sense of self-worth: "The message is that [as a woman] you are valued for your virginity and you are valued for being a mother.

To grow up to be neither a virgin nor a mother leaves the puzzle, under that kind of pressure of imagination, how does one value oneself?"

Mothers, too, struggle with how to relate to Mary's virginity and the emphasis the church places on it.

No one, after all, is both a virgin and a mother.

It was that double standard and the way Mary was invoked as "divine sanction" for the "patriarchal order of the world," that led me to keep her at arm's length through much of my life.

I often told people that, intellectually, I just didn't understand the appeal of Marian devotion.

What it was about Mary that, for example, led some of the most progressive Catholics I knew to pray the Rosary every day.

Mary, despite my hesitations, has always been present to me.

At times it feels I have been haunted by her, to borrow a phrase Dorothy Day used to speak about God.

Perhaps it is my many years of Catholic school, or my teenage habit of praying a Rosary on my morning drive every day, but I have always found myself reflexively reciting Hail Marys in life's liminal moments: washing my hands, waiting for a red light to change, watching hot coffee drip into the carafe.

Without ever really thinking about it, I am always talking to her, always in the same words, echoing the Annunciation ("Hail Mary, full of grace…"), and finally asking her to remember me now and at the hour of my death.

My mental hangups with Mary, though, kept me from talking to her beyond these almost unconscious recitations.

I tried to separate the liberating images of Mary from the oppressive ones, but I never could.

I found that the figure of Mary was too entangled in arguments that did not resonate with me or my understanding of myself as a woman.

Then I became pregnant, and my struggling relationship with Mary became impossible to ignore. Continue reading

Maybe we attended prayer vigils with our families in grade school or high school, or maybe we just read news magazines and argued with kids on the school bus.

Either way, the questions surrounding abortion opened our minds to some fundamental moral questions.

What do people owe to one another?

What is a human life, and what is it worth?

When must we set aside our personal goals for the sake of something bigger?

I can still remember sitting in seventh-grade Spanish class, turning over the phrases in my head: "right to life," "unique human being," "woman's right to choose."

Even as it shaped our moral sensibilities, the pro-life movement also served for many of us as a kind of primer for politics in the United States.

We may have come of age with deep antagonism toward the American judiciary, but at the same time, we also had serious reasons to reflect on the value of civic peace.

We reflected on the ethical and pragmatic reasons for pursuing worthy goals within the constraints of our political system.

We talked a lot in the 90s and 2000s about "the culture of death," and also debated what might be involved in building a culture of life.

For many years now, the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade has unified pro-life Americans.

We had our disagreements, but in a strange way, our shared opposition to this Supreme Court verdict provided the canopy for a very large political tent.

But the recent leak to Politico of a draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito suggests that the Supreme Court will soon strike down Roe v. Wade, and a corner may finally be turned. We must consider the road ahead.

It is a strange moment.

The recent leak to Politico of a draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito suggests that the Supreme Court will soon strike down Roe v. Wade.

We must consider the road ahead.

If Roe is overturned, pro-life Catholics likely will rejoice, but we also must consider the ways in which the political landscape more broadly, as well as the dynamics among the various factions of the pro-life movement, may change as a result.

It may feel harder to work together in pursuit of honourable goals.

Nevertheless, we can.

It is possible because the groundwork has already been laid.

Across all those years of praying for the right judges, we understood that originalist legal theories could not really do all the work.

Strong legal protections for the unborn would be impossible without the support of a given state's voters.

Even with amenable voters, laws can only do so much. The state can and should provide some protections for unborn children, but a culture of life must go further. Children have enormous needs that cannot be met by laws. They need families. Most especially, they need parents.

The Face of Motherhood

The first eyes to meet a newborn's gaze should normally be those of the infant's mother.

She is the person whose voice a child has heard for months on end.

Her body was the child's original home.

Sometimes there are serious reasons why a mother cannot nurture her child, but in a culture of life, we would normally expect those eyes to be there, searching the tiny face, making first contact with the world's newest citizen.

No law can make this happen, but it needs to happen, at least in most cases, if we truly want to protect and support our children.

What this means, of course, is that a pro-life society must support mothers.

They are indispensable to the good of children, and to society as a whole.

What does this mean on a cultural level?

This is a terribly difficult question, not least because it plunges us into broader controversies about the status of women generally.

Historically, many or most societies have presumed that a woman's primary responsibilities were to her household and children.

Her civicstatus was generally mediated through her husband, her father or another familial male.

Children have enormous needs that cannot be met by laws.

As a somewhat natural but unfortunate extension of this principle, most societies have treated women as something less than full-fledged citizens.

In many places, until recently they were a protected class, with only some of the rights and duties that define citizens.

In the United States today, we consider that sort of arrangement to be unacceptable.

Women do deserve to be citizens, with full access to civic society.

As a woman, I am grateful that we have taken this laudable step, affirming the full dignity of women.

Still, it remains undeniably difficult today to give women the moral and material support they need to be present for their children while also ensuring the opportunity to pursue outside work (whether out of desire or necessity) or other personal interests.

Particularly on the political right, some of the proffered solutions are fairly insulting to mothers.

It is rare for these to reach the caricatured extremes of the recent book by Stephanie Gordon, Ask Your Husband, which posits that women should do little without following the instruction of the book's title.

But many people still seem to want women to diminish themselves pre-emptively, either personally or professionally, cutting out any personal interests or pursuits as if that could prove to the world that they are ready and available for mothering.

Another approach, often favoured by pro-life Catholics, calls for a greatly enhanced social safety net.

It posits that a strong safety net allows expectant mothers to feel confident that they can raise their children without experiencing dire poverty.

Thus, they may be less likely to seek abortions.

The situation would be still better if women could count on extended families and communities to offer practical help, regardless of the availability of the child's father.

Instead of scolding or punishing women for becoming pregnant (possibly under difficult circumstances), they argue, we should embrace the mother and child together, ensuring that they have what they need to thrive.

There is much to admire in this position.

It replaces harsh judgment with gentle compassion.

It recognizes that mothers both need and deserve material support, especially through pregnancy and their children's early years.

It is shocking and shameful to read stories of mothers in the United States who deliver their babies and head out within 48 hours to deliver pizzas or drive Ubers, just to keep food on their family's table.

As a society, we need to find better ways to support families, especially those raising children under adverse circumstances.

As a society, we need to find better ways to support families, especially those raising children under adverse circumstances.

Realistically, though, we must recognize that this strategy has its limits.

We cannot buy good mothers because maternity has moral and spiritual dimensions that no social program can reach.

Across the decades, pro-lifers have battled Roe v. Wade here in the United States with remarkable tenacity and conviction.

Meanwhile, in the world as a whole, abortion has become far more available, while birth rates have plummeted.

We need to face the glaring reality that motherhood is extremely difficult, with or without a network of support.

Social safety nets have their place, but if we treat them as a reliable solution to the problem of abortion, we risk repeating a mistake that already undermines a culture of life: We risk making mothers invisible.

Invisible Mothers

Invisible mothers are not a uniquely modern problem.

This became increasingly clear to me over the years as I reflected on my maternity.

I was raised on Bible stories, and I noticed from an early age that the Bible richly affirmed the value of children.

In the early years of my marriage, my husband and I struggled with infertility, and I was grateful for the many stories about remarkable biblical women who experienced similar trials.

I am now the mother of 5 children, and as my family grew, I was somewhat discomfited to notice that, although numerous descendants are promised to some as a reward for their faith, the Bible offers surprisingly few examples of mothers nurturing large families. Continue reading

It explained: "Curiously, Europe's lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. . . .

Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like [the Scandinavian countries], have among the highest birthrates."

The author called this "the fertility paradox."

These arguments actually have an almost religious hold on the social policy architects of the European Union.

As Jean-Claude Chesnois summarizes, "in Sweden, . . . empowerment of women insures against a very low birth rate."

With Sweden again in mind, sociologist Peter McDonald asserts that "In a context of high gender equity in individual-oriented institutions, higher gender equity in family-oriented institutions will tend to raise fertility."

J.M. Hoem links Sweden's success to a "softening" of "the effects of women's labor force participation on their life sufficiently to reduce the inherent role conflict [relative to motherhood] to a manageable level."

Referring to Sweden, Paul Demeny concludes that "few social policies enjoy greater unqualified support from demographers and sociologists than those seeking" to make "participation of women in the labor force compatible with raising children."

Of course, the deeper source of anxiety driving these analysts has been the plummeting fertility of the European peoples, a continent-wide development. In the year 2014, the 28 nations of the European Union reported a combined fertility of 1.58 live births per woman, only 75% of the births needed to replace a generation.

Almost all of these nations have recorded declines in numbers over the past decades, with deaths outnumbering births.

Moreover, these declines are expected to continue.

Eurostat, the statistics-gathering body of the European Commission, reports—using a set of assumptions concerning emigration, fertility, mortality, and net migration—"that the projected number of deaths in the EU-28 will be higher than the projected number of births for the whole of the period 2016 to 2080."

Furthermore, the percentage of the very elderly (over 80) will increase from 5.1% in 2014 to 12.3% in 2080, while the working-age population will continue to shrink.

The median age of the population is expected to increase by 4.2 years in the same period.

The report concludes, "ageing will continue across all of the EU Member States, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland."

The Eurostat officials' only hope is that "migration has the potential to help delay the ageing process in some of the EU Member States."

However, they acknowledge that "it may also speed up the process of ageing in those Member States which are characterized by a relatively high proportion of their working-age population leaving, for example in search of work."

And not only is the population shrinking and aging. The institutions which historically have held up childbearing are failing.

In Northern Europe, marriage is increasingly rare, replaced by cohabitation; in Southern Europe, young adults increasingly avoid both marriage and cohabitation, refusing to form childbearing unions of any sort.

This is the essence of the joint European family and population crisis of the twenty-first century. Continue reading

A native of Texas, Trasancos's love of nature and insatiable curiosity led her to eventually earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Penn State University and then to work for DuPont Chemical. Trasancos was led to the Catholic Church and conversion by what she calls an "empirical" method: observation of the order of the world around her and of the effect that a budding faith had on her life.

She eventually left her research position to become a stay-at-home mom, and her burgeoning interest in the Catholic Faith led her to earn a Master's degree in systematic theology from Holy Apostles College & Seminary.

She now teaches science courses for Kolbe Academy Online Homeschool Program, teaches a course on "Science in the Light of Faith" at Holy Apostles, and writes regularly about science and faith for various Catholic publications.

Because of her education and her personal journey to and into the Church, Dr. Trasancos is in a unique position to address questions about faith and science. Such questions have been present in Western civilization ever since Thales suggested thunderbolts may have an origin apart from the hand of Zeus, but in our technologically advanced age the second objection to the existence of God raised in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae appears with increasing frequency: that the universe can be explained without God—and many believers find themselves ill-equipped to deal with such questions.

Dr. Transancos's new book Particles of Faith: A Catholic Guide to Navigating Science (Ave Maria Press, 2016) is intended to serve as a guide for Catholics who desire to engage these issues. Writing as a scientist, a theologian, and a mother, she brings all three perspectives together to "show how a Catholic person works through these questions of faith and science." Continue reading

Sources

• The Catholic World Report, article by Nicholas Senz, Director of Religious Education at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Mill Valley, CA.
• Image: stacytrasancos.com

It being a school night, I wrestled with the decision to bring her, but the promise of good media about the faith outweighed the practical concern of homework completion. She seemed elated that I was allowing her a night off. As we left the house to meet my mom and dad, a spirit of joy and anticipation filled the space between us.

Within minutes of arriving, that joyful spirit had all but disintegrated. Unexpected circumstances sent my daughter descending into a spiral of teenage angst, complete with yelling. Surrounding us were people I knew from church.

I felt sure they were watching our exchange and my inability to control the situation. I felt sure they thought I had no place at a film about the Mother of God when, at present, I was actively earning my title as "Worst Mother Ever."

As the film was about to begin, she took off to find a seat far away from me. I wanted to leave. While stewing in this emotional soup of anxiety, embarrassment and self-doubt, I heard a still, small voice within that told me to stay put.

Due to plain exhaustion, my usually stubborn self listened and stayed. It didn't take long to figure out why I was meant to be there.

The film portrayed the Church, ten years after the resurrection of Christ, standing at a crossroad. The disciples were faced with new challenges and confounding arguments.

All looked to Peter for answers, for leadership and yet he felt he had none to give. With the advent of adolescence in my home, I too felt myself to be at a crossroad. Daily I faced new challenges and confounding arguments. Continue reading

• Lisa Lohenry Gilligan is a wife and mother who has been employed in parish ministry for over 20 years.

But when I looked around at my friends, all in a public school in South Florida, I saw something very different: everyone was hungry for success, and so eager to go to college.

I didn't see peers that were lazy, entitled and narcissistic. I saw people who were entrepreneurial, incredibly philanthropic, very liberal and really hard-working.

So at 16, I created a radio show called Teen Talk Live—think The View gone Millennial—and pitched it to Clear Channel Radio in South Florida.

Other opportunities grew from there.

• When I was 18, my mom and I put together our first family mission trip on behalf of feminine hygiene care.
• We went to Nairobi, Kenya for almost three weeks and distributed hundreds of thousands of feminine hygiene products to women in need, which was coupled by an educational effort about the menstrual cycle.
• I put together a four-part docu-series, and then U by Kotex tapped me to be their Millennial spokesperson.

That led me into the branding world.

I loved the impact that working with brands has when I talk about how to market to Millennials, trying to get people to understand what makes this generation tick.

Millennials are the generation of the future. And we are also here and now.

We are the largest population in the United States. Companies have to revamp what worked 10 years ago, because it's not going to work today or tomorrow.

There is no one-size-fits-all description for the Millennial woman.

Old, cookie-cutter descriptions of men and women's roles no longer apply.

Millennial women get to pursue whatever passion or desire they want, because we have the means to do so today.

Thanks to technology we have a lot more resources to take advantage of.

The Millennial woman is more confident than ever, and she has more of a voice than she ever did have in the past.

We have more of the determination to be entrepreneurial because we have cheerleaders, too.

There are no longer taboos about women working, and we have more supporters.

We're experiencing a resurgence of the feminist movement in our own time.

It's not necessarily taking off our bras and rallying down the streets, but it is being led by women like Sophia Amoruso, author of #GIRLBOSS and founder of the Nasty Gal clothing Empire.

People like Beyonce, Sheryl Sandberg and Hillary Clinton are totally breaking down gender barriers.

Those are the women that are really inspiring the Millennial woman.

The ultimate Millennial woman doesn't let her gender hold her back whatsoever.

She's badass.

How Millennial women are redefining motherhood, continue reading

- Chelsea Korst is a TV and radio host, host of the #MillennialTalk Twitter chat, and a Millennial branding expert who helps companies understand the lifestyle and values of our generation.

Sr Luzia Premoli, superior general of the Combonian Missionary Sisters, was appointed a member of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples on September 13.

She told the Catholic News Agency that this took her by surprise.

"I did not expect it . . . but I was also joyful, because the appointment is a concretisation of Pope Francis's wish for more women in high ranking positions in the Catholic Church," Sr Premoli said.

The Brazilian native added that her appointment "shows Pope Francis's commitment" to having more women as decision-makers in the ranks of the Church.

While women have already served in the Vatican, as consultants or under-secretaries and members of pontifical councils, there had never been a woman appointed as a member of a congregation, the higher ranking departments of the Roman curia, the CNA article stated.

Sr Premoli spent eight years as a missionary in Mozambique, and another eight in her homeland.

As a missionary, she was impressed that "in the midst of tragedies, women always carried their children on their shoulders, and that children were quiet and calm, as though the mother's touch let them feel protected".

Motherhood is a contribution women can give to Church's life, Sr Premoli told CNA.

"The Church is called ‘mother', and a mother must bear the announcement of this full and joyful life Jesus has given us."

She underscored that "although the Church has given an organisation with almost exclusively men in the top ranks, the communities are full of women that give their personal contribution to the life of the Church".

The biggest contribution women can give to Church's life is "the way women gaze at things, and their being heartfelt".

"Women have this peculiar passion, which probably comes from their being capable of maternity," Sr Premoli explained.

Her missionary experience also showed a sharp contrast between throwaway cultures of plenty and poorer societies where even small scraps of cloth or soap are considered valuable.

Among the other appointees to the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples on September 13 was Cardinal George Pell, prefect of the Vatican's Secretariat for the Economy.

Sources

• Catholic News Agency
• Vatican News
• Image: Comboni Missionaries

But it wasn't just that kind of invisible. It was that no one was in the least bit interested in the fact that I had a baby. In a way, this was a good thing. Families are a private affair, and I was free to have one. And yet, it was this freedom, I felt, which also made me invisible. I was free to raise my child as I saw fit. The flip side was that no one cared. They cared about my academic work. But they didn't care about this work.

And yet, I thought that they should care. Not in a busy-body, ‘I'm going to call the social worker if I'm concerned about your parenting' sort of way, but in a ‘Thank you for raising a future citizen' sort of way. I had always been interested in politics, but now being a mother with a baby seemed about as far away from politics as I could get. I couldn't help feeling, though, that in some way, raising her was a political activity. It was political in the sense that what I did in my home - how I treated her, and the values I taught her - would have an impact upon her. And she, in turn, would one day have an impact on those around her in wider society.

Is parenting a political activity? Continue reading

Source

• Holly Hamiliton-Bleakley in Mercatornet

Holly Hamilton-Bleakley, mother of six children, has an M.Phil and a PhD in Intellectual History and Political Thought from the University of Cambridge (England), as well as a BA in Economics from Wellesley College. She has published many academic articles on the history of moral philosophy.

He and other researchers, including Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond, have found that there's more science than previously thought to being equipped for motherhood. Mothers are better at problem solving, handling stress and at completing certain memory tasks.

Franssen's aim has been to figure out what is happening in the brains of mothers to warrant these advantages. He designs experiments with mother and non-mother (but still female) rats to see how both groups perform on tasks such as navigating a maze. Then, he studies brain tissue samples from the rats to determine what neurons were activated. Does being a mother give a woman more neurons? Or, are a mother's neurons bigger or more efficient? Franssen explains.

You have this theory about revving racecar engines and pregnant women's brains. Can you explain? What do the two have in common?

It is funny comparison. At the revving stage, a racecar's engine is getting prepped for that race. It seems like there is a lot of evidence to suggest that is actually what's happening in the mother's brain during the period of pregnancy. There are changes happening to neurons. They are increasing in size or some neurons have been shown to not only grow but to potentially increase their capacity to produce protein in one part of the brain or perhaps increase their neuronal branches to make communications from one neuron to another neuron that it wasn't talking with before—all in anticipation of the high workload of caring for a child.

So, what advantages do mothers have over non-mothers, behaviorally?

It is quite the gamut of things that moms can do better than non-moms in the rat world. It is always fair to start by pointing out that rats are uni-parental. Continue reading

Sources

• Smithsonian.com
• Image: The Guardian