As children, we have two mothers on earth and one in heaven; as adults, we have two mothers in heaven and one on earth. Christians, or at least Catholics, always have one mother on earth and one in heaven. In time, we can and most certainly will lose the mother who gave birth to us; but even then we will not be left orphans: we will never lose the Holy Mother Church, since like the other two, she precedes us and will continue on earth after our time, until the end of age.
We receive the life that God transmitted to us through our mother who gave birth to us. This is our individual mother, who from an early age takes us to the Holy Mother Church, where we find a mother who is, at the same time, temporal like the one who gave birth to us and "eternal" or, better said, temporally eternal because she will last as long as time exists. Thus, we always have two mothers on earth and one in heaven, or two in heaven and one on earth. We are never orphans because wherever we are, we always have one or two mothers who console and comfort us.
OUR MOTHER ON EARTH
Mother... Such a tiny word, my lips well know, that you are the size of Heaven and only smaller than God. Mario Quintana
Mama, that's the first word we learn, papa being the second. These are the only two people whom we have never addressed by their first name. I will never forget the funeral for the father of a priest who throughout it all never uttered his father's name, neither at the beginning, nor in the homily, nor in the canon, nor in the farewell prayers, but always referred him simply as “Dad".
Our mother has no name, she is simply our mother, and when we relate to her even as adults, we go back to being the child that we were, we once again submit ourselves to her. For a mother, the child never grows up; for a child, his mother never ages. I remember the affection and respect with which my mother, in her 40s, treated her own mother. Children learn to be children when they see how their parents relate to their own parents.
Motherhood versus fatherhood
It is said that mothers love more /the child worse behaved / That must be why I love you so much / Despite you hurting me so much. Horace Menano, Lonely Fado
For us Catholics, it is not unusual that St. Joseph, who was only the adoptive father of Jesus and not his biological father, is the patron saint of fathers. It is only right that this should be the case for two reasons:
A fatherhood that involves raising and educating the child is more important than a mere biological one; being a biological father costs nothing, it involves only a sexual act that is supposedly done out of love and with love; being an educative father implies a lifetime of commitment, dedication and sacrifice for the child.
Additionally, it is fair that St. Joseph should be the patron saint of fathers, fatherhood or fatherly love because deep down when we think about it, all fathers are "existentially" adoptive fathers. In contrast, being a biological mother involves conceiving and feeding the child, first inside her womb, and then after birth from within, in breastfeeding: therefore, being a mother is a physical, psychological and spiritual experience, whereas being the biological father happens only at the genetic level, not at the physical, affective or spiritual.
All fathers, biological as well as adoptive, come to know their children much later. And it takes years for this child to recognize his father; at first, he only knows the breast, then later he sees beyond it, and sees his mama. It is only when the baby starts eating porridge that he starts to recognize his papa.
During the first few years of his existence, the baby does not need the father, his mother is enough for him. Only when he begins to open up to the world, and precisely as the assistance needed to detach himself from his mother, the father helps the child to integrate into society, being fundamental at the time of socialization.
Later in life, as a teenager, youth and adult, his father is "a wandering Aramean": he is always more distant from his son than the mother. Mother and house in the sense of home are one and the same; the mother is always a safe haven to which one can return to escape the storms of life.
Both the paternal and the maternal love are unconditional, but if we had to choose which is more unconditional, most of us would not even hesitate to say that it is the maternal. The father is more demanding and somehow to give love he needs to see fruits. How much some fathers love their children is subjective to the triumphs, or lack of them, they see in their children's lives. Some fathers even abandon their children when the latter do follow their father's script or do not do well in life.
The mother cannot help but love the fruit of her womb and unlike the father who can even push away the child who does not succeed in life, the mother is able to devote herself even more to that child, precisely because life has been unkind to him. Just like St. Monica who prayed for 30 years for her son’s conversion, a mother never gives up.
Love versus instinct
Jesus summarized the ten commandments with their hundreds of additional ones into "love of God above all things and love of neighbour as yourself", and said that the entire Old Testament is summed up by this. Those who prevaricated and did not keep the commandments would have to make sacrifices, to give something of theirs by offering to God as a ransom for the debt they had incurred against Him when they offended him.
Near the end of his life, Jesus gave his commandment, "I give you a new commandment", this was not in the Old Testament, but it was his, it was new: Love one another as I have loved you. It is no longer to love others as we love ourselves, but much more than we love ourselves. The sacrifice now is no longer to offer something of what we have, but to offer ourselves. That is why Jesus said, no one has greater love than he who gives his life for his friends.
At this point we realize how far we are from fulfilling the Gospel. If we could love our neighbour as we love ourselves it would no longer be good enough, but many times we do not even achieve that – we are selfish and we want much more for ourselves than for our neighbour.
But if we were to ask a mother if she loves her child as she loves herself or more than she loves herself, the answer will be easy to guess: any mother loves her child much more than she loves herself and would certainly be willing to die for him or her if one of them were to die. And don’t the females of mammals and birds also protect their young and are willing to die for them? Is this love or maternal instinct?
It is called paternalism, but it really should be called maternalism because the behavior or attitude of a "mother hen" is more proper to mothers than fathers. A mother hen will make a terrible mother-in-law; in fact, all jokes in this line are against mothers-in-laws and not fathers-in-laws. Not long ago I heard a husband complaining, "My wife does nothing without consulting her mother; every day they spend hours on the phone..." and he concluded, "I am married to two women...” Many women have difficulty cutting off the umbilical cord, separating themselves from their children. But there is no real growth without separation; no tree grows well in the shade of another tree; it needs direct sunlight.
It is important that he grows and I diminish – All education must lead to autonomy and independence; to keep the other depending on us, as if we were eternal, is to not prepare him for a life without us. Parents know that they are temporal, being a father or a mother is a temporary job until their children reach adulthood. There are no eternal schools, no one is a student forever, no one is a school child forever.
This is evident in animals that are close to us on the evolutionary scale; there comes a time when the female no longer recognizes her offspring and stops behaving like a mother to them; they must now fend for themselves. We see this with swallows at the end of summer; they are supposed to have already learned how to fly and when they do not launch themselves from the nest in their first flight, it is even the parents who push them, push them into life.
In animals, therefore, there is a mechanism that puts an end to maternal instinct; the same does not happen in humans, however. In this, as in other areas, it has to be psychological maturity that must put an end to the instinct and transform it into an adult love that seeks autonomy and the good of the other, rather than keeping it in an eternal sick dependence for both the mother and the child.
Motherhood configures femininity
Since the participation in the gestation of a human being is not significant for the man, few changes occur in him with the birth of his child. Many continue to behave as if they were not parents. The same does not happen for a woman. Her body changes not only during the nine months, but afterwards also. The main change, however, operates at the psyche and spiritual level.
Many husbands complain that after their wives become mothers, they live almost exclusively for their child, neglecting them in the process. It is as if being a mother keeps them filled to the brim, that it is enough for them; many mothers even claim that the love of their life is not their husband but their child.
Strange as it may seem, we too do not look at a woman in the same way after her experience of motherhood. If we see a woman with breasts uncovered our feeling is one, if we see that same woman breastfeeding a baby, we no longer look at her breasts in the same way. We look at her and her breasts in relation to the baby, we mentally do not abstract them from the baby.
Identification model for daughter
Son, father you will be, as you do as you will find…
After the Oedipus or Electra complex, children begin to look more at the parent of the same sex. Even at school, children who are discovering their own identity hang around more with children of the same sex than of the opposite sex. The mother is an identification model for girls, just as the father is for boys.
Libris ex libris fiunt – A little girl looks at her mother as a demigoddess and tries to imitate her in everything; she supposedly imitates her virtues, but often she also imitates her flaws. Parents should be aware of their defects and try to contain them so as not to pass them on to their own children, because as someone used to say, education is airborne – it is the environment that is created at home that is educational, it is the attitudes displayed by parents in the day-to-day family life that are educational or uneducational.
For humanity to grow, parents must pass on their virtues to their children and not their defects. Children should, as in a relay race, purify, refine the humanity received from their parents and take it to the next level.
The child's first love
They say that a man is not a man until he hears his name from a woman’s lips. Antonio Machado
The Oedipus complex for boy and the Electra complex for girls are not summer night dreams nor Freud's fantasies. They are real and we have all experienced them in our childhoods. As the father is for the girl, the mother is the first love in the boy's life, the first experience with the opposite sex. It is not the girl the boy meets in kindergarten, primary school or secondary school; this girl is already the second, the first is the mother.
Since the first experiences, both good and bad, are the ones that mark us more deeply for the rest of our lives, life experience with our mother, in addition to having the weight and importance of a first experience, also becomes an archetype, paradigm or model of the subsequent experiences.
We will spend the rest of our lives, unconsciously, measuring all women in relation to our mother who, without meaning to, is unconsciously the standard of what we understand by woman, and later, we end up marrying her as Freud rightly put it. In other words, we marry a woman who is like her, if the experience with our mother has been positive, or who is completely opposite to her, if the experience with our mother had been negative. In both cases, she, our mother, is always the point of reference.
Evidently everything I said about our mother is equally valid for girls in their relationship with their father. They say that girls who have a good relationship with their father date much later because what they need in a man at young age, they already have it at home. Those who have a bad relationship with their father or have a distant, disinterested and nonexistent father, start dating earlier and unconsciously do not look for a boyfriend or husband, but rather a father they do not have at home. Of course, the consequence of a relationship established on the basis of these motivations is inevitably a failure.
From experience, I can say that no woman can replace the mother if she exists. In the middle of the Oedipus complex, between the age of five and six, being completely in love with my mother as any child at that age would be, I did not feel that my love was reciprocated because my mother was always cold and distant, lacking in affectionate gestures or words.
During this time, when I started school, I had Miss Soledade as a teacher, a young and very beautiful teacher in her first year of teaching. She liked me very much and as she was very affectionate, she never tired of referring to me in words and gestures; but I did not correspond to her. I remember very well as if it were yesterday, of being confused, of not understanding why my mother was not like my teacher and of how I wanted to receive love only from my mother. As a result of this state, one day I injured my poor teacher after I gave her a brave kick in the shins. The pain was so strong that blood even came out of her nose, something that often happened to her when she was agitated.
OUR MOTHER IN HEAVEN
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. John 19:26-27
The world was ungrateful to Jesus, and Mary, his mother, was probably one of the few people who loved him. For this reason, in the final moments of his life, Jesus did not forget his mother who, like the widow of Nain, was losing her only son being already a widow and was preparing to be alone in the world. In the episode of the widow of Nain, Jesus gives a son to a mother; on the cross, Jesus gives a mother to a son, to the beloved disciple who represents all of Jesus’ disciples.
Whoever does not welcome Mary, his mother, into his home, whoever leaves her at the foot of the cross with a dead son in her arms, and whoever abandons her in her pain and does not comfort her in his home is not a good disciple, not a beloved disciple of the Master.
Mary is the mother of Christ because it was she who gave him a body, who conceived him in her virginal womb; Mary is the mother of the Church because she assisted in prayer with the apostles at her birth with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Already aware of the Holy Spirit through whom she had conceived by work and grace, Mary was the most qualified person to guide the apostles in the ways of the Spirit, the person most capable of catechizing them in preparation for the Pentecost, the sacrament of Confirmation for the Apostles, the mentor of the apostles in matters of the Holy Spirit. A Church without Mary as mother would be an orphanage, as Pope Francis said.
Mary is our mother now and at the hour of our death. Mary constantly prays for us at every now of our life and certainly at the hour of our death, as the Hail Mary prayer says. She who watched and comforted her son with her presence during the agony of the cross, will certainly also be at the foot of our cross at the moment of our passage to the Father, that is, our passage from birth to Heaven, to eternal life. Mary therefore assists our birth to eternal life, as she witnessed the birth of her son to this life and to eternal life, just as she witnessed the birth of the Church.
Ave versus Eve
We fly to thy patronage, O Holy Mother of God; despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin. Amen
Eve was not the mother who raised us, but our biological mother: she only gave birth to us, we were not brought up by her. The mother who educates, raises and feeds is called in Ethiopia "Injera enat", that is, the "mother of bread" who often does not coincide with the one who gave birth.
During my novitiate while studying theology, I had a colleague, a young man, who called his aunt mother and his mother aunt. The one who gave birth to him he called aunt and the one who raised him, and who was biologically his aunt, he called mother. They were two sisters: one had my colleague from an unplanned pregnancy, but later, she met the man of her life; he did not accept her son, so her sister, who did not think about marrying, stayed with him so that his biological mother would be free and could start a new life with her fiancé.
My colleague had no filial feeling for his biological mother whom he called aunt, and yet she had given birth to him; he only had filial feeling for the one who had raised him with much love, educated and guided him in life, dedicating herself exclusively to him, since she had never wanted to get married. And yet, on a biological level, she was just his aunt.
In human being, biology counts for little. We call her Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and I suppose no one would dare deny her the title of Mother. However, as we all know, she was never a biological mother, although she behaved as such for many orphaned children, and even adults, who saw in her the mother they never had.
The devotion of the Christian people, at least the Catholics and the Orthodox, to Mary stems from our closeness to our mother on earth. She is closer to us than our father and we often make her the intermediary between us and him, because we have more confidence with our mother than with our father. She's always by our side and accompanies us more than our father does. This experience gives the Christian people a special devotion to Mary and projects to her the same experience, the same kind of relationship that they had or have with their mother.
Mary is our mother because, like all mothers, she is attentive to the needs of her children, as she was at the wedding at Cana and as she is still visiting us today at Guadeloupe, Lourdes and Fatima. Mary is our mother because she educates us with her son's gospel when she tells us to "do whatever he tells you." Eve was our progenitor; Ave is our heavenly mother who accompanies our life on earth until we join her in Heaven.
With my Mother I will be, In Holy glory one day / Together with the Virgin Mary, in heaven I will triumph. In heaven! In heaven! With my mother I will be. In heaven! In heaven! With my mother I will be... Marian folk song
MATER ECCLESIA
Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me. Isaiah 49: 15-16
The Church, the mystical body of Christ
Come to him, a living stone, though rejected by mortals yet chosen and precious in God’s sight, and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house… 1 Peter 2:4-5
Not knowing yet the mysteries of life that biology reveals to us, the best image Peter found to refer to the Church as the mystical body of Christ where He is the head, was that of a temple built with stones placed on top of each other, like Lego pieces. But as a temple is something inanimate, just like the stones from which it is made, he then called them living stones.
If he had the knowledge of biology that we have today, he would have used the image of our own body to explain how the Church is the mystical body of Christ. We look at our body as unique, free and independent, as an indivisible unit, but in fact, from a biological point of view, our body is made up of trillions of cells, each of which is a living organism, that is, a living entity.
What seems to us as one single unique, autonomous and indivisible whole is actually a community of trillions of living beings. They are united because they are blood relatives of one another. Our body is formed by a brotherhood of trillions of cells; yes, the cells that make up our body today are all sisters and therefore they remain together; otherwise, they would have already separated.
When we undergo an organ transplant, our body rejects the organ because it is made up of cells foreign to us; the cells that form the organ are sister cells to each other, but not of the same family as the cells that form our body. Therefore, the person who lives with a transplanted organ has to take medication every day that will trick his body so not to reject the transplanted organ.
The cells in our body are sisters to each other because they are all descendants of that mother cell or zygote that formed the moment we were conceived. At this moment that occurred 9 months before our birth, half-cell from our father, a sperm X or Y, united with another half-cell from our mother, an egg that from the chromosomal point of view is always X, originating a new cell with a new genetic code.
Immediately this cell begins to divide and replicate, and differentiate, until the complete body of a human being is formed. Although each one of our cells is the smallest unit of life and therefore autonomous and independent, what keeps them united to form a body is the fact that they all have the same genetic code.
E pluribus unun – As cells of the mystical body of Christ, which is the Church, what keeps us united is the same faith in Christ. This faith, present in all of us, functions within us like the genetic code (DNA) inside of the cells. Just as the cells that form our bodies are different from each other, blood cells are different from those of bones, muscles, skin and every organ, we Christians too are people of different ethnic groups, geographies, languages, countries and cultures, and yet we are able to remain united in one Catholic Church because we are all born, grow, live and move in the same faith in Christ. The faith in Christ is the genetic code, the DNA of the Church, it is what keeps people of different ages, genders and ethnic groups together.
Universality of the Catholic Church
Let no man do anything connected with the church without the bishop. Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist which is [administered] either by the bishop, or by one to whom he has entrusted it. Wherever the bishop shall appear, there let the multitude be also; even as, wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not lawful without the bishop either to baptize or to celebrate a love-feast; but whatsoever he shall approve of, that is also pleasing to God, so that everything that is done may be secure and valid. St. Ignatius of Antioch Epistle to the Smyrnaeans 8, 2 (AD 107)
St. Ignatius of Antioch of Syria (68-107), according to Eusebius of Caesarea, was one of the first bishops of the second Christian community, the Antioch of Syria, founded after the community of Jerusalem. It was precisely there that the followers of Christ, until then known as Nazarenes, were called Christians for the first time, according to the book of the Acts of the Apostles (11:26).
Although the followers of Christ were nicknamed Christians, the Church has never been called Christian. Until the year 107, it was simply called Ecclesia. However, Bishop Ignatius, in noting the universal vocation of the Church, called her Catholic. Indeed, the first name that the Church had was Catholic in the year 107, according to the writing of St. Ignatius above, when there was still only one Church, the one founded by Jesus.
All of us baptized Catholics in traditionally Catholic countries, when we reach the age of self-consciousness, around six or seven years of age, while recognizing ourselves as people and citizens of a country, we also recognize ourselves as members of a supranational organization, the Catholic Church.
It is no coincidence that the founding fathers of the European Union, Frenchman Robert Schumann, German Konrad Adenauer and Italian Alcide de Gasperi, were all Catholics. According to the historian Alan Fimister, in a book on Robert Schuman, the European Union is in fact a Catholic project in line with the Church's social doctrine from Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum (1878-1903). The principle of subsidiarity, enshrined as European law and also an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, appeared for the first time in this same encyclical.
All Orthodox churches, as well as Protestant churches, are national churches linked to a particular culture and in Africa, even to the particular idiosyncrasy of a tribe. Only the Catholic Church, the one Jesus founded, is truly supranational and supracultural.
Catholics are certainly more universalistic than Protestants and Orthodox, since they drank universalism in the same way that they were nursed in the bosom of their mothers as they were baptized a few days after birth in the Church that Christ founded, which is Catholic.
The term Roman Catholic
The Church has never called herself Roman Catholic, for in itself the term is a "contradictio in terminis"; if the term Catholic means universal, the Church that is Catholic is not Roman, if it is Roman it is not Catholic. The term was born and promoted by the Anglican Church in England to somehow justify the schism of the Church; for the Anglicans, who coined the term, the Catholic Church of the Nicene Creed was composed of Roman Catholics, Anglican Catholics, and Orthodox Catholics.
Because the Anglicans come from a state owned church in England and because they envy so much the catholicity of the church that Jesus founded of which they were once part of, they attached a local name “Roman” to diminish our catholicity that bothers them so much, and to allow them to also use the term catholic. The fact is that only the Catholic Church is indeed catholic, all others, Protestant or Orthodox, are national churches, local or provincial churches that exist only in a very demarked geographical area.
It was precisely the English-speaking Catholic bishops who alerted their colleagues, both at the First Vatican Council and at the Second, that the Church should never use this term when referring to herself.
Ironically, the term is still being used, but only in English-speaking countries; many parishes of the Archdiocese of Toronto use the term in complete ignorance of the ideology that underlies it; at least the Cardinal and his auxiliary bishops were obliged to know and respect the will of their English counterparts in the last two Councils of the Catholic Church.
"Mater et Magistra"
Gaudet Mater Ecclesia... The Holy Mother Church rejoices that, by the singular gift of Divine Providence, the longed-for day has finally dawned when – under the auspices of the virgin Mother of God, whose maternal dignity is commemorated on this feast – the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council is being solemnly opened here beside St. Peter’s tomb. Pope John XXIII Opening address of the Vatican Council II
The Church as mother
According to Pope Francis in one of his homilies, the Church is our Mother who gave birth to us on the day of our baptism and, like a mother, educates and protects us with meekness and goodness. The Church conceived without this maternal feeling is to think of a rigid association, without human warmth; a church so conceived, says the Pope, makes us all orphans.
Calling the Church Mother is not as common among Protestants as it is among Catholics, probably because they do not relate to Mary, mother of the Lord, as mother of the Church because she witnessed her birth as she witnessed the birth of her son, and as our mother, given by her own son on the cross.
From the feeling of motherhood of Mary, mother of Christ, mother of God, and mother of the Church, the feeling of motherhood of the Church is deduced by affinity. The Church is our mother because Mary is the mother of the Church and our mother too.
The Church as teacher
The Holy Mother Church has doctors who will know how to answer you...
In the Church, not everyone is a prophet, not everyone is a doctor, and not everyone can answer all the questions. The phrase cited above is the answer of a humble man to a non-believer who posed a difficult question that he could not answer. Humbly recognizing that he cannot answer the question, he directs the non-believer to those in the Church who can guide him to the answer of his question.
There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortal by which we must be saved. Acts 4:12
The Church is teacher in the instructions and proposition to men and women of Christ as the model, paradigm, and reference of humanity. Whoever wants to be authentically human is measured in relation to Christ, because only through Him can one go to God the Father. Even looking at the gospel narrative from a purely human point of view, there is no narrative under heaven that contains more humanity than the life, sayings, and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth.
Whoever does not gather with me, scatters, says the Lord. There is no other model of humanity anywhere that is equally valid and that leads to happiness and self-realization of all the dreams than the model of Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life.
Our life in front of the altar
Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. John 14:12
The Church is the universal sacrament of salvation, that is, the Church is the legitimate dispenser of God's grace through her son, the first-born grace. Christ did not come into the world only for the Israelites of his generation. It would make no sense that the salvific action of the son of God be reduced to men of one place and one period. The Church is the feet, the mouth, the hands of the Lord, for she acts here and now, in the here and now of all times and places, as the same Christ who, humanly speaking, could only live once and act in Israel 2,000 years ago.
Salvation means health, through the Church which is his body, we access the goods that come to us from Jesus, whom she represents in the here and now of social history and our individual history. These goods are the sacraments.
Before the altar, the Mater et Magistra Church welcomes us into her bosom as soon as our physical mother gives birth to us in the sacrament of baptism when we initiate our journey with Christ at our side. Our parents entrust us to the motherhood of the Church, because they feel she has been their mother throughout their own lives.
In time, at the same place before the altar, we receive the Eucharist for the first time, and throughout our life we go there every Sunday to enter into communion with Him who is the reason of our life, the bread and the wine of our sustenance. Later, still in the same place in front of the altar, we receive the sacrament of Confirmation, answering this time personally the same questions we were asked on the day of our baptism with the full use of our freedom.
In due course, it is still there that we are ordained priests, that we take the temporal or perpetual vows of religious life or get married. There we return every Sunday in communion or to take part in the sacraments of our children and relatives and, finally, as on the day of our baptism, we are taken there and before the lighted Easter Candle, that candle that was lit years ago, which shone until then is now extinguished. Our life begins, goes on and ends in front of the altar of the Church, our mother who always accompanies, guides, nourishes, consoles and comforts us.
Life starts as it ends and ends as it starts. In baptism, we are taken to the Church and in our burial, we are taken to the Church; the first time and the last time we go to the Church, we are taken there. The burial liturgy is very similar to the baptism liturgy. The casket is covered in white just as we were at the time of our baptism, and the holy water is used once again as it was at the time of our baptism.
Conclusion: Our earthly mother gives birth to us, cares for us, and educates us for freedom and independence; our ecclesial mother initiates us in faith of Christ, the model of human life, and educates us for equality and interdependence as members of a community; our heavenly mother "prays for us now and at the hour of our death", that is, she assists us in our birth to eternal life.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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