Fifth Sunday of Easter: Motherhood
Etched into the floor, around the font in which I was baptized are the words we heard a moment ago: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may announce the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” These words, from the First Letter of Peter, speak of how the baptized person becomes a living stone, forming us collectively into a spiritual house. Peter says that Jesus too is one of those stones—specifically, the cornerstone.
And just as there are many types of stones and architectural elements that can be used to form a building, so all the baptized serve as elements to form this living Temple that is the Church in varied ways and in varied roles. And each role—whether the pope, the members of the laity, consecrated men and women, and any other—all serve a distinct purpose in the Church and her mission, but also do so in response to their baptism.
THE DOMESTIC CHURCH
We often speak of the domestic church, referring to family and their home. As I like to say it, the life of the domestic church should give life to the parish church, and vice versa. Just as family life and family structure serves as a building block for society itself, so too the home, the family, the domestic church is meant to be a microcosm of the church itself—with all its variety of roles.
One of the roles in the domestic church is the mother. In a culture like ours that has so many questions about whether there is distinction between male and female, and whether a home is best served with any particular combination of parental figures, I believe one consequence is that it greatly undermines the institutions of womanhood and motherhood.
I honestly don’t see how it can be argued that God had something particular in mind in creating the family, and specifically the mother’s role within it. I’m not so naïve to suggest that a family cannot thrive in absence of a mother, or a father for that matter, in this same way that a person can thrive without use of their legs or ability to hear.
On this Mother’s Day weekend, we bear in mind that everyone of us comes from a mother. In a certain way, she sacrificed herself for us, carrying us in her body, dealing with all the uncertainty of the life within her, and how it might affect her own physical well-being.
There’s no question, some women have proven to be awful mothers—the worst sometimes make the news. But in whatever way those aberrations, as well as the difficult relationships any of us may have with our mothers, may skew our perception of motherhood, let us not lose sight of what God intended for motherhood as an essential element of the family, nor the sacrifice our mothers made for us.
ST. GIANNA MOLLA
One of the patron saints of motherhood is a woman named Gianna Molla. Born in 1922 near Milan, Italy, she began studying medicine at age 20, and at the same time, was active in a lay-movement Azione Cattolica (a movement intended to spread catholic social teaching and carry it out), as well as a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. After finishing medical school and beginning her practice as a pediatrician, she married. In the four years that followed marriage, she gave birth to three children.
Two years later she became pregnant with their fourth child, and in the second month she learned that she had a tumor on her uterus. She was presented a few options, including aborting the child. She chose to have the tumor removed, knowing it would put her own health at risk, to allow the child within her to go full-term, declaring that her baby’s life was more important than her own. The baby was born healthy, however due to an ensuing infection, Gianna died a week later, April 28, 1962.
Her heroic and inspirational story began to spread, and a cause for sainthood began. She was canonized on May 16, 2004, with her husband and all four children in attendance.
When Pope Francis came to the U.S. in 2015 for the World Meeting of Families, this fourth child, Gianna Emanuela—who had followed her mother’s career path, becoming a doctor—publicly read a letter before the pope, a letter her mother had written to her father soon before they married. In the letter, her mother emphasized the Christian virtues of marriage and called them, as a couple, to serve God in a “saintly way” by what she referred to as this “sacrament of love”.
As part of her work in Catholic Action, a twenty-something Gianna had once instructed young girls: “Whatever your vocation may be, it is a vocation to physical, spiritual, and moral motherhood, for God has put in us a tendency toward life…If in carrying out our vocation it should happen that we die, that would be the finest day of our life” (Magnificat, April 2017).
I believe that St. Gianna would offer the women of our culture the same message: that regardless of whether you are married, divorced, widowed or single, young or old, God has called you—in your unique strength as a woman and your sacred femininity—to give your lives in some way for the good of others—whether it’s a physical motherhood, spiritual motherhood or moral motherhood. And in doing that, it will give way to life.