Church finds ‘sacred feminine’ in Mother Mary

By J.D. Long-García
The Catholic Sun

The millions of moviegoers who flock to see “The Da Vinci Code” this weekend will be given a squawking portrayal of the Catholic Church suppressing the “sacred feminine.”

Dan Brown, the novel’s author, takes liberties interpreting Leonardo da Vinci’s works to advance a theory that the Church masked the “true” story of Jesus.

The Mona Lisa, the book reads, is actually a self-portrait of Leonardo as a woman and reflects the sacred union of man and woman.

This sacredness of man and woman is also depicted in Leonardo’s Last Supper. According to the story, the person to Jesus’ right in the painting is actually Mary Magdalene.

The Church, Brown writes, has suppressed the sacred feminine by hiding Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. The Holy Grail is a woman — not a chalice — that carried Christ’s bloodline.

“There is a lot of assumptions made about this person known as Mary Magdalene,” said Larry Fraher, a Kino Institute faculty member who will present a workshop on “The Gospel of Judas in Context” May 20.

“A lot of people assume Mary Magdalene is the woman caught in adultery or the woman who breaks the jar of oils over the feet of Jesus and washes them with her hair and tears,” he said. Fraher noted the lack of evidence to support such claims.

So, who is Mary Magdalene?

“Historically what we can say is that she was a follower of Jesus and could have been a relative of one of the disciples,” he said. “Somehow she got into that inner group where she took on a care-giving role.”

So could she have been Jesus’ wife? Fraher doesn’t think so. He noted the verses from the Gospel of John that place Mary Magdalene at the tomb on the first day of the week.

“From what I know of Jewish tradition, it would not have been the wife of the dead husband anointing the body,” he said.

The Early Church

Some “Da Vinci Code” believers might respond that the Church placed Mary Magdalene at the tomb to suppress her role as the wife of Christ. Couldn’t it all be a big cover up?

“You can’t just skip over the first 300 years and say Constantine Christianized the world and decided to conspire against” those who didn’t agree, Fraher said. “That’s not really an accurate portrayal of Church history. There were different churches with different emphases, some of them orthodox, some of them not.”

He said that the Gnostics, a second century fringe group that believed the spirit was good and the flesh was bad, were dealt with and refuted on a local church level.

“So there wasn’t this big commission that was gathered in the walls of Rome and said, ‘Let’s persecute these people,’” Fraher said. “That’s just not the dynamics of the first three centuries of the Church.”

But would Jesus have been taken seriously if he weren’t married?

Yes. Fraher noted that St. Paul wasn’t married either and was considered a great teacher in the Hebrew world before converting.

“Those who argue for this relationship between Mary and Jesus are doing so from their own faith perspective, from their own belief that Jesus and Mary had this relationship,” he said.

Celibacy of Christ

The idea that the Church covered up a feminine cult centered on a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene is incompatible with orthodox Catholicism, said Fr. Timothy Davern, the diocesan judicial vicar. As a canon lawyer, Fr. Davern is well versed in Church history and the teachings of the Church.

“The argument has always been that Christ didn’t marry one person because His bride was the Church, the whole body of Christ,” he said.

Fr. Davern said one would have to “make tremendous leaps” to believe the Christ married Mary Magdalene.

“When Jesus wanted to do something radical, he did something radical,” he said. “Now the radical thing is not being married at 30 in Judaism at the time.”

Katrina Zeno, coordinator of the John Paul II Center for the Theology of the Body and Culture, shed light on “The Da Vinci Code” with teachings from the late pontiff.

John Paul II recognized that Christ’s gift of self to the Church was both redemptive and spousal, Zeno said.

“Marriage is an exclusive union between one woman and one man,” she said. “Celibacy is an inclusive gift of self in the sense of being able to make your gift of self to the Church in general.”

“The Da Vinci Code” does not recognize the nature of the Church as the bride of Christ because Christ has another bride, she added.

“We’re redeemed from our sins to be united to Him in a spousal manner,” she said. “That’s our faith. This presentation of Jesus’ relationship to Mary Magdalene undermines that.”

The Sacred Feminine

Zeno recognized the importance of Mary Magdalene, but said Brown was distorting her role in Church history.

“What’s happening is that you’re shifting the focus and the author is superimposing onto Mary Magdalene a role she wasn’t meant to play, a role that already belongs to Mary as Mother of God,” she said.

In “The Da Vinci Code,” there is little mention of Mary, the mother of Jesus.

“A lot of the idea of the suppression of the feminine ignores the imagery of the Church and certainly conveniently ignores the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the economy of salvation,” Fr. Davern said.

He noted that Christian artwork is rife with images of Mother Mary stepping on the head of the serpent and as cooperating in God’s redemption of all human beings.

Why leave mother Mary out?

Fraher said it was probably because it didn’t fit Brown’s story line. He noted that from the beginning, the Church revered the Virgin Mary as the first disciple and as the model of discipleship.

“Where Eve is the bearer of the fruit that leads Adam to sin, Mary is the bearer of the fruit that leads humanity to life,” he said. “Ultimately Mary gives her fiat, her yes to the divine so that she can be the theotokos, the God-bearer.”

In “The Da Vinci Code” the sacred feminine is presumably worshiped through ancient fertility rituals in which, Fraher said, women can be exploited as sexual objects.

“I’d much rather follow a sacred feminine that talks about giving your life to God and becoming a vehicle for God’s presence in the world than I would some bizarre ritualistic paganism,” he said.