The Roman Catholic dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary does not simply state that Mary did not engage in sexual activity throughout her life (“sexual virginity); instead, such is only secondary to the dogma. What is primary about the dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary is that she remained physically a virgin, that is, her “virginal integrity” (her hymen) remained intact perpetually, and was not compromised by the birth of her divine son. As Catholic theologian Ludwig Ott wrote:
§ 5. Mary’s Perpetual Virginity
Mary was a Virgin before, during and after the Birth of Jesus Christ.
The Lateran Synod of the year 649, under Pope Martin I, stressed the threefold character of Mary’s virginity teaching of the “blessed ever-virginal and immaculate Mary” that: “she conceived without seed, of the Holy Ghost, generated without injury (to her virginity), and her virginity continued unimpaired after the birth” (D 256). Pope Paul IV declared (1555): Beatissimam Virginem Mariam … perstitisse semper in virginitatis integritate, ante partum scilicet, in partu et perpetuo post partum. D 993.
Mary’s virginity includes virginitas mentis, that is, a constant virginal disposition, virginitas sensus, that is, freedom from inordinate motions of sexual desire, and virginitas corporis, that is, physical integrity. The Church doctrine refers primarily to Her bodily integrity. (Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, pp. 203-4, emphasis added)
Elsewhere, Ott (p. 205) writes:
2. Virginity During the Birth of Jesus
Mary bore her Son without any violation of her virginal integrity. (De fide on the ground of the general promulgation of doctrine.)
The dogma merely asserts the fact of the continuance of Mary’s physical virginity without determining more closely how this is to be physiologically explained. In general the Fathers and the Schoolmen conceived it as non-injury to the hymen, and accordingly taught that Mary gave birth in miraculous fashion without opening of the womb and injury to the hymen, and consequently also without pains (cf. S. th. III 28, 2
Section 499 of the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church reads as follows (emphasis added):
The deepening of faith in the virginal motherhood led the Church to confess Mary's real and perpetual virginity even in the act of giving birth to the Son of God made man. In fact, Christ's birth "did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it" and so the liturgy of the Church celebrates Mary as Aeiparthenos, the "Ever-virgin."
Kyle Roberts, in a recent volume on the virginal conception of Jesus, wrote about this understanding of the perpetual virginity and how it is very docetic in nature:
THE HOLY HYMEN
Consider, for example, the early church father Ambrose (337-397 CE) who links the “gate of the sanctuary” of the temple in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 44:1-2) to Mary’s hymen: “Holy Mary is the gate of which it is written: ‘The Lord will pass through it, and it will be shut,’ after birth, for a s a virgin she conceived and gave birth.” Ambrose elaborates that no man “shall pass through” that gate (Mary’s hymen) except for God. In another text, he insists that Jesus “preserved the fence of her chastity and the inviolate seal of her virginity.”
Or his student Augustine (354-430 CE) who argues that because the resurrected Jesus could walk through walls, it’s no stretch (no pun intended) to believe that the baby Jesus could pass through the “closed doors” of Mary’s vagina without disturbing the hymen. The laws of physics and of biology do not apply to the birth of the Son of God. Augustine ends this segment with a dramatic portrayal of the delivery of baby Jesus: “As an infant He came forth, a spouse from His bride-chamber, that is, from the virginal womb, leaving His Mother’s integrity inviolate” . . . For Ambrose, the painless, bloodless virginal birth reversed this curse. Mary, the “new Eve,” experienced no pain while birthing Jesus, and this illustrated that salvation had arrived . . . The assumption that Mary’s hymen was undisturbed by the birth of Jesus didn’t originate with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, both of which are sparse in deliver-room detail, but from texts dating to the middle of the first and second centuries (CE). (Kyle Roberts, A Complicated Pregnancy: Whether Mary was a Virgin and Why it Matters [Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017], 6-7, 8)
While discussing The Protoevangelium of James, Roberts writes:
Mary was informed by an angel that she would conceive. Her pregnancy caused a stir among the religious power brokers: the priests who learned of her apparent indiscretion and Joseph’s illicit behaviour were enraged at the betrothed couple’s impropriety and disobedience. Both Mary and Joseph were proven innocent through a ritual resembling a witch-trial. When God apparently protected them from harm, the priests were finally convinced of their innocence.
Mary gave birth to Jesus in a cave underneath a “luminous cloud.” A blinding light covered her. When it dissipated, the newly born Jesus was revealed and he immediately latched onto the breast of his mother. The midwife, who played no effective role in the delivery, proclaimed to another midwife, Salome: “I have a strange sight to relate to you: a virgin has brought forth—a thing which her nature admits not of.” Then said Salome: “As the Lord my God lives, unless I thrust in my finger, and search the parts, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth.”
Salome, this story’s version of a doubting Thomas, investigated Mary’s vagina to prove that this miracle had really occurred; sure enough, Mary was still a virgin. Her doubts were met by a burning sensation in her hands, as she exclaimed: “My hand is dropping off as if burned with fire.”
This story formed the basis of subsequent assumptions about Mary’s virginity; her sexual purity had been preserved and her feminine body protected through the miraculous cloud-covered birth of Jesus. This influence was unfortunate, however, because it allowed docetic tendencies to creep in to the way theologians read the two Gospel accounts of Jesus’s birth. If we take the incarnation seriously, we should embrace the biological realities of birth, not deny them, (Ibid. 11-12)
Indeed, this aspect of the perpetual virginity of Mary seems to be explicitly contradicted by the testimony of Scripture. In Luke 2:21-24 (RSV) we read the following:
And at the end of eight days, when he was circumcised, he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. And when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, "Every male that opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord") and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the law of the Lord, "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons."
As Eric Svendsen noted about this pericope and v. 23’s reference to the phrase “opens the womb”:
The Roman Catholic teaching of Mary’s virginity during birth (in partu) (i.e., without rupture of the hymen) seems to be negated by Luke’s phrase in v. 22 that Jesus “opened the womb” (διανοῖγον μήτραν). The sacrifice made in vv.21-24 presupposes a normal birth process for Jesus, and many Catholic scholars note that it is unlikely that Luke would have employed this phrase if he had known of this Marian tradition. (Eric D. Svendsen, Who is My Mother? The Role and Status of the Mother of Jesus in the New Testament and Roman Catholicism [Amityville, N.Y.: Calvary Press, 2001], 143)
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