Venerable Bede (d. 735) on Revelation 12:2: The Church, in a spiritual sense, gives birth to itself

  

birth. The Church, in a spiritual sense, both brings forth those with whom it travails, and ceases not to travail with them when already born. As she herself says, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again, until Christ be formed in you.” (Venerable Bede, The Explanation of the Apocalypse [trans. Edward Marshall; Oxford: James Parker and Co., 1878], 81)