As a teenager, I went to confession at our local Roman Catholic church and struggled to find much to confess. From the back of my mind, I dredged up some petty misdemeanours and was told by the priest in the confessional box to recite three Our Fathers, Three Glory Be’s, and Three Hail Marys. The third prayer is a direct appeal to the Virgin Mary to intercede for us and be with us to the moment of our death. It’s an appeal to the Queen of Heaven, Mary, seated next to God the Father, clothed in royal robes. Not bad for a woman born into poverty. So, how exactly did Mary become elevated to the status of a goddess?
If the New Testament gospels were a screenplay then the Virgin Mary has a pretty minor role – not many lines and few are memorable. Yet she is revered by a billion Catholics, honoured by the Eastern Orthodox churches, and respected (if somewhat grudgingly) by Protestants. Mary has her own shrines, prayers, basilicas, statues, etc. But she had to fight her way to the top!
And she’s earned her position as far as Catholics are concerned. The most popular prayer in the Roman Catholic church is the Hail Mary. Yet it took a thousand years, from the 6th to the 16th century, to finalise the wording. The first part comes from scripture combining the Archangel Gabriel and Elizabeth’s greetings to Mary: ‘Hail Mary, full of Grace/The Lord is with Thee/Blessed art Thou among women/And blessed is the fruit of Thy Womb’. The word ‘Jesus’ was added after ‘womb’ in 1261. The second part was added in response to the Protestant Reformation: ‘Holy Mary Mother of God/Pray for us sinners/Now and at the hour of our death/Amen’. It was a rebuke to Protestants who believed prayers should be directed solely to God. In 1568, the completed prayer was added to the Rosary. For Roman Catholics, praying to Mary had now become central to their faith.
The devotion to Mary among Catholics is unquestionable. Here are two women I encountered in 2024 at the festival of Our Lady of Agony (Nossa Senhora da Agonia), dressed as the Virgin Mary. The festival is held in the northern Portuguese town of Viana do Castelo every year. Mary is honoured there as a protector of seafarers and her statue is carried to the seafront to bless a flotilla of boats. She is then processed to a church where a statue of the crucified Jesus awaits her. The crowd goes silent as Jesus bows to his mother, Mary. But what on earth has this got to do with the bible? Well, Mary has been on a bit of a journey over the last 2,000 years – let me tell you all about it.
What the Gospels Tell us about Mary
Mary features most prominently in the bible story during the Nativity – the birth of her son Jesus. This is a momentous event because Mary remains a virgin and Jesus is the son of God. Yet two of the gospels, Mark and John, jump straight into the story when Jesus is an adult. Only Matthew and Luke give us the account of a stable, a manger, shepherds, and three kings. Curious as it’s the Nativity that defines who Jesus is – his divine and human nature – and how his birth fulfils prophecy. But only two gospel writers thought it was worth recounting.
Then Mary is reduced to an occasional appearance and is still alive when Jesus is crucified – though the gospel writers can’t agree whether she was at the crucifixion. When Jesus is resurrected he doesn’t bother to see his mother though according to the book of Acts, she is with the disciples one last time when they gather in mournful prayer.
Basically, the church has spun a huge narrative about Mary from very little material in the bible. As we’ll see, the church had to rely heavily on non-biblical gospels, local traditions, and influences from other religions and mystery cults. So let’s look at how Mary went from being a peasant woman in Galilee to the Queen of Heaven.
The Annunciation
The dramatic scene where the Archangel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the son of God is found in only one gospel: Luke. Which begs the question, given that this is surely a critical event in the narrative, why do Mark, Matthew, and John ignore it?
The gospel of Luke begins with a description of a couple losing hope of ever having a baby. Zechariah is a priest and his wife Elizabeth appears to be “barren”, incapable of pregnancy. But then the archangel Gabriel appears to Zechariah and tells him that Elizabeth will give birth to a child who will lead many of the Jews to a new union with God.
A few months later, Gabriel is sent on another errand by God, this time to Nazareth to meet Mary. “Greetings, oh favoured one, the Lord is with you.” Confronted by an angel proves to be rather discomforting for the Nazarene woman. What does an angel want with me? The explanation is a shock to Mary:
“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
Mary, a stickler for detail, points out that this scenario is highly unlikely as she is a virgin. No worries, Gabriel responds, the Holy Spirit “will come upon you”.
Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, is already six months pregnant. Though in that case, Zechariah was the father but let’s just say a little bit of heavenly angel dust was required to make things happen. Well, that’s good enough for Mary. She pledges her allegiance to God and gets on board with the project.
However, Mary’s husband, Joseph, is not so enamoured by this. In the gospel of Matthew, there is no annunciation by Gabriel. Instead, we are told quite breezily that Mary was already pregnant by the Holy Spirit before her betrothal to Joseph. Once he realises that his wife is with child, Joseph “being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly”.
I find this chapter in Matthew very confusing but maybe I’m missing something. Is he already married to Mary when he discovers she is pregnant? If he’s planning to divorce her, that suggests yes. But then in the next verse, we’re told that an angel appears to Joseph and says:
“Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Hard to imagine how Joseph felt at this point but he agrees. Matthew describes what happened next:
“When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, but knew her not until she had given birth to a son.”
In this passage, Joseph refrains from sexual intercourse with his wife Mary until she has given birth to Jesus. Up until this point, remember, she has been a virgin. As we’ll see further down, Roman Catholic teaching insists she retains her virginal status throughout her life. However, Matthew is clear that after the birth of Jesus, Joseph is going to enjoy his conjugal rights.
The Visitation
Immediately after the Annunciation in Luke’s account, Mary travels to visit her older relative Elizabeth, who is miraculously pregnant with the child who will become John the Baptist. When Mary greets Elizabeth, the baby leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear.” Mary’s response is the great hymn known as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) — “My soul glorifies the Lord” — a poetic declaration that has been sung in Christian worship for two millennia.
The Visitation is important for several reasons. It establishes a connection between Jesus and John the Baptist from before their births. It confirms Mary’s blessedness through another human voice, not just an angel. And it gives Mary her own theological voice — the Magnificat, with its revolutionary language about the powerful being brought down and the humble lifted up, is a substantial piece of writing that stands quite apart from the silent, passive figure Mary is sometimes assumed to be.
However, let me question the whole story of the Visitation. There are certainly layers of meaning, but not the ones you might be expecting. Fast forward to the adult years of John the Baptist. He is leading an apocalyptic cult of zealots preaching the end times in Roman governed Judaea. The end is nigh!
One of his followers is a man called Jesus. He’s more street aware and has the common touch. But John is the cult leader. That is until John is arrested by the Roman authorities as a trouble maker and thrown into jail. Interestingly, Luke describes John’s preaching career and imprisonment before he gets round to relating the encounter between Jesus and John.
In the gospel of Mark – which scholars acknowledge as the earliest gospel – John baptises Jesus. This places Jesus in a subordinate role, which is problematic. The issue is addressed in Matthew when John objects to baptising the Messiah, because he is not worthy, but Jesus insists. Luke fudges the issue of who baptises Jesus but plays up the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus and the proclamation from the heavens that he is indeed the son of God.
Strangely, this is not good enough for John the Baptist. You might think the heavens opening and a big voice booming out would provide sufficient evidence that Jesus has come to save the world but apparently not. As he languishes in his Roman prison cell, John sends out his followers to ask Jesus if he really is the Messiah. The son of God is busy performing miracles at the time:
“Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.”
Herod Antipas, Rome’s puppet ruler of Galilee, orders John to be executed. That clears the path for Jesus to take control of John’s sect. The idea of Jesus usurping John’s role as a leading preacher of the coming apocalypse is not accepted by church theologians but even today, there is a group in the Middle East known as the Mandaeans who claim John was the last true prophet. They do think Jesus muscled in.
It’s not a nice image to have Jesus as a cuckoo in John’s nest – taking advantage of his imprisonment to steal his followers. Which might account for the need to backdate John’s acceptance of Jesus as the true Messiah, right back to the womb. So, the real purpose of the Visitation story is to prove that the John, as a foetus, recognised Jesus as his superior. Mary therefore meets Elizabeth to allow one foetus to do homage to the other.
The Nativity
Then we come to the Nativity. Who hasn’t stood before a crib at Christmas and gazed at Mary looking down at her baby in the manger? Yet the gospel of Mark skips straight to the ministry of Christ in his adult year. To be clear, most scholars believe Mark was the first of the gospels, followed by Matthew and Luke, and then John. So, the first account of the life of Jesus regards the birth story as irrelevant. Bart Ehrman, a respected bible scholar and author of many books on Christianity, thinks this is something that cannot be glossed over when it comes to the relationship between Mary and her son, Jesus.
Remember, this is supposed to be a virgin birth. That’s pretty important. It speaks to the very nature of Jesus Christ as both human and divine. Yet Mark never mentions that Mary is a virgin. He seems to be completely unaware of the fact. Not only that, but later on, as Jesus preaches, Mary and his family are convinced that Jesus has lost his mind. They try to catch up with him to remonstrate, because the priests are saying he’s a devil. But hang on a moment? Has Mary now forgotten the annunciation with the declaration by an angel that she was giving birth to the son of God?
A crowd around Jesus says that his mother and family are coming for him and he answers, rather petulantly:
‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ (Mark, Chapter 3, Verses 20-35)
This did not feel quite right to many Christians. Jesus rejecting his family and even his mother, Mary. And not only that. Mary being unaware that Jesus is the son of God and suspecting he might be insane for saying so. Well, Mark might have thought that was OK but other early Christian communities clearly did not.
So, the next two gospel writers – Luke and Matthew – set out to resolve the relationship between Mary and her son. The birth narrative in Luke (2:1–20) is the most familiar story in the Western world – though it’s loaded with historical, factual errors. Luke has a Roman imperial census taking place that forces Mary and Joseph to return to their ancestral hometown. There was no such census and no such requirement. And it’s long been recognised that the death of King Herod in 4BC meant pushing the birth of Jesus back in time.
But the important point about the Nativity is the centrality of Mary and her immaculate conception, as defined in Roman Catholic doctrine. She gives birth as a human mother but through the divine intercession of the Holy Spirit, with no human sperm involved. Joseph, her husband, is reduced to being an observer, effectively cuckolded by the Holy Spirit. Mary experiences the same birth process as any other woman but remains a virgin. Indeed, she was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Jesus.
Which poses a little problem. The gospel of Matthew makes it very clear that Jesus has siblings – about six or seven. How can Mary be a virgin for life if she has given birth to brothers and sisters of Jesus? The church came up with a couple of innovative solutions. The Epiphanian View, as it came to be known, was that these siblings were children of Joseph from a previous marriage, before he wed Mary. In this view, Joseph is an older man, married before, who then weds Mary, a younger virgin. Alternatively, there’s the Hieronymian View, which claims these are not siblings of Jesus, but cousins.
Christians, in the first centuries after Christ, had a lot of problems defining the nature of Christ and whether he was divine or human. Some thought he was born human, by Mary, and then assumed a divine nature later on. Others thought his human nature was an illusion and the idea of God being literally born from a woman, Mary, was preposterous. The church ruled that Jesus had two natures: divine and human. To prove this, they emphasised Mary’s role as a loving mother, even breastfeeding the young Jesus, as depicted in this 14th century painting from Siena, that I saw in 2025 at the National Gallery in London.
The Presentation and Simeon’s Prophecy
Luke (2:22–40) describes Mary and Joseph bringing the infant Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem for the rites of purification and presentation. Here they encounter the elderly Simeon, who takes the child, blesses God, and speaks the Nunc Dimittis — “Lord, now let your servant depart in peace.” But then he turns to Mary and delivers a darker prophecy: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel… and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” This sword-piercing would become central to later devotion, the foundation of the concept of the Seven Sorrows of Mary — of which more below.
Like many prophecies in the bible, what Simeon says is written after the event. It’s also very much from the perspective of the early church, recognising that Jews would reject the Messiah status of Jesus while gentiles would becoming more willing converts. And that the suffering of Mary would enrapture the faithful who would erect statues of her in utter misery with swords literally piercing her breast.
The Flight into Egypt
After the Three Kings – or Magi – visit Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, an angel warns Joseph that King Herod intends to kill Jesus. Under cover of night, the family flees to Egypt. On hearing the news, Herod flies into a rage and orders the slaughter of all baby boys under the age of two. There is no historical evidence that such a mass killing took place, even allowing for Herod’s undoubted ruthlessness. Some biblical scholars have tried to suggest it was a very localised infanticide but that is desperate stuff. As if to say, Herod demanded the murder of male babies but only in the Bethlehem downtown area. Oh please!
The gospel writer Matthew recounts the flight into Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents, which many bloodthirsty artists have relished portraying, but his story has more to do with fulfilling prophecy than describing real-life events. This is an exodus narrative with Jesus cast as the new Moses who will lead Christians to the promised land. As for the holy innocents, these babies are the first Christian martyrs and for centuries, 28 December was their feast day, just after Christmas. Mary is often depicted in heaven surrounded by the souls of these poor children – as if she has become their heavenly mother.
Mary’s presence in Egypt has not been forgotten by that country. Between 1968 and 1971, thousands of Egyptians, Christian and Muslim, claimed that Mary appeared repeatedly above the cupola of a church in Zeitoun, a suburb of Cairo. At the time, sceptics claimed that this miracle was a cynical ploy by the Egyptian government to rally Arab Christian support behind its ongoing conflict with Israel. It was even suggested that the Soviet Union perpetrated the hoax using overhead satellites!
The Finding in the Temple
Luke gives us one further episode from Jesus’s childhood (2:41–52). When Jesus is twelve, the family travels to Jerusalem for Passover, and on the return journey they discover Jesus is not with the group. They search for three days before finding him in the Temple, sitting among the teachers, listening and asking questions.
Mary’s reproach — “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you” — is the most ordinary, maternal, recognisable line she speaks. Jesus’s answer — “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” — bewilders his parents. But, Luke notes, his mother “treasured all these things in her heart.”
The implication is that Mary is a loving mother but has not yet fully understood the cosmic nature of her son.
The Wedding at Cana
As we all know, teenage and young adult sons rebel against their parents, causing them significant emotional pain. The wedding feast at Cana sees a very frosty exchange between Jesus and Mary.
In John’s Gospel (2:1–11), Mary appears at the wedding feast in Cana and when the wine runs out, she tells Jesus: “They have no more wine.” His reply — “Woman, why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come” — is pretty rude. It’s also weirdly patronising, and just nasty. Mary has performed her role in bringing him into the world and doesn’t need to be snapped at for not fully understanding what is about to unfold. As with the finding in the temple, Mary is yet again cast as a dullard compared to her brilliant, all-knowing son.
Mary skulks away, telling the servants at the wedding: “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus then performs his first miracle, turning water into wine.
This boorish, unpleasant side to Jesus was speculated on in the Middle Ages. I’ve blogged before about the missing years of Jesus between his childhood and ministry. In the British Museum in London, there is a a series of 14th century medieval tiles – the Tring Tiles – that show scenes from the childhood of Jesus that you will not find in the bible. It shows him to be a bully and a mindless killer. Below, he murders a man though later brings him back to life after being admonished by Mary.
At the Cross
John’s Gospel (19:25–27) records that Mary was present at the crucifixion, standing near the cross with the beloved disciple and several other women. Jesus, seeing his mother and the disciple, says to her: “Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple: “Here is your mother.” From that moment, the disciple takes her into his own home. This deathbed act of filial care is profoundly human; but it has also been interpreted theologically as Jesus entrusting the whole community of believers to Mary’s maternal care.
The other gospels mention women at the cross but not Mary, mother of Jesus. Confusingly, three of these other women are called…Mary. One of them being Mary Magdalen. For artists down the centuries, depicting Mary’s grief at the death of her son has been an irresistible subject. This is a medieval statue I saw in Prague in 2025.
After the Resurrection
After the crucifixion and resurrection, Mary makes one final appearance in the New Testament: in Acts 1:14, she is described as being with the disciples in Jerusalem, gathered in prayer as they await the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It is her last mention. The New Testament says nothing of her subsequent life or her death. So, forget all the stuff about being crowned queen of heaven – that comes from later additions.
The Story Develops — From Scripture to Popular Folklore
Given how sparse the gospel record is, it is perhaps unsurprising that the early Christian imagination set to work filling in the gaps. The process began very early indeed.
The Protoevangelium of James
The most influential of the early non-canonical texts relating to Mary is the Protoevangelium of James, probably dating to the late second century. This text introduces details that would become central to Catholic and Orthodox tradition even though they have no scriptural basis: the names of Mary’s parents (Joachim and Anne), a miraculous birth narrative for Mary herself (her elderly, barren parents are told by an angel that they will conceive), Mary’s presentation as a child to live and serve in the Temple, her selection by lot to become the wife of Joseph (depicted as an old widower with children from a previous marriage), and an account of the nativity in which a midwife confirms Mary’s perpetual virginity.
The text was not considered canonical, but it was enormously influential. It gave Mary a backstory worthy of her role, and it established certain details — particularly about her parents — that would become doctrinal foundation stones.
Mary’s Mother Anne
Anne (or Anna, Hannah) plays an increasingly important role in later Catholic tradition, though she appears nowhere in the New Testament. The Protoevangelium of James gave her a name and a narrative; subsequent centuries gave her a feast day (July 26), a rich iconographic tradition, and her own theology. She became the patron of mothers, of pregnant women, of miners, and of many other groups. Her cult was particularly strong in Brittany and elsewhere in the Celtic world.
The story of Anne became important partly because it addressed a theological anxiety: if Mary was herself conceived in the normal way, was she tainted by original sin? This question would not be formally resolved until the nineteenth century (see below), but long before that, theologians elaborated a doctrine of Mary’s “sanctification in the womb” — she was cleansed of original sin either at conception (Immaculate Conception) or at some point during gestation. Either way, Anne’s womb became a site of theological significance, a kind of pre-purification chamber. Anne’s story became embellished because Mary’s holiness needed a holy origin.
The image known as Anna Selbdritt (Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child), depicting a monumental Anne with a smaller Mary and a tiny Jesus, became popular in late medieval northern Europe. It was an extraordinary pictorial compression of generations of grace — and it showed Anne, not Mary, as the dominant figure.
Here is a a portrayal of this concept from Portugal with Anne dominating the trio of herself, daughter Mary, and grandson Jesus.
Theological Controversies and Doctrinal Developments
Was She Present at the Crucifixion?
John’s Gospel clearly states that Mary was present at the cross. The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) mention women present at the crucifixion but do not specifically include Mary the mother of Jesus among those named. This discrepancy is not usually treated as a major theological problem; most Catholic and Orthodox teaching assumes the Johannine account is accurate in this respect, and the image of Mary at the foot of the cross — Stabat Mater Dolorosa, “the sorrowful mother stood” — became one of the defining images of Western Christianity.
The Death of Mary: Dormition vs. Assumption
Possibly the messiest theological area for describing Mary is her death – or did she actually die? On a visit to Jerusalem in 2012, I was confronted by two religious sites claiming to be the place where Mary died. One is a Roman Catholic site and the other is Eastern Orthodox. Here’s the problem. These two branches of Christianity do not accept the other’s account of how Mary died. It’s a theological conflict guaranteed to give you a headache but here goes!
To sum it up before I go into the nuts and bolts – Catholics believe Mary went up to heaven both body and soul while the eastern orthodox think she died first, her soul ascending heavenwards, then Jesus arrived later to take her body as well. Why does this matter? Believe me, Christians have killed each other over less!
The Roman Catholic doctrine of the Assumption, was formally defined as dogma by Pope Pius XII in 1950. It states that “having completed the course of her earthly life”, Mary was taken up — “assumed” — body and soul into heavenly glory. The definition was careful: it did not specify whether Mary had died before being assumed, leaving open the question of whether she experienced biological death at all.
Pope Pius clearly felt she had not died in the usual way. As the sinless mother of God, she was preserved from mortal decay. Only those tainted by original sin rot after death, apparently. And another important distinction – Jesus ascended into heaven, powering his own flight upwards due to his godly status. Mary, on the other hand, needed to be “assumed” into heaven, bodily whole, by the grace of God. Given that Catholics love to venerate the corpse of a saint, it was important to state that Mary’s body would never be found because it had been taken skywards.
In Ireland, in 1950, businesses took out classified advertisements in the newspapers to tell their customers that they would be closing in honour of the pope’s proclamation of the dogma of the assumption. However, Protestant ministers condemned the papal decree as a statement with no basis whatsoever in scripture.
The Eastern Orthodox doctrine of the Dormition (Koimesis, “falling asleep”) has an equally tortuous narrative. Mary, having been told by an archangel that her death is approaching, gathers the apostles miraculously brought from across the world to her bedside. She dies peacefully, and Christ himself appears to receive her soul. Three days later, her tomb is found empty except for her grave clothes, and she is taken bodily to heaven. The Orthodox feast of the Dormition (August 15, the same date as the Catholic Assumption) is one of the twelve great feasts of the church year.
The difference is subtle but real. The Catholic doctrine leaves open whether Mary died; the Orthodox doctrine asserts clearly that she did die, but was then resurrected and assumed bodily. The Orthodox are, in a sense, more specific and more narrative; the Catholics have left a deliberate theological space. Neither account is based on Scripture; both are rooted in ancient pious traditions that were circulating from the fourth and fifth centuries onward.
The Seven Sorrows of Mary
Catholic devotional life organised Mary’s suffering into a formal structure: the Seven Sorrows (or Seven Dolors) of Mary, which provide a kind of emotional biography of her grief. They are:
- The Prophecy of Simeon — “a sword will pierce your own soul” (Luke 2:35)
- The Flight into Egypt — the terror of exile and persecution (Matthew 2:13–14)
- The Loss of Jesus in the Temple — three days of anguished searching (Luke 2:43–45)
- The Meeting of Jesus Carrying the Cross — though not described in the Gospels, it became standard devotional tradition
- The Crucifixion — standing at the foot of the cross (John 19:25)
- The Taking Down from the Cross — depicted in countless Pietà sculptures and paintings
- The Burial of Jesus — the sealing of the tomb
The Seven Sorrows tradition developed in the late medieval period, gaining formal papal recognition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The feast of Our Lady of Sorrows is observed on September 15. The devotion is powerful precisely because it insists on Mary’s suffering — it refuses to let her be a passive, ethereal figure untouched by grief. She endures what any mother whose son is tortured and executed would endure. The Pietà — Mary cradling the body of the dead Christ — is perhaps the single most emotionally overwhelming image in Western art, and Michelangelo’s version in St Peter’s Basilica remains one of the most visited sculptures in the world.
I mentioned the town of Viana do Castelo in Portugal above and its festival to Our Lady in Agony. The faithful carry a statue of Mary with his chest pierced by seven swords. This is an image that I’ve seen many times in southern Europe, especially in Spain and Portugal. Here is a statue from Viana do Castelo.
This is a statue at the very austere cathedral in the Spanish town of Tui, in north-west Spain, which I visited in early 2026. Note the swords again – though these ones look like giant cocktail sticks.
And in the nearby Spanish city of Vigo – we have another depiction of Mary and her Seven Sorrows.
Immaculate Conception and Perpetual Virginity
This is where Mary really does get elevated to the status of a goddess. As we’ve seen, largely thanks to sources outside of the bible, Mary has gone from being a humble peasant woman who gave birth to the son of God – to an almost supernatural being. At death, she is assumed into heaven and crowned as queen.
But what about her birth? Was she born sinful like the rest of us?
The Roman Catholic church is adamant that Mary was always devoid of sin. How could this be? Well, in 1854, Pope Pius IX gave the answer when he promulgated the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The conception in question is not that of Jesus, but of his mother. In short, Mary was immune to original sin from the moment she was conceived in Anne’s womb.
This was a matter of debate throughout the medieval period — the great theologian Thomas Aquinas actually argued against it, believing it would compromise the universality of Christ’s redemption. Think about it. If Mary was exempted from original sin, then Christ did not arrive to save everybody. His universal mission would be compromised. Because Mary, in effect, had already been saved.
Nevertheless, in order to be free of original sin when she became pregnant with Jesus – because even Aquinas thought that had to be the case – her soul was cleansed very early on. I’ll let Aquinas explain and you make your minds up!
“Even in the Blessed Virgin, first was that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual: for she was first conceived in the flesh, and afterwards sanctified in the spirit.”
Confused? It doesn’t get better!
“The Blessed Virgin was sanctified in the womb from original sin, as to the personal stain; but she was not freed from the guilt to which the whole nature is subject, so as to enter into Paradise otherwise than through the Sacrifice of Christ; the same also is to be said of the Holy Fathers who lived before Christ.”
OK, basically, Mary was a lump of sinful flesh in the womb for a second or two. Then her soul was implanted and that was sin-free. If anybody thinks I’ve done Aquinas a disservice with that summary, comment below. Aquinas is not an easy read. His definition of Mary’s sinful status was part of a monster book, the Summa Theologiae, which weighs in at 1.4 million words.
Anyway, in 1854, Pope Pius IX rejected the misgivings of Aquinas and defined the dogma, reinforcing the idea of Anne and Joachim experiencing a miraculous, sin-free conception. It should be stated that Pius IX declared this dogma at a time when he believed the church was under sustained attack on all fronts including the threat of Italian nationalism which not long afterwards deprived the pope of the papal states – a central band of territory in Italy ruled by the papacy since the 9th century. Today, the pope only has the Vatican as his kingdom.
As for the doctrine of Perpetual Virginity, that portrays Mary as a virgin before, during, and after the birth of Jesus. In other words, as if an explanation was really needed, she never had sexual relations with Joseph or any other man. As early as the papacy of Pope Martin I in the seventh century, this view was expressed very clearly. It was even accepted by leading Protestants, including Martin Luther.
But as we’ve seen, it clashes with elements of the bible story. Those pesky brothers and sisters of Jesus! And the stated intention of Joseph to consummate his marriage after the birth of the son of God.
Local Variants and Pagan Antecedents
My late mother was Portuguese and we had a summer house in a village in northern Portugal. She told me stories the local people recounted about Mary helping the fisherman bring in a good catch. But this confused me. The woman my mother was talking about could not be the Mary described in the bible. She never came to Portugal. There’s no account of her hanging out with fishermen. This had to be a different Mary.
It became obvious to me that the Virgin Mary, like some kind of religious franchise, was being grafted on to other divine females. And these were most likely pagan deities. Pre-existing goddesses who guaranteed a good harvest or a bumper catch at sea. When Christian missionaries fanned out across Europe, they would have met resistance to destroying these female spirit helpers. So, I suspect these missionaries created a universal Mary that incorporated all these local goddesses. A classic example of what is known as ‘syncretism’.
Examples of this can be found in every Catholic country. Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico), Our Lady of Częstochowa (Poland), Our Lady of Loreto (Italy), Our Lady of Aparecida (Brazil), Our Lady of Knock (Ireland), Our Lady of Lourdes (France), Our Lady of Fatima (Portugal) — the list is almost endless, and each figure has its own distinctive iconography, history, and devotional life.
This localisation has led many scholars — and many Protestant critics — to ask whether Marian devotion was essentially a Christianisation of pre-existing female deity worship. The sacred well, the hilltop shrine, the healing spring, the miraculous image — these phenomena are older than Christianity, and they cluster around Marian sites in ways that seem more than coincidental.
There is some impressive evidence for this dating back to the first years of Christianity. The great Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — was located in the city where, according to tradition, Mary spent her last years under the care of the apostle John. Early Christian councils in Ephesus, including the Council of 431 CE that granted Mary the title Theotokos (“God-bearer”), were taking place in a city with a very strong tradition of goddess worship. The famous dark-skinned statues of Mary that appear across the Mediterranean world (the Black Madonnas) have been connected by some scholars to ancient representations of Isis or Cybele — though others note that the darkness of these images often results simply from centuries of candle smoke and oxidisation.
The case of the goddess Isis is worth examining more closely. Isis was one of the most widely worshipped deities in the ancient world, her cult spreading from Egypt throughout the Roman Empire. She was a loving mother, depicted nursing her divine son Horus, searching the world in grief for her dead husband Osiris, and ultimately achieving his resurrection. The iconography of Isis nursing Horus — seated, with the divine infant at her breast — is visually almost identical to countless representations of the Madonna and Child. Isis was known as the “mother of god,” she was associated with the moon, with compassion, with intercessory prayer. Her temples stood throughout the Roman Empire, many of them in locations that later became churches or Marian shrines.
Did Christianity “borrow” the figure of Mary from Isis? The cautious scholarly answer is: not directly or consciously, but there was certainly a cultural absorption at work. Early Christians, competing for converts in a world already saturated with religious imagery, were drawing on a visual and emotional vocabulary that their audience already understood. The loving divine mother, accessible, compassionate, maternal — this was a figure that pagan converts would have found entirely familiar. The specific theological content was different; the emotional register was not.
This process is visible across Europe. In Ireland, the great goddess Brigid — associated with fire, healing springs, and creativity — became Saint Brigid, with her feast day on February 1 replacing the pagan festival of Imbolc. In parts of France and Spain, local female spirits of streams and mountains were transformed into local manifestations of Our Lady. In Mexico, the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531 on a hill that had previously been sacred to the Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin was not, from the indigenous perspective, entirely surprising.
In April 2026, during a month-long stay in Japan, I visited the Tokyo National Museum which includes a collection of objects confiscated from Japanese Christians, mainly in the area around Nagasaki, who for centuries were forced to worship in secret after their religion was banned by the Shogunate from the 17th to the 19th century. Only Buddhism and Shintoism were legal, being the historic faiths of Japan.
To try and fool local magistrates, Japanese Christians used statues of the Buddhist Bodhisattva Kannon as a stand-in for the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Clearly this ruse didn’t work as many of these items of devotion were seized and stored by the Nagasaki magistrate. Here is one example below, manufactured in China as a sacred Buddhist artefact and repurposed by Christians in hiding. It shows how Mary could be grafted on to any pagan female representation. This is how Mary became a universal female goddess!
Below is a medieval Madonna and child I snapped at the Musée de Cluny in Paris in October 2025. This is what Japanese Christians wanted to worship!
Protestant Objections to Marian Devotion
The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century — Luther, Calvin, Zwingli and their followers — had serious and sustained objections to Catholic Marian devotion. Their concerns operated at several levels.
The most fundamental was scriptural: Catholic Marian doctrines and practices, they argued, went far beyond anything warranted by the Bible. The Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, the perpetual virginity, the invocation of Mary as intercessor — none of these had clear scriptural support. For Protestants who held that Scripture alone (sola scriptura) was the rule of faith, this was damning.
The second objection was to the practice of praying to Mary. Catholic theology had always maintained a careful distinction between latria (worship due to God alone) and dulia (veneration appropriate to saints), with Mary receiving a special form of the latter called hyperdulia — supreme veneration, but still distinct from worship. Protestants found this distinction unconvincing in practice. When millions of ordinary believers prayed to Mary, lit candles before her images, made pilgrimages to her shrines, and attributed miracles to her intercession, were they not in practice treating her as a divine figure? Were they not praying to a goddess?
Luther himself is interesting in this regard. He retained considerable personal affection for Mary and never attacked her personally. He wrote warmly about the Magnificat. He believed in the Virgin Birth and in the perpetual virginity. What he rejected was the invocation of Mary and saints as intercessors, which he saw as undermining the sole mediatorship of Christ. There was one mediator between God and humanity, the man Christ Jesus — not a ladder of saints with Mary at the top.
Calvin was more severe. He described Marian devotion as straightforward idolatry, a relapse into paganism. Zwingli ordered the removal of images from Swiss churches, and Mary’s statues were among those destroyed. The English Reformation saw a similar iconoclasm: the great shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham — England’s most important pilgrimage site — was dissolved in 1538, its statue burned, its treasures seized.
The question of whether the Virgin Birth was “borrowed from paganism” has been raised from the 19th century. The argument points to divine births in pagan mythology — Perseus, Heracles, Romulus, and others, born of divine fathers and mortal mothers. More specifically, the story of Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, is cited.
Marian Apparitions and Popular Devotion
If the doctrinal elaboration of Mary tells us something about how theologians and church authorities shaped her story, the history of Marian apparitions tells us something different and equally important: it shows how popular devotion worked from below, and how the church sometimes struggled to contain and channel it.
Lourdes
In 1858, in the small town of Lourdes in the French Pyrenees, a fourteen-year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous reported a series of eighteen apparitions of a beautiful lady in a grotto by the river Gave. The lady eventually identified herself with a phrase that resonated with the recently proclaimed doctrine of the Immaculate Conception: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Cynics might wonder if this was more than mere coincidence.
She instructed Bernadette to dig in the ground; a spring was uncovered that has flowed ever since. In 1960, a movie was made about Bernadette’s story. Here’s a still from the film as the teenager experiences her meeting with the mother of Jesus.
Lourdes is now the most visited Marian shrine in the world and one of the most visited pilgrimage sites of any religion, with somewhere between four and six million visitors annually. The water from the spring is believed to have healing properties; the Catholic Church has officially recognised a number of healings at Lourdes as miraculous after rigorous investigation. Bernadette herself was canonised in 1933 by Pope Pius XI.
Sceptics have noted that the Virgin Mary has a knack for turning up when the Roman Catholic church is experiencing political challenges or declining church attendances. France saw a wave of anti-clericalism throughout the 19th century, a legacy of the 1789 French Revolution. Lourdes was a well-timed miracle for a beleaguered church.
Fatima
In 1917, Europe was convulsed by the First World War and Russia exploded into revolution with the communist Bolsheviks taking power – an avowedly anti-religious, anti-capitalist party. The Roman Catholic church hierarchy was not amused. So, one might have assumed it would be very pleased when three peasant children in rural Portugal – Lúcia, Francisco, and Jacinta – reported not one, but several encounters with the Virgin Mary between May and October of that year.
The apparitions were accompanied by the famous “Miracle of the Sun” on October 13, witnessed by a crowd estimated at 70,000 people, who described the sun dancing, spinning, and plunging toward the earth before returning to its place. Cynics attributed this optical illusion to the idiocy of staring at the sun for too long.
The Fatima apparitions had a more explicitly political and apocalyptic character than Lourdes. Mary spoke of communist Russia, of wars, of the need for consecration and reparation. The “Three Secrets of Fatima” — a vision of hell, a prophecy of world war, and a third secret that was sealed until 2000 — gave Fatima a Cold War urgency that made it immensely important in twentieth-century Catholicism.
Lúcia became the sole custodian of these secrets as Francisco and Jacinta died not long after the apparitions in the Spanish Flu epidemic that swept across the world after World War One. Holed up in a convent for decades, she received successive popes but in advanced old age, struck up the strongest rapport with John Paul II, a fervent Marian.
John Paul II survived an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981 (the feast of Our Lady of Fatima) and attributed his lucky escape from the clutches of death to Mary’s intercession, making a pilgrimage of thanksgiving to the shrine. He then donated the would-be assassin’s bullet, retrieved by surgeons from his abdomen, to Fatima where it was placed into the crown of the Virgin Mary.
In 2019, I visited Fatima, which is a vast shrine with an airport runway sized piazza in front of it, across which pilgrims trudge on their knees. Quite a sight!
The gift shop at Fatima would have sent Martin Luther into convulsions. Here is Mary crowned as queen of heaven. Sometimes these statues are full of holy water!
FIND OUT MORE: Exploring Marian pilgrimage sites
What the Shrines Tell Us
The popularity of Marian shrines — Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Czestochowa, Knock, Medjugorje — tells us several interconnected things about the nature of popular Catholic devotion.
First, it tells us that people need a face of the divine that is maternal, accessible, and non-judgmental. The theology of the Trinity — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — can feel abstract or distant or judicial. Mary offers something warmer, something that draws on the deepest human experiences of unconditional maternal love. She never condemns; she only asks and intercedes.
Second, it tells us that apparitions tend to occur among the marginalised and the powerless. Bernadette was poor and uneducated. The Fatima children were illiterate shepherds. Juan Diego, to whom Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared, was an indigenous Mexican in a colonised land. The message of Mary tends to reach across social hierarchies in ways that official church structures sometimes cannot.
Third, it tells us something about the persistence of the sacred feminine in religious life. Despite centuries of monotheistic theology emphasising a masculine God, despite Protestant efforts to strip Marian devotion from Christianity, the figure of the divine mother refuses to disappear. She surfaces in apparitions, in pilgrimages, in the devotion of hundreds of millions of ordinary believers who find in her something that formal theology alone cannot provide.
In short, we all need a goddess!
The Woman and the Tradition
Mary began as a young Jewish woman from Galilee who said yes to an extraordinary calling. From those few gospel chapters, an entire world of theology, devotion, art, music, architecture, controversy, and spiritual experience has grown. She has been the subject of the greatest sculptures and paintings in Western history. Her name has been given to countless cathedrals, hospitals, cities, and children. Popes have consecrated the world to her. Armies have marched under her banner. Pilgrims with cancer and broken bodies have dragged themselves to her springs.
She is, simultaneously, a humble servant of God and a figure of cosmic significance; a historical Jewish mother and a universal symbol of compassion; a carefully defined subject of doctrinal precision and a figure of wild popular imagination. The tensions in her story — between scripture and tradition, between Catholic veneration and Protestant suspicion, between pagan antecedents and Christian theology, between official doctrine and grassroots devotion — are not contradictions to be resolved but energies that have kept her story vital across two millennia.
Whether one believes in her miraculous conception, her perpetual virginity, her Assumption, and her apparitions — or whether one regards these as the products of human imagination working on a sparse historical record — the figure of Mary remains one of the most powerful and enduring creations of the religious imagination. She is, as the great theologian Karl Barth (a Protestant, notably) acknowledged, “the most human of all humans.” And in that humanity — in the sword piercing her soul, in the frantic search for her lost son, in the standing at the foot of the cross — she has found an echo in the human heart that shows no sign of fading.
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR:
Tony McMahon is an investigative historian often see on TV: https://tony-mcmahon.com/
He is the author of several books on different historical topics including the Knights Templar: https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Knights-Templar-Hardback/p/51654
Tony is the co-host of the Talking Templars podcast on YouTube and other channels.
