Mary and childbirth

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divinefaith

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Did Mary give birth to Jesus with the same experiences as other women. II was under the impression that She did not go through pain as she was free from original sin. Does theology talk more about her birth to Jesus?
 
The Church teaches that Mary was a virgin BEFORE,** DURING **and AFTER the birth of Jesus. In other words, she is Ever Virgin. The Church also teaches that she did NOT undergo the pain of childbirth. (The details of the birth of her Son aren`t touched on.) Obviously, for her virginal integrity not to be violated, a miracle was involved.

Those teachings are Dogma.

If she`d been examined by a physician (not likely!) later in life, he most likely would have been able to say: “This woman is still a virgin.”

i wonder whether the Child emerged miraculously through her abdomen…into her waiting arms. Just conjecture.🤷
 
Tradition says that Jesus was born out of the usual orifice. (There are some serious theological problems if He didn’t, and the ancient world knew all about C-sections, so it would have smelled of that.)

However, the poetic way of saying it is that He passed through said orifice “like sunlight through glass”, so you’re not far wrong. Another poetic way of saying it is that Mary gave birth to the Word as simply as she conceived after hearing the Angel’s word from God to her.

Remember, Jesus is the Great Physician. It’s not impossible that He healed His Mother while He moved along. It’s also possible that something happened similar to His behavior after the Resurrection. Or it may just be that the Father just made it happen that way.

However, despite Jesus getting born without pain and with Mary still being a physical virgin, it really was a normal birth otherwise. Jesus really was man born of woman, not some kind of floaty Docetist phantom critter.

Mary was sinless and virginal and didn’t suffer, but otherwise she was a completely normal young Jewish mother with all the normal joys and troubles. (I say this, because there are some REALLY WEIRD Docetist notions about Mary, including some arcane Islamic thinking that Mary was hermaphroditic.)
 
Fiasco said:
The Church teaches that Mary was a virgin BEFORE,** DURING **and AFTER the birth of Jesus. In other words, she is Ever Virgin. The Church also teaches that she did NOT undergo the pain of childbirth. (The details of the birth of her Son aren`t touched on.) Obviously, for her virginal integrity not to be violated, a miracle was involved.

Those teachings are Dogma.

If she`d been examined by a physician (not likely!) later in life, he most likely would have been able to say: “This woman is still a virgin.”

i wonder whether the Child emerged miraculously through her abdomen…into her waiting arms. Just conjecture.🤷
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I’m not sure that the four Marian dogmas of Divine Motherhood, Perpetual Virginity, Immaculate Conception and Assumption into Heaven speak about pain or lack of pain during the birth of Jesus.

There is much writing on the topic, but I don’t think a painless birth is part of the dogmas.

I do welcome correction.

-Tim-
 
Hi Divine,

As stated above, Mary is ever a virgin. For those who defined this dogma, virginity includes physical integrity. It is not however a dogma that she was free from pain during childbirth, although it seems a logical conclusion from physical integrity. As a matter of fact is is considered “ordinary teaching”. John Paul II said that Mary’s pains of childbirth happened on Calvary where she became the Mother of us all.
**On Calvary, Mary united herself to the sacrifice of her Son and made her own maternal contribution to the work of*salvation, which took the form of labour pains, the birth of the new humanity. In addressing the words “Woman, behold *
*your son” to Mary, the Crucified One proclaims her motherhood not only in relation to the Apostle John but also to **every disciple. The Evangelist himself, by saying that Jesus had to die “to gather into one the children of God who are **scattered abroad” (Jn. 11:52), indicates ***the Church’s birth as the fruit of the redemptive sacrifice with which Mary is **maternally associated.
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. ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2bvm63.htm
 
Thanks for all your posts.

Why did Mary still need the physical resemblance of a virgin? Any woman is still capable of remaining a virgin while still having that physical difference. Is it specifically a Church teaching that her body feature was intact even after birth?
 
Hi Divine,

There was no “need” of anything. It’s just the way God decided to take our human nature. Virginity while giving birth is physical integrity.

Verbum
 
Verbum said:
Hi Divine,

There was no “need” of anything. It’s just the way God decided to take our human nature. Virginity while giving birth is physical integrity.

Verbum
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Thanks for your response. Where is the explanation of her physical integrity stated in dogma? Do you or anyone else here have a reference?
 
I have read that Jesus left Mary’s womb with its seals intact just as he left the tomb with its seals intact, and entered the room with its locks intact.
 
Yea, but that was Christ is His resurrected body, w/out the limitations it had before.
 
Fragile said:
Yea, but that was Christ is His resurrected body, w/out the limitations it had before.
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I see nothing in the Bible which says His Resurrected body was different from the one with which He walked on water.
18 The sea rose because a strong wind was blowing. 19 When they had rowed about three or four miles, * they saw Jesus walking on the sea and drawing near to the boat. They were frightened, 20 but he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.”
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John 6:18-21

Or the one which walked through the crowd which sought to kill Him 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.
29* And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw him down headlong. 30* But passing through the midst of them he went away.
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Luke 4:29
 
For me, the argument that Mary is SUCH a perpetual virgin that she was even a “virgin” “in partu” – that her womb did not even open to let Christ out – mortally conflicts with the doctrine that Jesus was “fully God AND fully man.” If Mary’s physical womb did not physically open, either Jesus was hopelessly trapped inside her womb, or He STOPPED being “fully man” for a moment in time, so that He could get out of her womb.

This extreme form of “in partu virginity,” maintaining that, literally speaking, Jesus was not “born,” but rather that He came out of Mary in a miraculous fashion, always seemed to me to violate so many components of Church doctrine.

Logic is “in and of God,” so that doctrines illogically partnered-up can’t be accepted. Something has to give.

Participants in the Bible studies I mentor sometimes call me a “heretic” for denying “in partu virginity” – something that is as irrelevant to virginity as pregnancy – but I always answer with the question, “Then you deny that at all moments of His time on Earth Jesus was ‘fully God and fully man’?”
 
Verbum said:
Hi Divine,

Pope John Paul IIL has summarized the Church’s teaching on Mary’s virginity in the following document :
ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP960710.HTM

Verbum
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Although this is a nice explaination on Mary’s virginal conception, it dose’nt address the virginial birth process.

Now I understand that Mary’s giving birth did not remove her virginal status. But the question remains, just how did that come about? Since the Bible nor the Fathers have shed any diffinate light on this, then it would be pure speculation to conjecture this process.

Yes/No? What do you think?
 
I was always taught Mary had Jesus the way any mother would. She was human, albeit a perfect soul, he was human, they wouldn’t have any weird way of having a baby. Why go nine months then, why be pregnant, just have him be born…the birhing process is not horrible, to get into the physcial virginal aspects isn’t correct…that doesn’t make someone a virgin or pure. They ate, slept in the same home, had to go to the bathroom, Mary had to go to the temple to be cleansed after the birth, she followed Jewish law.

I think you shouldn’t get into “what makes a virgin”, she was a pure soul, nothing about Jesus’s birth made it different.
 
fred_conty said:
Although this is a nice explaination on Mary’s virginal conception, it dose’nt address the virginial birth process.

Now I understand that Mary’s giving birth did not remove her virginal status. But the question remains, just how did that come about? Since the Bible nor the Fathers have shed any diffinate light on this, then it would be pure speculation to conjecture this process.

Yes/No? What do you think?
Click to expand...
the explanation linked by Verbum did briefly mention Mary’s ‘physical integrity’…dont know what its specifically referring to…
 
fred_conty said:
Although this is a nice explaination on Mary’s virginal conception, it dose’nt address the virginial birth process.

Now I understand that Mary’s giving birth did not remove her virginal status. But the question remains, just how did that come about? Since the Bible nor the Fathers have shed any diffinate light on this, then it would be pure speculation to conjecture this process.

Yes/No? What do you think?
Click to expand...
The reason why in partu virginity is a big issue is that one of the early popes, Martin I, signed-off on a decree that Mary remained a “virgin” even “in parturition” – even in giving birth. I will have to look up the exact language. In effect it means that Mary did not actually “give birth” in the normal sense of the word.

For me this creates a theological crisis. The Scriptures are as much “an infallible teaching of the Church” as the decree of Martin I. Yet, Luke’s gospel indicates that Mary gave birth in the normal fashion when it says that she and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem after the days of “their” purification – Mary and Joseph’s – were achieved (where Mary would have needed purification from having the normal “blood” of childbirth touch her outer body, and Joseph would have needed purification because he assisted Mary at childbirth, and so became sullied by the same “blood.”} The two bird sacrifice described in Luke 2 is the normal purification sacrifice after a normal bloody birth.
 
divinefaith said:
the explanation linked by Verbum did briefly mention Mary’s ‘physical integrity’…dont know what its specifically referring to…
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“physical integrity” I agree with, although it dosen’t say what everyone wants to hear, and that is “hymen”. It could be referring to non-cesarian.

My own opinion is that the birth was natural thru the normal birth channel with physical integrity made possible thru divine intervention. In short a miracle.

I don’t find that difficult to believe when Moses raised his arms and the waters parted.

Just a thought.
 
Uzziah1 said:
The reason why in partu virginity is a big issue is that one of the early popes, Martin I, signed-off on a decree that Mary remained a “virgin” even “in parturition” – even in giving birth. I will have to look up the exact language. In effect it means that Mary did not actually “give birth” in the normal sense of the word.

For me this creates a theological crisis. The Scriptures are as much “an infallible teaching of the Church” as the decree of Martin I. Yet, Luke’s gospel indicates that Mary gave birth in the normal fashion when it says that she and Joseph took Jesus to Jerusalem after the days of “their” purification – Mary and Joseph’s – were achieved (where Mary would have needed purification from having the normal “blood” of childbirth touch her outer body, and Joseph would have needed purification because he assisted Mary at childbirth, and so became sullied by the same “blood.”} The two bird sacrifice described in Luke 2 is the normal purification sacrifice after a normal bloody birth.
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I agree that it could have been bloody even tho miraculously virginal because the birth seemed normal in every other sense. In fact that would seem to emphasize how normal it was.

Just a thought.
 
I agree with those who are saying that Mary had a natural birth with the same natural physical results as other mothers. thanks guys 🙂
 
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