This article was originally given as a talk at the Rosary Shrine in London, alongside Mary Harrington.
It’s a great joy to be here at the Rosary Shrine this evening - or, rather, to be back at the Rosary Shrine. Because for many years, before I became a Dominican, this was in fact my parish. Thanks to my time as a parishioner here, I have many memories of praying in this church, of coming to Mass, to Evening Prayer, to Adoration, but also many memories simply of sitting in the side chapels depicting the joyful, the sorrowful and the glorious mysteries of the Rosary. And when I think back to my younger self sitting in these side chapels and meditating on those mysteries, I’m reminded of something that Pope St John Paul II said about the Rosary in his letter Rosarium Virginis Mariae, On the Most Holy Rosary. “With the Rosary,” Pope St John Paul II tells us in that letter, “the Christian people sits at the school of Mary and is led to contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ” (RVM, 1).
To sit at the school of Mary and contemplate the beauty on the face of Christ. This idea of the Rosary as a time of sitting at Our Lady’s school to contemplate her Son is where, tonight, we are going to start our meditation on Our Lady as a preacher of human dignity. One of the mottoes of the Dominican Order is contemplata aliis tradere, “to contemplate and to pass on the fruits of our contemplation,”[1] and this, fundamentally, is what we mean by preaching: to present to others, through the explicit proclamation of the Gospel, the Christ whom we ourselves have come to know, the Christ whom we meet in our liturgical worship and in our private prayer, in our study and in our life in community.
As Dominicans we understand that we cannot pass on what we ourselves have not first received in contemplation. And we see this principle in action above all in the life of Mary, who is able to guide us into contemplation of the face of Christ in the school of her Rosary because she herself has contemplated that face more deeply, more intently, more purely than any other human being - in His birth and infancy, in His public ministry, in His suffering and death and in His glory - and she has done so as His disciple, but above all as His mother.
Mary, preacher of Christ, has contemplated the face of her Son and passes on to us, in the school of her Rosary, the fruits of that contemplation. But there is something else she has received in that contemplation which she is able to pass on to us. Earlier this evening, before Mass, we prayed together the Evening Prayer of the Church. We sung, as we always do in Evening Prayer, the Magnificat: the Canticle of Mary taken from her words in the Gospel of Luke, the words she speaks to her kinswoman Elizabeth after learning that she is to give birth to the Son of God.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary says, “and my spirit exults in God my saviour; for He who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is His name” (Lk 1:46-47, 49).
Fourteen years before he wrote Rosarium Virginis Mariae, in his letter Mulieris Dignitatem, on the dignity and vocation of woman, Pope St John Paul II gave a commentary on these words of Mary from the Scriptures: “He who is mighty has done great things for me.” These words, said the Pope, “certainly refer to the conception of [Mary’s] Son, who is the Son of the Most High.” But, he says, “they can also signify the discovery of her own feminine humanity… just as God wanted her to be, a person for her own sake, who discovers herself ‘by means of a sincere gift of self’”(MD, 11).
Mary is able to guide us into contemplation of the face of Christ in the school of her Rosary because she herself has contemplated that face more deeply, more intently, more purely than any other human being.
Contemplating the mighty works of God, Mary also sees her own preciousness in God’s sight. Is this, then, something she passes on to us in her preaching? Is Mary’s discovery of her own humanity, her own personhood, one of the fruits of her contemplation of Christ which we receive from her hands when we sit at the school of her Rosary?
I think we find the beginnings of an answer to this question when we look at those many side chapels surrounding us today, presenting to us the mysteries of the Rosary. These images, these carvings, these statues - they are not abstract, faceless symbols of divine power. They are personal. They show concrete, embodied encounters between created persons and divine persons. They show relationships: relationships between Mary and Joseph, Mary and Jesus, Mary and Elizabeth, and between Jesus and His friends, His disciples.
What we learn from these side chapels is that God reveals Himself to humanity in ways that make full use of our relationality, of our capacity for relationship - a capacity which He Himself has given us. And this capacity for relationship with the other, we learn, is also at the same time a capacity for a free and rational response to the other. It is a capacity to offer oneself for the good of the other, with that combination of knowledge of the good and desire for the good which the Christian tradition calls freedom. We see this in Mary’s joyful response to the birth of her son, and in Elizabeth’s welcome of Mary; we see it in Christ’s free offering of Himself for us in His Paschal mystery, His death, resurrection and ascension.
The human capacity for relationship and response which we see in the mysteries of the Rosary is at the heart of the Gospel message. But it has its origin far deeper in salvation history: in the very act of our creation. “God created man in his own image,” we read in Genesis, “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (1:27). Not only in Mulieris Dignitatem but also throughout his papal teaching, most notably in the catechetical cycle of Wednesday Audiences on human love known as the Theology of the Body, Pope St John Paul II repeatedly returns to this passage from Genesis and refers to its fundamental truths as “the biblical beginning.” It is in these mythic, poetic lines from Scripture, whose lessons we see repeated in the Psalms, in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and on the lips of Christ Himself in the Gospels, that we discover who we are. We discover that we are persons. Created in God’s image, we make Him present in the world through our rationality (that is, our capacity to know good, to desire good, and to move ourselves freely towards it) and, as a sexually dimorphic species, embodied as male and female, we manifest that rationality specifically within relationships: in knowing and desiring the good of another person, responding to them with a free and total gift of our own selves.
So this biblical beginning is not merely a chronological beginning; it is not just an event from history which has passed out of sight and out of mind. It is instead the revelation of what a human being fundamentally is in every time and place, and a principle for our thought and for our action today.
God reveals Himself to humanity in ways that make full use of our relationality, of our capacity for relationship - a capacity which He Himself has given us. And this capacity for relationship with the other, we learn, is also at the same time a capacity for a free and rational response to the other.
The Rosary is a prayer that returns us, again and again, to the biblical beginning: to our identity as creatures made in God’s image, creatures made for relation and for response. In the Rosary, at the school of Mary, we receive a catechesis on this dignity - a dignity which is ours solely by virtue of our human nature. And the catechist whom God has chosen to transmit this teaching to us is His mother Mary, whom Pope St John Paul II describes in Mulieris Dignitatem as “the most complete expression” of the “dignity” and the “vocation” of the human person (MD 5). Not just the female human person, but every human person.
Through her Rosary, Mary preaches to us the necessity of returning to our biblical beginning if we are to respond to God as she has done, to love Him as she loves Him and know Him as she knows Him. She preaches to us the necessity of rediscovering, or perhaps discovering for the first time, that each one of us is a person made for relationship and response.
Now, the biblical beginning is a truth from which each age loses its way in its own way - and yet never with quite as much originality as it might believe. The only thing that really changes, I think, is the technology with which each historical era can separate itself from the biblical beginning, and stamp its own unbiblical conclusions on our own bodies, and those of others.
We are not the ancient Romans, who had no more sophisticated tools than the slave market and crucifixion to express their opinions on others’ personhood - or lack of it. But I don’t imagine, given access to smartphones, OnlyFans and puberty blockers, they would do anything categorically different from what we have been doing to ourselves recently. The technology changes, but the same questions haunt us: do we want to receive ourselves, or escape ourselves? And do we want to receive others, or escape them?
Bishop Erik Varden OCSO, in his book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, describes how these questions are answered - or not - by modern gender ideology. He brings to his readers” attention a Norwegian sex education textbook aimed at nine-year-olds, published in 2022, which describes gender identity as “your own thought about who you are and about how you see yourself.”
Bishop Erik writes, “the vista is at first intoxicating: fancy being, and requiring others to accept one as, whatever one likes! The sense of excitement yields, though, to a weight of heaviness. Effectively a child is told to be a demiurge: to create reality anew according to his, her, or zir self-perception there and then. Everything is possible, formless and empty as in Genesis, waiting to be filled and ordered - by oneself, at nine years of age.”[2]
Far from opening a door to limitless freedom, this view of the human person which Bishop Erik describes closes the door on the biblical beginning - the place where true freedom is found. After all, how can we make ourselves into gifts when we must constantly be works? Where can we find the time to give to another that which we must be constantly fashioning and refashioning? How can we respond to other people when we must constantly be responding to the disparate jumble of clues thrown out by our own minds and bodies, clues which might hold the answer to what on earth we are meant to make ourselves into next?
I don’t imagine, given access to smartphones, OnlyFans and puberty blockers, the Romans would do anything categorically different from what we have been doing to ourselves recently. The technology changes, but the same questions haunt us.
Many centuries ago, a previous Pope Leo exhorted us, “Christian, know your dignity,”[3] but perhaps our current age requires a far more basic invitation: “Human, know your dignity.” And the genius of Pope St John Paul II in Mulieris Dignitatem, the way that the prophetic character of this magisterial text is most clearly obvious to us today, is that it begins its discussion of women, and on women’s role in the Church and in society, not actually with the question of womanhood at all - but instead with a far more fundamental question about the very nature of the human person.
We would do well to learn from the Pope’s pedagogy here; to have the courage to take a step back from the various fights and debates in which we find ourselves embroiled and to ask not the surface-level question, but the deeper question underlying our confusion: what is a human person, and what are we for? Because vast swathes of our current political and social dilemmas in fact boil down to this: we no longer really know what the human person is, or what they are for.
Now, we might think that we in the Church are immune to the idea that total self-invention, at any physical or psychological cost, is the only true guarantor of human safety and happiness. I would like to suggest that actually, we are not. But in the Church we do, thankfully, have the tools for diagnosis and for cure. We can name this phenomenon for what it is, even if we ourselves are vulnerable to it: it is a fear of the biblical beginning; it is fear of the givenness of human nature, and of the necessity of relationships - relationships with others, who exist outside and beyond our own selves - for our psychological and spiritual flourishing.
This is where we find the content for our preaching today: we are called to preach the truth of the biblical beginning to a world that fears it or else has entirely forgotten it.
But how?
I’ve already mentioned the many side chapels depicting the mysteries of the Rosary which we’re surrounded by tonight. But also, over here to my left, we also find a replica of the grotto at the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes in France. This is because the Rosary Shrine was built in gratitude for what was then the very recent apparitions of Our Lady to Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes. And this, I think, is very fitting given our topic tonight, because Our Lady’s appearances to St Bernadette have much to teach us about what it means to be a preacher of human dignity formed in the school of Our Lady.
The Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette, then a fourteen-year-old girl, for the first time on February 11th 1858, in a natural cave found in the rockface at Massabielle normally used for sheltering animals or dumping refuse. The Carthusian monk Dysmas de Lassus uses Our Lady’s appearance to St Bernadette as an illustration of what he calls “the immense esteem God has for His creatures,” for Our Lady spoke to Bernadette, in his words, “as if she were a princess.”[4]
But Bernadette herself put it differently, and I would say with more theological accuracy: she said that Our Lady addressed her “like a person.” Bernadette Soubirous, daughter of a miller who could barely earn enough to keep his family and who spent time in prison after being falsely accused of theft, illiterate until she was a teenager, wracked with chronic ill health after contracting cholera in the cold and cramped conditions in which her family were forced to live, is spoken to by the Mother of God as somebody who matters: as a person.
“A person for her own sake,” said Pope St John Paul II of Mary: this, we recall, was the great, God-given discovery about herself which Mary preaches to her kinswoman Elizabeth when she proclaims that, “my soul magnifies the Lord,” and “He who is mighty has done great things for me.”
We might think that we in the Church are immune to the idea that total self-invention, at any physical or psychological cost, is the only true guarantor of human safety and happiness. I would like to suggest that actually, we are not. But in the Church we do, thankfully, have the tools for diagnosis and for cure.
Our Lady of the Magnificat, having discovered the fullness of her own human dignity, evangelises others by helping them to discover theirs. She comes to Elizabeth, to St Bernadette, and to each one of us in the Rosary, with confidence in her own preciousness in God’s sight, with sure knowledge of the personhood which has been given to her by God - and this is what she transmits to them, to us, in her preaching.
“Who am I, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?” asks King David of God in the Old Testament (2 Sam 7:18). “Lord, what is man that you bear him in mind, that you think of him?” asks the Psalmist (Ps 8:4). The question who am I, who am I that God should care about me, who am I that God would ask me to serve him, is woven throughout the people of Israel’s journey with God. It passes into the New Testament on the lips of Elizabeth, childless and elderly, who asks of Mary, “Who am I that I should receive a visit from the mother of my Lord?” Or as some translations have it: “Why am I so honoured?”
When Mary sings her Magnificat, she takes this question, the human person’s deepest question about their own identity and their purpose in the plan of God, and she embeds it into the evangelising mission of the Church. The answer she gives for herself is the answer she gives to Elizabeth and to all of us: in magnifying the Lord, in her relationship with Him, she has discovered not only who He is but also who she herself is: she has discovered the fullness of her own humanity.
To guide another person towards an answer to this question, who am I, is part of the privilege of evangelisation. It is part of the responsibility of the mission of preaching. Scripture and the witness of Our Lady together attest that it matters to God that each of His human creatures receives, in their journey towards Him, an answer to this question: that they receive from the Church, from God’s People, the news that they are so honoured because they are persons, and thus learn to receive themselves, as they have been created, with peace and joy.
This, we can say, is the definition of dignity: we are so honoured because of who we are, of who our biblical beginning has made us; we are so honoured because of the mighty thing that God has done simply by holding each of us in existence.
Our Lady of the Magnificat, having discovered the fullness of her own human dignity, evangelises others by helping them to discover theirs.
Within the poetry of the divine plan, it is no accident that this preaching mission belongs pre-eminently to a woman - in other words, to a human person capable of motherhood. In Mulieris Dignitatem, Pope St John Paul II is emphatic that motherhood, from a Catholic perspective, cannot be spoken of just as fifty per cent of parenthood but with more blood and exhaustion.
“The woman’s motherhood,” he tells us, “constitutes… the most demanding part,” of parenthood, for it “involves a special communion with the mystery of life” (MD 18). Motherhood is the apocalypse that lifts the veil over our biblical beginning, and which gives all women - even those who never fulfil their capacity for motherhood biologically - a particular attunement to the mystery of the human person. Woman’s physical capacity for motherhood speaks of a spiritual capacity for welcoming, for nurturing, simply for seeing the human person for who they are with a particular openness and ease.
“Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge the person, they see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations… In this way,” he says, “the basic plan of the Creator takes flesh in the history of humanity.” (Pope John Paul II, Letter to Women)
This feminine capacity - this “feminine genius”, as JPII calls it - is why we speak of the Church as woman: as bride and mother. It is why we speak of Mary, virgin Mother of God, not simply as a member of the Church but as its very figure, its model. She is not simply a very good example whom we look up to from afar, but our mother in the order of grace who accompanies and strengthens us at every moment of our Christian lives. Feminine humanity, ordered towards motherhood on every level of its being and thus fully ready to welcome the human person, is the natural key which God gives us to make sense of the supernatural identity and mission of the Church.
What we learn of the Church through thinking of her in this way, seeing her in this way, is what we call the Church’s Marian dimension. And this Marian dimension of the Church is for all of us. All of us, baptised into Christ’s Body and sharing in His life and mission, are called to make present, in our lives and in our witness, the primacy of the human person with their distinct capacity for relationship and response.
We can’t all become women, but we can all become Marian. We can all accept this baptismal calling to acknowledge and to receive the human person into the family of God in their fullness, with all their difficulties and distinctiveness, without regard for their utility or their function - knowing that this is a supernatural calling for which women, and pre-eminently the woman of Nazareth, Mary, provide us with the God-given natural blueprint.
Feminine humanity, ordered towards motherhood on every level of its being and thus fully ready to welcome the human person, is the natural key which God gives us to make sense of the supernatural identity and mission of the Church.
Now, I mentioned earlier that each society loses sight of the biblical beginning in a distinct but never entirely original way. And our current confusion over the biblical beginning makes it particularly difficult, I suggest, to understand what’s being proposed to us here in this teaching, this teaching on the Marian dimension of the Church - even if we ourselves are faithful Catholics. We do not know how to cope with the fact that the biblical beginning asks us to see dignity, rather than threat, in the differences between men and women, such as the differences between fatherhood and motherhood.
We may well have chosen to go and sit in the school of Mary. But many of us have shown up with stationery and with textbooks taken from the school of Aristotle, whose philosophy provides a functionally useful metaphysical scaffolding for many areas of Catholic doctrine but not for a Catholic understanding of human sexual difference. Aristotle’s conception of sexual difference is what the philosopher Sr Prudence Allen has called sex polarity, and it boils down to the idea that material difference means hierarchy: if matter matters, and men and women are physically distinct, then one must be at the top of the hierarchy, and one must be at the bottom. And, in an unexpected plot twist, Aristotle concludes that it is women who are defective manifestations of human nature, and men the full manifestation. This theory of sexual difference is most succinctly defined in his own writings in Metaphysics Book 10 and Politics Book 1, and in the modern era in that scene in the Barbie movie where Barbie asks to speak to a woman and Aaron, the Mattel employee, replies, “I’m a man without any power - does that make me a woman?”
For a mind formed by Aristotelian sex polarity, the concept of the dignity of woman can only be a subject for apologetic arguments and clever rhetorical acrobatics, not a cool-headed and straightforward assessment of the data of Scripture and Tradition. This is one of the reasons we find Mulieris Dignitatem, which is simply a calm meditation on biblical anthropology rather than a try-hard apologetic, somewhat perplexing.
Another reason is that Mulieris Dignitatem roots its teaching on women’s power and dignity, on the gift of femininity to our understanding of the Church, in motherhood: a characteristic of feminine humanity that also makes women weak and vulnerable. And we are not equipped by our culture and society to make sense of this.
How can something that makes a person weak also make them powerful? How can something that makes them dependent on others’ service also empower us to serve? In the biblical beginning, there is no contradiction here, because motherhood, as JPII has told us, involves a special communion with the human person as they truly are. But in the school of Aristotelian sex polarity, this is a paradox too far. Differences, such as the differences between male and female parenthood, imply a hierarchy in which somebody has to be lesser. And yet here the Church proposes for our belief the total opposite: that which makes us powerful also makes us vulnerable; that which puts us at the feet of others puts us over the serpent’s head.
And this is what we are called to make manifest in our preaching, our lives of faith, in our service and in our witness to others: the Marian dimension of faith which is rooted in the logic of motherhood, where power is vulnerability and dependency and service go together.
But we can’t be frightened of this fact if we are to become, like Mary, preachers of human dignity. We can’t let that hold us back.
We may well have chosen to go and sit in the school of Mary. But many of us have shown up with stationery and with textbooks taken from the school of Aristotle, whose conception of sexual difference is what the philosopher Sr Prudence Allen has called sex polarity. In an unexpected plot twist, Aristotle concludes that it is women who are defective manifestations of human nature, and men the full manifestation.
Whatever roles we are called to play in God’s plan of salvation - as parents raising children in the faith, as pastors, ministers, as volunteers in our parish groups, or simply as believing disciples committed to evangelising our family and friends - whatever role we play, the Church calls us to do it in a Marian way. And if we do it in a Marian way, focused on the person, on developing their God-given capacity for relationship and response, it is going to be hard. It will reveal our own dependency, and our own need; our own capacity to harm and to be harmed. It will reveal our disordered attachment to efficiency and externally impressive results; it will reveal our impatience with the slow and respectful workings of grace. It will put us with Mary at the Annunciation, quietly forming a free and personal response to God; it will put us with Mary at the foot of the Cross, committed to abiding with the suffering of others, accompanying them in it and through it, for however long is needed.
Yet this is what we have been asked to do; this is what is to be done unto us according to God’s word. And it seems hard partly because it genuinely is hard; but often it seems hard simply because we’re looking at it in the wrong way, with the eyes of our secular culture rather than the eyes of faith. And this is why we go to the school of Mary to learn what it truly means to be a preacher of human dignity, to learn what it means to be both powerful and vulnerable, to be both dependent and of service.
So how can we make more visible this Marian dimension of the Church’s life - what can we do concretely to preach human dignity? I’d like to suggest just one way we can become preachers of human dignity in the style of Our Lady, formed at her school, and it has to do with the human conscience. We can give the formation of conscience its rightful importance in all that we do in our parishes and in our communities to bring others to Christ.
The nature and purpose of the conscience is, I think, a very misunderstood part of the Church’s doctrine of the human person. Often our temptation is towards either a very shallow view of conscience as a kind of inner vending machine cranking out right decisions, or a suspicious view of conscience, which sees it simply as the thing which some people think tells them that they can go on the pill.
Neither the shallow nor the suspicious view of conscience is the fullness of Church teaching. The Second Vatican Council defines the conscience as “the most secret core and sanctuary of a man” (Gaudium et Spes, 16). The conscience is not just present and active at the moment of deciding on a specific course of action. It is our permanently open door to our biblical beginning; the inner Nazareth where each of us receives our own personal Annunciation from God and where we respond to His truth with our free “yes”. In the Church’s understanding, conscience is indeed about making right decisions; but right decisions are, properly speaking, free decisions, decisions which do not merely take the correct external form but are prompted by an inner movement of the mind and will towards God.
So I’m going to look at an area of parish life where we can focus on the formation of conscience, sacramental preparation. Not just because this is an area we’re all going to be at least aware of going on in our parish, even if not very familiar with, but also because it’s an area of parish life where we face a strong temptation to hone in on the procedural aspects, the forms-and-paperwork aspects, rather than the relational aspect present in the biblical beginning.
Many parishes I know are reforming their sacramental preparation for First Reconciliation and First Holy Communion so that, rather than focusing on hustling large groups of children simultaneously towards a fixed calendar date, they instead focus on accompanying families in order to give the child not only good teaching but also good time, the time needed to develop an inner response to God - an inner meeting which cannot be forced or fabricated by any other human person, and which allows them to say their own authentic, personal “yes” to the sacrament they are being prepared for. This style of catechesis has a few different names: I’ve heard it called family-focused or family-led catechesis, or accompaniment-based catechesis. But we can also think of it, I would like to suggest, as conscience-forming catechesis.
I’d like to suggest just one way we can become preachers of human dignity in the style of Our Lady, formed at her school, and it has to do with the human conscience. We can give the formation of conscience its rightful importance in all that we do in our parishes and in our communities to bring others to Christ.
Now, this might sound like a rather overinflated way to talk about a child’s spiritual life, and as somebody who works with children a lot, I am fully aware that when a child gives you an insight into their inner life you’re as likely to hear as much about unicorns, crisps and their new bunkbed as you are about God. But the Marian dimension of Church life acknowledges the person, and so we must acknowledge that the tiny children we meet in our catechesis have, by virtue of their baptism, the same capacity to make a free and personal response to God as we adults do.
But if we commit ourselves to conscience-forming catechesis, we then have to acknowledge that the most effective place where such catechesis takes place is not usually in the relationship between a child and a parish catechist. It is instead usually in the relationship between the child and their parent. What this means is that the consciences to be formed in children’s catechesis are not just the children’s consciences but those of their parents - helping them to make a free “yes” to God’s truth in their own inner sanctuary. In this way, faith can be transmitted parent-to-child, within the most fundamental and organic unit of human community within which a child is nurtured - recognising that this nurture is not only physical and emotional, but spiritual.
And when we commit ourselves to conscience-forming catechesis for children’s sacramental preparation, then we might find that the way we treat the seemingly most small and insignificant among us, the children of the parish, builds a certain spiritual muscle within us. It might begin to have an effect on how we approach our evangelisation and catechesis of people of all ages. We might discover that all of our evangelisation and our catechesis flourishes here in the biblical beginning: in forming consciences to make a free response to God and to the Christian community. This is a small but powerful way in which we can bring others to the school of Mary to discover the truth of their own dignity.
I mentioned at the beginning of this talk that I spent the first few years of my Catholic life, the years before I became a Dominican, as a parishioner at the Rosary Shrine. I then found myself returning to the parish as a Dominican about three or four years ago to work as a parish sister together with Sr Lucy.
At the same time that the two of us were working here in the parish, there was a lot of renovation work going on in the church building, and we would come to the parish every weekend to find that yet another thing that had once been dull and grubby had suddenly become all gold and shiny. It was all very exciting! But it was particularly wonderful when one of the side chapels was renovated, to have those visible signs of the mysteries of the Rosary presented to us newly clean, newly bright, newly coloured. And when Sr Lucy and I would arrive at the Shrine to find one of the side chapels had been restored or repainted, we would always take time just to sit in it for a little while, just as I did back when I was a parishioner here myself, and contemplate that mystery anew.
When I think about the renovations I saw happening at the Rosary Shrine when I worked here, I’m reminded of a homily Pope St John Paul II preached in the Sistine Chapel in 1994, to mark the unveiling of the chapel’s newly renovated frescoes. In that homily, Pope St John Paul II was very keen to draw out the spiritual significance of the Sistine Chapel’s renovations. “The Sistine Chapel,” he said, “is the sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” for it witnesses “to the beauty of man created by God as male and female.”[5] In other words, this sacred art makes visible, and holds before our eyes, a deeper theological truth.
I think it is worth thinking about the renovations of the Rosary Shrine, in particular the side chapels depicting the mysteries of the Rosary, in a similar way. That renovation work was also not simply an act of spring-cleaning but was instead an act with a spiritual significance. As the Sistine Chapel is a sanctuary of the theology of the human body, this shrine is a sanctuary of the theology of human dignity: its sacred art witnesses to the beauty of human creatures made in God’s image, made for relationality and response. This shrine was worth renovating because that message is worth preaching - indeed, God Himself thought it was worth the life of His own Son.
The work of renovating these side chapels in the Rosary Shrine, this sanctuary of the theology of human dignity, took much time and effort. But it can be our inspiration to undertake a similar work ourselves, to renovate those sanctuaries of human dignity that we have been called to steward in our own lives: the bonds of charity within our parish communities; the various forms of service and ministry we undertake within those communities; our Christian witness to our friends and family; our own interior lives of prayer.
These sanctuaries we have may not be as large and impressive or as visible as side-chapels in a shrine, but they are still ours to care for; they are both where and how we discover our own human dignity and preach that dignity to others. And this preaching will become louder and more powerful when we take the time to restore and renew these sanctuaries we have been given, with as much care and attention as if they were chapels filled with sacred art, using the lessons we have learnt about human dignity, and our calling to preach it, at the school of Mary: God’s pre-eminent preacher of human dignity.
Watch the talks by Sr Carino and Mary Harrington on our YouTube channel.
Sr Carino is the author of the CTS book The Dignity of Women in the Modern World.
What the Female English Martyrs Tell Us About the Feminine Genius
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Apr 30
The martyrs of England and Wales have been a source of inspiration, encouragement and intercession for British Catholics for centuries. But in our own time, they can also help us to navigate the debates and disagreements around sexual difference, gender roles, and collaboration between men and women, which have become particularly strident in recent yea…
Women in the Life & Leadership of the Church
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Apr 10
The Synod on Synodality’s study groups have begun releasing their final reports, and while not all of them have managed to capture the attention of the Catholic news cycle, one notable exception has been the report of the fifth study group: The Participation of Women in the Life and Leadership of the Church.
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[1] ST III, Q. 40, A. 1, Ad 2 “The contemplative life is, absolutely speaking, more perfect than the active life, because the latter is taken up with bodily actions: yet that form of active life in which a man, by preaching and teaching, delivers to others the fruits of his contemplation, is more perfect than the life that stops at contemplation, because such a life is built on an abundance of contemplation, and consequently such was the life chosen by Christ.”
[2] Bishop Erik Varden OCSO, Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses, p. 124
[3] Pope St Leo the Great, Sermo 1 in Nativitate Domini, taken from the Office of Readings for the Solemnity of the Nativity of the Lord
[4] Dysmas de Lassus OCSO, Abuses in the Religious Life and the Path to Healing, p. 159
[5] Pope St John Paul II, Homily at the Celebration of the Unveiling of the Restorations of Michelangelo’s Frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, April 1994
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