Book review: “The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary” by Sidney Callahan

It wasn’t happenstance, I think, that Sidney Callahan’s The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary were published within a year of each other a half century ago.

Undoubtedly, they are very different books, yet both were rooted in the concerns of second-wave feminism in the Western world (1963-1991), particularly the inequalities of women in a male-dominated culture and society.

Warner is an English social and cultural historian who was just 29 in 1976 when her groundbreaking Alone of All Her Sex was published. Her core point was that the Catholic Church had used the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a way to keep women in subservient, inferior and compliant.

Warner writes that, even though Mary was identified as “the Church’s female paragon and the ideal of the feminine personified,” she was also characterized in a way that no other woman could match: born without sin, a virgin-mother who suffered no labor pains, never engaged in sex, lived a life without sin, was assumed into heaven.

Church leaders described Mary as almost super-natural, the most perfect of beings, except for Jesus, of course. And, with a paragon like that, every other woman couldn’t help but fall short. Indeed, Warner writes that, in many ways, Mary was praised specifically because she wasn’t a “woman,” at least, not the sort of woman who would have sexual feelings and would engage in sexual intercourse and would have to deal with painful labor to give birth to a child.

“Every facet of the Virgin” has been “systematically developed to diminish, not increase, her likeness to the female condition.”  And Warner goes on: “Her freedom from sex, painful delivery, age, death, and all sin exalted her ipso facto above ordinary women and showed them up as inferior.”

 

“His lowly handmaid”

However, for Sidney Callahan, writing as a Catholic feminist in 1975, Mary’s story is one of “special good news for women” — good news beyond the patriarchal interpretations of her by churchmen for two millenniums.

Her short book examines and reflects on the Magnificat, the prayer-song that the pregnant Mary said upon meeting her cousin Elizabeth who was also with child (Luke 1: 46-56).

A short time earlier, the angel Gabriel had appeared to the young virgin and told her that the Holy Spirit would come upon her, and she would conceive and give birth to the Son of the Most High. And, in the Jerusalem Bible translation used in Callahan’s book, Mary said, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me.” Now, upon greeting Elizabeth, Mary says:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord

and my spirit exults in God my savior.

 

Because he has looked upon his lowly handmaid.

 

Yes, from this day forward all generations will call me blessed,

for the Almighty has done great things for me.

 

Holy is his name,

and his mercy reaches from age to age for those who fear him.

 

He has shown the power of his arm.

He has routed the proud of heart.

 

He has pulled down princes from their thrones and exalted the lowly.

 

The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich sent empty away.

 

He has come to the help of Israel his servant, mindful of his mercy — according to the promise he made to our ancestors — of his mercy to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.

 

“A prayer for justice”

At the time the book was published, Callahan was in her early forties, already the mother of six children and deep into her career as a psychologist, theologian and scholar, a career that has continued well into the 21^st century.

She looks one by one at each of the eight sections of the prayer-song — “one of the greatest, most triumphant prayers” the western world has ever known — and her analysis is fueled with a great sense of wonder, righteousness, potential and joy at a new world that she and other women could see opening for them as they demanded equality in all areas of life.

It is a prayer for justice, a prayer of vindication, a prayer which embodies all the longing of all the outsiders and poor throughout history.

 

“Direct and rightful access”

It is the opening revelation of the new order that Jesus will bring to human existence, a new way, a road to salvation. And Callahan writes that it is fitting that God makes known this new order to a woman first — a woman, one of those outsiders and poor throughout history, hemmed in by men and the male-drawn rules, limited and constrained.  The Annunciation is the beginning of something radical:

Women are equal with men in their service to God and the world.  In the charge given to subdue the earth, and increase and multiply, both men and women are give power of ministry….Mary is a handmaid who is directly accountable to the Almighty.

She does not receive a secondhand vocation through her submission to her father or husband. She does not need to receive her value from her male kin, nor does her vocation involve subordination to males.

She is a handmaid to the Lord.  Not to this or that man.  “When Mary is a handmaiden,” writes Callahan, “she had direct and rightful access to the Almighty.”

In this way, God is signaling that women, like men, are equal partners in the radical new way of living.  That all women have direct and rightful access to God.  “The revolutionary nature of the good news can at last be fully applied to women,” writes Callahan.

 

“Jesus’ revolutionary view of women”

The Gospels show Jesus dealing with women in a profoundly countercultural way — as equals.  And Callahan credits Mary, to some extent, for his ability to do so:

Who else by Mary could have influenced Jesus’ revolutionary view of women? Jesus could speak with women freely in a way that shocked his disciples. He could relate to them with ease while asserting women’s equality in marriage.  Jesus had women as friends and helpers in his work.

Not that this countercultural revelation has been embraced over the past 2,000 years by human society or, for that matter, the churches.  Callahan writes:

Radical equality is a principle which it is hard for the world ever to accept.  Our world is still a place of patriarchal dominance ruled by an elite propertied class who live at the expense of others.

But the religious proclamation of the equality of each person’s claim in God’s Kingdom is pervasive in all of those revolutions which seek justice.

The cry of radicals down history for liberty, equality and community, she adds is “a cry that has grown out of this great woman’s prayer.”

 

“Women should be ordained”

The blossoming of the women’s movement in the 20^th century made it possible for scholars and leaders like Callahan to reframe the story of Mary from a female perspective, without the imposition of male views and demands.

The 1970s were a time of great optimism, and Callahan’s book is filled with enthusiasm and expectation. For example, she writes:

One of the revolutionary aspects of the good news was that, when the last were to be first and the first last, women would no longer be suppressed but co-heirs of the Kingdom.

Women should be ordained to all forms of the ministry because the Spirit blows where it wills, and talent, gifts, and vocations are not linked to sex, race, or class, but to the will of God.

A half century ago, the ordination of women to the priesthood seemed to be such a clear next step in the opening and reforming of the church, just as the push for equality in all of society was self-evident in the light of feminism.

Alas, despite great gains by women in some areas of western society, much more remains to be done.  For instance, female workers are routinely paid less than males for the same work.

Similarly, while some Christian congregations today have women priests and bishops, the official Catholic church leaders — all men — have slammed the door on even a discussion of women celebrating the mass and bestowing other sacraments to the faithful.

 

“Things are not right”

Although change hasn’t moved as fast as Callahan and other 1970s feminists had hoped, the radical truth-telling of Mary’s prayer-song remains:

Mary echoes all of the prophets of Israel and all of those who have always looked at the status quo with new eyes and the ordinary response of common sense.  Things are not right.  Something is dreadfully wrong when all of the riches and all of the food and all of the good things are not shared equitably.

That was true 2,000 years ago when Mary said her prayer-song.  It was true in 1975 when Callahan wrote The Magnificat: The Prayer of Mary.

And it’s just as true today — much to the world’s shame.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

3.20.25