During this upcoming Lenten season, the Church will prepare once more to solemnly commemorate the great mysteries by which we have been redeemed. 

During this time when Christians seek to enter more deeply into the mystery of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ, we can find no better model for closeness to Christ than the Mother of Jesus. The recent Doctrinal Note from last October describes the special way in which Christ has wanted Mary to share in his saving work, while, at the same, seeking to help the faithful avoid certain misunderstandings regarding the topic.

The Vatican document, as is well known, has discouraged the use of “Co-Redemptrix” as a title for Mary. In doing so, the Note follows in the footsteps of the Second Vatican Council, which desired to describe Mary’s special role in the Church in a way that safeguards the primacy of Christ in God’s saving plan. 

Theological debates about titles should not distract us from the rich doctrinal teaching regarding Mary’s role in the work of salvation, present throughout the Church’s Tradition and recognized in the recent document. We could say that in recent decades the Church has chosen the path of seeking to articulate in depth the role which Christ wanted his Mother to play in the work of redemption, while avoiding the misunderstandings that might be occasioned by new titles. Mariologist Manfred Hauke comments that Vatican II, in its Constitution Lumen Gentium, “teaches the doctrine of co-redemption without using the word, for ecumenical reasons.”

With the final chapter of this constitution, the Council indeed offers a detailed description of Mary’s special role in the divine plan to redeem mankind. This role, foretold in the Old Testament and prepared for by God’s decision to keep her free from sin from the first moment of her conception, begins to take shape at the moment of the Annunciation, in which — as Lumen Gentium states — “embracing God's salvific will with a full heart … she devoted herself totally as a handmaid of the Lord to the person and work of her Son.” 

The text recalls the teaching of the Fathers of the Church, who saw Mary as not simply a passive instrument used by God, but rather as “freely cooperating in the work of human salvation through faith and obedience.” As St. Irenaeus of Lyons stated, in a striking phrase cited by the Council, through her Yes, Mary became “the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race.” 

The moment of the Annunciation is so familiar to Christians that perhaps they can easily lose sight of the profound mystery it contains. God has indeed foreseen his plan of salvation from all eternity and is not dependent upon human beings. At the same time, in a very real way, he willed to make his saving plan for the human race depend on Mary’s free response. Only by means of her Yes to God did Christ take on a human nature, and it was through Christ’s human nature that God willed to restore the human race from the wounds of sin.

Lumen Gentium goes on to describe how “this union of the Mother with the Son in the work of salvation” continues throughout Christ’s life: in the Visitation, in which the joy of God’s presence reaches St. John the Baptist (Luke 1:43-44), in the virgin birth of Our Lord, in which Mary was intimately associated with Christ’s taking on of a human nature for the salvation of the human race, and in various other moments recounted in the Gospel. 

Theologians have viewed the Presentation in the Temple as having a particular significance in manifesting the depths of Mary’s involvement in the Redemption. In presenting her Son, Mary is making an offering of the Son of God, and thus she participates in bringing to God the perfect sacrifice. Mary, like Abraham, offers her only Son to God in obedience to God’s command.

At this moment, Simeon manifests the unique way in which Mary would share in the future sufferings of her Son. As he acclaims the child as a light of revelation, he announces to Mary that “a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:35). 

The finding of the child Jesus in the Temple (2:41–50) gives us more insight into the nature of Mary’s sharing in Christ’s sacrifice. 

In this Gospel scene, Christ gives witness to his own unique relationship of intimacy with the Father: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Mary, along with Joseph, does not immediately grasp the significance of her Son’s words. Mary’s role in the Redemption is not at the same level of the unique obedience of the only-begotten Son of God to the Father. Rather, it comes from her singular relationship to Christ, whom she has sought “anxiously” for three days before finding him in the Temple.

The aforementioned passages, even if they apply to the early life of our Lord, nonetheless suggest the intimate union with Christ that Mary maintained throughout her life. She kept the mystery of Christ “in her heart” (Luke 2:51). During the public ministry of her Son, she is in the background, as Christ calls other men and women — the apostles and the holy women — to cooperate in his saving mission. However, it is precisely in this subordinate way that Mary exercises her unique role in Jesus’ redemptive mission. Her discrete intervention at Cana is decisive in bringing about the first of the signs which reveal Christ as the Messiah (John 2:1–11).

This close bond of Mary with her Son’s saving work reaches its culminating moment in the Cross. Lumen Gentium makes it clear that the Mother of God is not simply a passive bystander in these moments. She “faithfully persevered in her union with her Son unto the cross, where she stood, in keeping with the divine plan, grieving exceedingly with her only begotten Son, uniting herself with a maternal heart with his sacrifice, and lovingly consenting to the immolation of this Victim which she herself had brought forth.”

The Council here gives expression to a notion which had emerged during the Middle Ages, a period in which theologians came to appreciate more deeply the central importance of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross for the salvation of mankind. Arnold of Chartres, a disciple and friend of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, describes the presence of “two altars” at this moment: “one in the heart of Mary, the other in the body of Christ.” 

While Christ immolates his flesh, Arnold notes that Mary offers her soul. She “sacrifices herself spiritually in profound communion with Christ and pleads for the salvation of the world.”

An awareness of this truth, deeply rooted in Scripture, led various 20th-century popes to emphasize Mary’s role in the redemption and at times use the term “Co-Redemptrix,” a title proposed by some theologians at the beginning of the last century. The last ecumenical council, while deciding to forgo this title to avoid possible confusions, has nonetheless left us a profound doctrinal vision of the close association which God has wanted Mary to have with Christ’s saving work. The Church cannot fail to continue recognizing and pondering this truth and draw from it valuable lessons for living out the Gospel today.

Each person, as St. John Paul II stated in light of the teachings of St. Paul, has “his own share in the Redemption,” and each one is also “called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption is accomplished.” 

In carrying out this important task, the Church looks to the Mother of the Redeemer as model and intercessor, so that the faithful of Christ might more fully experience and spread the fruits of the salvation won by her Son.