The Vatican's letter on feminism was released at the beginning of August. Now The Passion of the Christ is coming to DVD at the end of the month. The two have one thing in common: a culturally challenging presentation of women.
The Vatican's letter on feminism was released at the beginning of August. Now The Passion of the Christ is coming to DVD at the end of the month. The two have one thing in common: a culturally challenging presentation of women.
When The Passion of the Christ arrives in video stores, it will likely be greeted the same way it was in theaters: with robust sales from the general public and a fresh round of denunciations from the critics.
But this film about the suffering and death of Jesus Christ forces us to confront the truth claims of Christianity and the values of our secular culture. One of its most powerful challenges to the secular worldview is embedded in one of its most endearing qualities: Its focus on the quiet strength of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
That's a focus the Vatican shared in the letter on men and women.
As in Scripture, Mary has few spoken lines in The Passion. But she appears in frame after frame, as her quiet presence sustains her son throughout his suffering. The camera frequently captures the connection between mother and son, as Jesus and Mary lock eyes during his most agonizing moments.
Often, Mary's unwavering willingness to witness his suffering seems to stir Jesus to stand up again, to bear still more beatings, to walk still more steps. In Mary, Jesus has a disciple who will not flee suffering, one who will follow him and love him to the bitter end.
Mary witnesses her son's crucifixion without turning on his enemies in rage, turning in on herself, or turning away. She is a true contemplative — one who gazes on the face of her God and her child, one whose greatest strength lies not in what she does or says, but in who she is. She exemplifies what Pope John Paul II calls the “feminine genius.” As he says: “The moral and spiritual strength of a woman is joined to her awareness that God entrusts the human being to her in a special way.”
This feminine genius — in compassion for others and contemplation of God — has been largely ignored by modern feminists.
They almost seem to tell us that a woman can only be strong if she imitates the worst qualities associated with masculinity: callousness, careerism, cold rationalism. They say that the child entrusted to her womb is often an impediment to her freedom; that her willingness to sacrifice for her family is a sign of weakness. A strong woman, they say, avoids suffering and prizes her own interests — her own choices — above all else.
The image of Mary in The Passion is a rebuke to radical feminism.
It is also a rejoinder to our cultural obsession with self-assertion, self-reliance and the avoidance of pain.
By her quiet example, Mary shows that it takes more strength to watch and pray than to rant and rave, to face suffering than to run from it. She does not use force or cleverness to “fix” the problem of her son's suffering. Neither does she rely on positive-thinking techniques to blunt her pain. Instead, she faces the awful reality of her son's agony and accepts the mystery of his death even as she mourns it with all her soul.
Mary's example reminds us how countercultural our Catholic understanding of suffering really is. Living in a society that shuns suffering, we often forget that our trials can be the means of our sanctification. If we embrace them and offer them to God as a gift, he will use them to bring about greater good in our world and in our souls.
That lesson, like the mother of God herself, is often overlooked in a society consumed by noise and action, power politics and self-help schemes. But The Passion brings it home again, in the form of a character whose silent surrender reminds us of an enduring truth: God's strength is made perfect in our weakness, and true strength lies in surrender to his will.
Familiar as it may be, that truth never loses its power to shock. And it always endangers the status quo.
Colleen Carroll Campbell, a former White House speechwriter, is the author of The New Faithful:
Why Young Adults Are Embracing
Christian Orthodoxy.
www.colleen-campbell.com