Each May, the Church honors the Blessed Mother. The words of our most recent popes about Our Lady also relate to their focus on the “feminine genius.”

Pope Francis often spoke lovingly of Mary.

Speaking about Marian piety, Francis reminded the faithful last November:

“Our Lady is the mother who leads us by the hand towards Jesus.”

For her assumption solemnity in the first year of his pontificate, he echoed this truth:

“The Mother of Christ and of the Church is always with us. She walks with us always; she is with us.”

In his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Francis pointed to Mary, too: “Many a page of the Gospel illustrates how attentive Jesus was to individuals and above all to their problems and needs. … In his humanity, Jesus learned this from Mary, his mother.” 

Francis also spoke of Mary in his “Bull of Indiction” for Jubilee 2025 — highlighting her maternal care:

“It is not by chance that popular piety continues to invoke the Blessed Virgin as Stella Maris, a title that bespeaks the sure hope that, amid the tempests of this life, the Mother of God comes to our aid, sustains us and encourages us to persevere in hope and trust.” 

And in 2020 remarks, he emphasized: “To go to Mary’s school is to go to the school of faith and life.”

Turning to Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy, Benedict spoke lovingly of Mary is his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love).

“Outstanding among the saints is Mary, Mother of the Lord and mirror of all holiness,” he wrote, adding: “Mary is a woman of hope. … The Magnificat — a portrait, so to speak, of her soul — is entirely woven from threads of Holy Scripture, threads drawn from the Word of God.”

“Mary is a woman who loves. … We sense this in her quiet gestures, as recounted by the infancy narratives in the Gospel. We see it in the delicacy with which she recognizes the need of the spouses at Cana and makes it known to Jesus,” he continued. “We see it in the humility with which she recedes into the background during Jesus’ public life, knowing that the Son must establish a new family and that the Mother’s hour will come only with the Cross, which will be Jesus’ true hour (John 2:4; 13:1). When the disciples flee, Mary will remain beneath the Cross (John 19:25-27); later, at the hour of Pentecost, it will be they who gather around her as they wait for the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:14). “… Mary has truly become the Mother of all believers. Men and women of every time and place have recourse to her motherly kindness and her virginal purity and grace, in all their needs and aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their moments of loneliness and their common endeavors. … Mary, Virgin and Mother, shows us what love is …”

Pope St. John Paul II, whose episcopal motto referenced Mother Mary, consistently spoke of the Blessed Mother.

In his 1988 apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, on the dignity and vocation of women in the Marian Year, John Paul observed:

“In Mary, Eve discovers the nature of the true dignity of woman, of feminine humanity. This discovery must continually reach the heart of every woman and shape her vocation and her life.”

Pope John Paul II focused on “Mary’s Message of Love” in 1982.

“Mary embraces us all with special solicitude in the Holy Spirit. … The love of the Savior’s Mother reaches every place touched by the work of salvation. Her care extends to every individual of our time and to all the societies nations and peoples. … The power of the Redemption is infinitely superior to the whole range of evil in man and the world. The Heart of the Mother is aware of this, more than any other heart in the whole universe, visible and invisible. And so she calls us. She not only calls us to be converted: She calls us to accept her motherly help to return to the source of Redemption.”

For the Mother of God Solemnity in 2002, John Paul II put Mary’s role in beautiful context.

“If Jesus is Life, Mary is the Mother of Life. If Jesus is Hope, Mary is the Mother of Hope. If Jesus is Peace, Mary is the Mother of Peace, Mother of the Prince of Peace.”

Champions of Women’s Dignity

This trio of popes also spoke of respect for women and their distinct charisms for the good of the world.

“ … the ‘genius of woman’ is seen in feminine styles of holiness, which are an essential means of reflecting God’s holiness in this world,” Francis observed in his encyclical on the call to holiness in today’s world, Gaudete et Exsultate.

“Indeed, in times when women tended to be most ignored or overlooked, the Holy Spirit raised up saints whose attractiveness produced new spiritual vigor and important reforms in the Church. We can mention St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bridget, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. But I think too of all those unknown or forgotten women who, each in her own way, sustained and transformed families and communities by the power of their witness.”

In a 2024 address at the “Women in the Church: Builders of Humanity” conference, he continued his praise of “how the ‘feminine genius’ can uniquely reflect God’s holiness in the midst of our world,” detailing how “women know how to bring people together with tenderness. St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus said that she wanted to be love in the Church. She was right: Women, in fact, with their unique capacity for compassion, their intuitiveness and their connatural inclination to ‘care,’ are able, in an outstanding way, to be for society both ‘intelligence and a heart that loves and unites,’ to bring love where love is lacking, and humanity where human beings are searching to find their true identity.”

In his 2015 angelus for International Women’s Day, Francis praised women’s capacity, “because women not only give life but they also transmit the ability to see beyond, to see beyond themselves. They transmit the ability to see the world with different eyes, to feel things with a more creative, patient and tender heart.”

Benedict XVI also spoke of women’s feminine genius, citing that exact phrase in 2008.

While still a cardinal, in a 2004 letter to bishops, he noted:

“… one understands the irreplaceable role of women in all aspects of family and social life involving human relationships and caring for others. Here what John Paul II has termed the genius of women becomes very clear.”

“Among the fundamental values linked to women’s actual lives is what has been called a ‘capacity for the other,’” the letter continued, adding that “women preserve the deep intuition of the goodness in their lives of those actions which elicit life, and contribute to the growth and protection of the other.”

St. John Paul II consistently held up the feminine genius, as Benedict referenced.

“By defending the dignity of women and their vocation, the Church has shown honor and gratitude for those women who — faithful to the Gospel — have shared in every age in the apostolic mission of the whole People of God,” he wrote in Mulieris Dignitatem, adding:

“The witness and the achievements of Christian women have had a significant impact on the life of the Church as well as of society. Even in the face of serious social discrimination, holy women have acted ‘freely,’ strengthened by their union with Christ. Such union and freedom rooted in God explain, for example, the great work of St. Catherine of Siena in the life of the Church and the work of St. Teresa of Jesus in the monastic life. In our own days too the Church is constantly enriched by the witness of the many women who fulfill their vocation to holiness. Holy women are an incarnation of the feminine ideal; they are also a model for all Christians, a model of the sequela Christi, an example of how the Bride must respond with love to the love of the Bridegroom.”

Perhaps John Paul’s most well-known writing in this regard is 1995’s “Letter to Women”:

“Necessary emphasis should be placed on the ‘genius of women,’ not only by considering great and famous women of the past or present, but also those ordinary women who reveal the gift of their womanhood by placing themselves at the service of others in their everyday lives. For in giving themselves to others each day women fulfill their deepest vocation.”

“Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge the person, because they see persons with their hearts,” he continued. “They see them independently of various ideological or political systems. They see others in their greatness and limitations; they try to go out to them and help them. In this way the basic plan of the Creator takes flesh in the history of humanity and there is constantly revealed, in the variety of vocations, that beauty — not merely physical, but above all spiritual — which God bestowed from the very beginning on all, and in a particular way on women.”

In thanking mothers, wives, daughter, sisters, working women and consecrated women, John Paul II emphasized in that same letter:

“Thank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being a woman! Through the insight which is so much a part of your womanhood you enrich the world’s understanding and help to make human relations more honest and authentic.”