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Earlier this month, the pro-abortion group “Catholics for Choice” stirred controversy online when it wrote in a tweet: “This holiday season, remember that Mary had a choice, and you should, too.”
The explicit pro-abortion message is meant to equate Mary’s choice to be the mother of God with a mother’s “choice” to have an abortion. “By explicitly seeking definitive consent from Mary to conceive of Christ, God empowered and uplifted her bodily autonomy,” the group claims on its website. “It’s clear that reproductive choice is God’s will.”
The Catholic Church, of course, has since its ancient beginnings forbidden abortion on the grounds that it constitutes homicide.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: “Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law” (No. 2271).
Catholics for Choice, meanwhile, has been strongly criticized by Church leadership for its explicitly un-Catholic advocacy: Cardinal Timothy Dolan several years ago said the group “is not affiliated with the Catholic Church in any way,” does “not speak for the faithful,” and is “funded by powerful private foundations to promote abortion as a method of population control.”
Yet the group’s misleading advocacy inadvertently underscored a key aspect of Catholic doctrine, one that has been part of the Catholic faith since it began 2,000 years ago: that Mary did indeed have a choice to assent to God’s will and become the “Theotokos,” the mother of God.
Mark Miravalle, who holds the St. John Paul II Chair of Mariology at Franciscan University of Steubenville, told CNA that Mary was “absolutely free” in exercising the decision to become God’s mother on Earth.
“She was free in exercising God’s greatest gift of free will,” he said. To suggest otherwise, he said, would be to imply that “she was somehow coerced or that it was some form of predestination, one that doesn’t allow for the expression of what makes us human, which is our freedom.”
The theologian noted that it was “a malicious equivocation” for Catholics for Choice to “imply that Mary’s ‘yes’ choice to bring our Redeemer into the world bears any similarity or moral equivalence to the tragic ‘no’ choice of a woman that leads to the direct killing of an innocent human being.”
“Mary’s choice brings life and salvation,” he said. “The choice for abortion brings death and destruction. Morally, these two choices could not be more diametrically opposed, and thereby can never be honestly referred to as justification for the devastating evil of abortion.”
Daniel Payne, December 24, 2024
(1) Such a statement overlooks the fact that no one has the choice to transgress the 5th of the 10 Commandments, “Thou shalt not kill”, which is a matter of universal Morality. We are free, but our free-will has its limits (cf. the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil in Genesis).