A Catholic girlhood lived out in Catholic schools included substantial devotion to Mary. May was Mary's month. From first grade through high school graduation for the entire month, we would dress in virginal white and process through the school grounds singing Marian hymns. Come Christmas, some lucky girl among us would be chosen to play Mary in the Nativity pageant (never me. I was usually relegated to the barnyard, playing either shepherd or sheep).
     As we got closer to high school graduation, got to know a few boys and experienced sexual desire if not activity, the essential paradox of Mary became more real. The Virgin Mother. It was a classic patriarchal trap, I've sometimes suspected, to establish an unachievable ideal as a way of keeping women in our place. Mary, a fully human woman, but without sexual desire or passion. Mary, the teenage mother, married to a sweet, gentle, older, also asexual man. Mary, always depicted with sad, circumspect eyes, her hair partially covered with a blue veil, lips barely parted, never open-mouthed with laughter. A quiet woman, a woman who knew her place. Mary, dogmatically situated in the chasm between "isms": between Catholicism and Protestantism, between religious fundamentalism and sexual humanism, between patriarchy and feminism. Mary, patron saint of the '50s and '60s Catholic anti-communism. Mary, social and political conservative, darling of the Catholic religious right.
     Is it any wonder that Mary has emerged as a conservative cause and icon in our time, a response to Catholic feminism? Over the last thirty years, Catholic attitudes toward birth control, abortion, women's ordination, divorce and remarriage, homosexuality and church authority have shifted dramatically, and Catholic women have provided the insights that generated these shifts. Significant majorities of Catholics disagree openly with traditional church positions on these issues, and consider church policies discriminatory toward women. For conservatives, a resurgence in Marian devotion and dogma is the antidote.