01/01/2026
How can God have a mother? 🤔
I remember asking that question more than ten years ago.
This morning, I realized how that very question eventually led me back to the Catholic Church. After praying, I sat in front of my typewriter and wrote this essay I’m sharing with you today.
Did that mean Mary must also be God? Did it imply she existed before God?
To me then, the title sounded not only illogical but dangerous—idolatrous, even heretical.
I did not bother to read the Catechism or consult official Church teaching. Why would I? Nothing true should come out of Catholicism for what they teach is not biblical.
Looking back, I see how deeply biased I was—how suspicious I had become of anything the Pope, the saints, or the Church had to say. I absorbed caricatures of Catholic belief as if they were gospel truth.
At the time, I sincerely believed the Church had invented doctrines, added books to Scripture, and openly violated biblical prohibitions against idolatry. So when I heard Catholics call Mary the Mother of God, it became one of my strongest objections against the faith of my childhood.
Fast forward to around 2015, when Pope Francis visited the Philippines. Something unexpected happened. I felt a calm interior nudge to revisit the beliefs I had long dismissed. It was a gentle invitation to give Catholicism one last look.
Finally, I decided to be sincere and intellectually honest. I started studying actual Catholic sources that tried to explain with clarity the teachings of the Church. One of the most illuminating moments of that inquiry was realizing that even the early Protestant Reformers defended the title Mother of God.
Martin Luther, in his 1521 Commentary on the Magnificat, wrote that all of Mary's glory is "crowded into a single phrase: the Mother of God". Throughout his life he asserted that no one can say anything greater of her than this title.
What surprised me even more was discovering that Calvin, Zwingli, and other non-Catholic Christian figures I admired had no problem with the title either.
That realization unsettled me.
I began to see how little I actually understood the very doctrines I was so eager to reject. I had been arguing against non-Catholic interpretations of Catholic teachings without sincerely studying the Church’s reasons for her faith. In other words, I was contradicting caricatures, not convictions—debunking positions no one truly held.
When I finally humbled myself and asked why this doctrine mattered so much to Catholics—and even to the early Reformers—the answer became clear: this was never primarily about Mary.
It was about Jesus.
To affirm that Mary is Theotokos—God-bearer—is to affirm that the one she carried in her womb was not merely a prophet, not merely a moral teacher, not merely a remarkable man, but the Word made flesh. Elizabeth already grasped this when she cried out, “Why is this granted to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”
Defending this title is ultimately about defending the divinity of Christ. If Jesus is not Lord, then He is something far less—and Christianity itself collapses into fiction or fanaticism.
To declare Mary as Mother of God does not elevate her to the level of a goddess. It does not ascribe divinity to her. It simply proclaims that the Person she bore is fully God and fully man—the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity who entered history through her “yes.”
Who Mary is always points to who her Son is.
Every Marian title is an echo of Christology; every Marian devotion, when properly understood, deepens our faith in Jesus as God, Lord, and Savior.
Mary’s role in our faith is maternal. She leads us by the hand to Christ, just as she did two thousand years ago. Whenever we contemplate her, we hear her quiet instruction at Cana: “Do whatever He tells you.”
In the coming days, Filipino Catholics will celebrate the feasts of the Santo Niño and the Poong Nazareno—two liturgical reminders that the God who created the heavens and the earth chose to enter human history as a child, within a family, through a mother.
But He did not only assume our weakness; He entered our suffering, carried our crosses, and loved with a love that bleeds.
All of this was possible not only because He is God, but because He had a human mother whose humility and fidelity opened the door to our redemption.
Today, as we pray to Mary, the Mother of God, we thank her for her yes. And we thank her for being our mother too.
Mary, conceived without original sin, my Mother, lead me closer to your Son. Walk with me through this valley of darkness, that in the end I may find the light and rest promised to those who follow after you. Amen. 🙏
Happy Feast Day, ! God bless you all.
Essay and photograph by Bernz Ordoñez Caasi
Originally written on a 1958 Olympia SF typewriter
Photographed on film (Pentax K1000, Kodak Gold 200)
