Bound in Love

Co-Redemptrix

When we speak of Mary as co-redemptrix, we are highlighting the integral role she played in the salvation through Jesus Christ. He made the sacrifice, but she was there with him at every step from the Incarnation to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. In that sense, she is such an intimate component of God’s plan of salvation that we can call her co-redemptrix.

St. Paul identifies Jesus as “the New Adam” (Rom 5:12-21, 1 Cor 15:21-22), and the early Church Fathers built on that in describing Mary as “the new Eve.” Just as Eve was the God-given “helpmate” for Adam, Mary is the “helpmate” for Jesus. We see the connection between Eve, whose name means the “mother of all living,” and Mary, the Mother of the Church.

Among others, St. Irenaeus of Lyons (+ 202), saw her role as new Eve as fundamental to his theology of salvation. Irenaeus was a disciple of Polycarp, who was a disciple of St. John, who had taken Mary into his own after Jesus gave his instructions from the Cross on Good Friday.

He taught that salvation was not a mending of the first product but a resumption of the work from the beginning. It was a regeneration from the head downwards. In this radical restoration each one of the elements marred by the fall is renewed in its very root. He provided the imagery of a knot being untied: “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by Mary’s obedience: what the virgin Eve bound through her disbelief, Mary loosened by her faith.”

The modern Popes from Pius IX in the 1800s to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s added more writing to the concepts of Mary as Co-Redemptrix.

Pope Leo XIII in 1894 wrote that Mary “stood by the cross of Jesus (Jn 1:25) and offered to divine justice her own son, and in her heart died with him, stabbed by the sword of sorrow.” Remember the prophecy of Simeon at the Presentation.

Pope Pius XII (1943, Mystici Corporis): “she … offered him on Golgotha to the eternal Father together with the holocaust of her maternal rights and mother love, like a New Eve, for all the children of Adam contaminated by this unhappy fall.”

In Lumen Gentium #56, we read: “Comparing Mary with Eve, [the Fathers] call her ‘Mother of the living,’ and frequently claim: ‘death through Eve, life through Mary.’”