Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ “opened the womb” of his mother—an action many readers equate with destruction of virginity. How can Origen claim that Mary remained virginal if her hymen tissue was no longer intact? Scholars commonly solve the problem by characterizing his thought as self-contradictory or by concluding that he prioritizes Mary's lack of sexual experience over her loss of physical intactness. This essay resolves the contradiction more fully through attention to divergent models for female genital anatomy that circulated in antiquity. Origen, like most thinkers during and before his time, probably did not believe that female virgins have hymens. For him, the terminology of “closed” and “opened” wombs refers not to virginity but to fertility. Scholarly readers have been misled by certain other authors’ uses of this vocabulary and by Jerome's Latin translation of the homily, which draws on a different anatomical model. For Origen, Mary is a virginal mother not in spite of a broken hymen, but without possessing a hymen in the first place.

This paper argues that Western theology has lost a certain intellectual unity by becoming divided between dogmatic theology (or doctrine) and moral theology (or ethics). The history of theological reflection on Mary illustrates this, because it has become confined to dogmatic theology and has hardly ever been discussed in the context of morals. However, mariology can help us to understand the doctrinal foundations that must support any adequate moral theology. By helping us to see how morals depend on dogma, mariology can help us to recover the unity of theology.

Popular devotion to the Virgin Mary can often be understood as implying a doctrine of deification, that is, of becoming perfect as our Heavenly Father is perfect. The Mother of God herself is the primary example of the deified person, and she in turn assists her devotees in their own process of becoming deified. The doctrine of deification articulated by Maximus the Confessor and John Scotus Eriugena provides an account that explains particularly well the theology implicit in much Marian devotion, and this is illustrated by two sets of examples, namely, devotional texts concerning the in partu virginity, and devotional practices at the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The Byzantine passion play Christus Patiens (Christ Suffering) is a cento: composed of quotations and borrowings from other sources, it takes Euripides’ tragedies as its main source for reworking the passion narrative. The genre, popular with Christian authors who usually transformed classical epics, enacts cultural exchange between canonical pagan literature and biblical narrative. Traditionally transmitted as the work of Gregory of Nazianzus, this drama showcases the tensions inherent in this reuse of Greek tragedy which threaten to collapse the original texts under the weight of their new meaning – or vice versa. While the afterlives of Classical texts, especially Greek tragedy, have been increasingly well explored, the scant attention afforded Christus Patiens has largely consisted of debating the disputed date and authorship. At the same time, scrutiny lavished on Virgilian centonic technique provides a helpful spring-board. This article focuses on the four tragedies most plundered in Christus Patiens: Rhesus, Medea, Hippolytus and Bacchae. It concentrates on interpreting the protagonist, Mary the Mother of God, through key passages which borrow most heavily from these plays. These stretch centonic conventions by almost exclusively reworking contiguous lines featuring the tragic mothers Medea, Agave and Musa; yet Mary is otherwise created from multiple conflicting voices. Analysis of these passages as frames for the cento author's own compositions and in the context of the prologue's invitation to identify specific Euripidean reworkings suggests that the author playfully flirts with creating a narrative of fragmentation through clashes between centonic form, tragic sources and Christian subject.

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to ‘resolve the issue’ through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails.

As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek’s private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a ‘modern’ Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.