Mary, Mother of God: Theotokos and the January 1 Solemnity

The Catechism gives the argument in three sentences. The Gospels call her “the mother of Jesus.” Elizabeth, prompted by the Spirit and before he is even born, calls her “the mother of my Lord”: “Why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43). “In fact, the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father’s eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly ‘Mother of God’ (Theotokos)” (CCC 495).

Scripture says the same from two directions. John: “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Paul: “But when the fullness of the time came, God sent out his Son, born to a woman” (Galatians 4:4). The Word did not take a human being and live alongside him; he became flesh, from a woman. Whoever she is mother of, she is mother of him.

That is why the title is a statement about Christ first. It holds together what the Creed says in one breath: that the one “born of the Virgin Mary” is “God from God.” Every other Marian title, including the Immaculate Conception, rests on this one.

Theotokos is Greek for “God-bearer,” the one who gave birth to God. Christians had been using it since the third century. The argument came when Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, objected to it: Mary gave birth to the man Jesus, he said, and should be called Christotokos, mother of Christ, instead.

The problem, as Cyril of Alexandria saw, was what that implied about Christ. The Catechism puts the heresy plainly: “The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God’s Son.” Against it, Cyril and the third ecumenical council, meeting at Ephesus in 431, confessed that “Christ’s humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb” (CCC 466).

The council accepted Cyril’s reasoning. Catholic and Orthodox Christians have called Mary Theotokos ever since, and in the Eastern churches it is still her ordinary title. The Council of Chalcedon, in 451, completed the thought: one and the same Christ, “perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity” (CCC 467).

This is the most common objection, and it was answered in the same breath as the title was confirmed. In the words of Ephesus as the Catechism quotes them, she is called Mother of God “not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh” (CCC 466).

In plain terms: Mary is not the source of God. She is not older than God, not a goddess, not a fourth person of the Trinity. The eternal Son existed before her and made her. What the title says is that the one who was born from her, and whom she nursed and raised, was not someone other than the eternal Son. A mother is mother of the whole person she bears, not of a part of him. You would not say your own mother was the mother only of your body.

So the title protects two truths at once: that God really became man, and that the man born at Bethlehem really is God.

January 1 is the octave day of Christmas, the eighth day of the feast, and the Church spends it on the mother. Rome kept a feast of the Mother of God on this day in the early centuries; later the date became the feast of the Circumcision of the Lord, since the Gospel of the eighth day records it: “When eight days were fulfilled for the circumcision of the child, his name was called Jesus” (Luke 2:21). Pius XI extended a feast of Mary’s Motherhood, kept on October 11, to the whole Church in 1931, fifteen hundred years after Ephesus. The reform of 1969 brought the two together: January 1 is “the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God, and also the commemoration of the conferral of the Most Holy Name of Jesus.”

Paul VI explained the choice in Marialis Cultus (1974). The solemnity, “placed on January 1 in conformity with the ancient indication of the liturgy of the City of Rome, is meant to commemorate the part played by Mary in this mystery of salvation” (5).

The readings (Lectionary 18) are the same every year: the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:22–27, Psalm 67 with the refrain “May God bless us in his mercy,” Galatians 4:4–7, and Luke 2:16–21, where the shepherds find the child and “But Mary kept all these sayings, pondering them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19).

The Church’s Directory on Popular Piety calls it “an eminently Marian feast” and connects it to the first words of the Hail Mary’s second half, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us, sinners” (115). For the rest of the season see Christmas.

Yes. It is one of the holy days of obligation in the universal law of the Church, and one of the six kept in the United States. But the US bishops added a rule, decreed on December 13, 1991 and confirmed by the Holy See on July 4, 1992: “Whenever January 1, the solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, or August 15, the solemnity of the Assumption, or November 1, the solemnity of All Saints, falls on a Saturday or on a Monday, the precept to attend Mass is abrogated.”

So in the United States you are bound to attend Mass on January 1 unless it falls on a Saturday or a Monday, when you are not, though the solemnity is still celebrated and Mass is still offered. Other countries differ, and some bishops’ conferences have lifted the obligation altogether. For the full list and the years ahead, see holy days of obligation.

In a message dated December 8, 1967, Paul VI asked all people of good will to keep “The Day of Peace” on January 1, 1968, and every year after. He was explicit that it would not change the liturgical calendar, “which reserves New Year’s Day for veneration of the divine motherhood of Mary and the most holy Name of Jesus.” The Directory on Popular Piety notes that popular devotion has taken the day up for “intense prayer for peace” (117).

The pairing fits the readings. The first ends with a blessing of peace:

The LORD bless you, and keep you. The LORD make his face to shine on you, and be gracious to you. The LORD lift up his face toward you, and give you peace.

Numbers 6:24–26

Many families pray it over each other at the start of the year. A form of it follows.

The Sub tuum praesidium is among the oldest prayers to Mary known to survive, and it calls her Theotokos. A Greek text of it on a papyrus in the John Rylands Library in Manchester was dated by its first editors to the third or fourth century; later scholars have argued for a date after 450, one as late as the eighth century, and the question is open. It is prayed in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Anglican Communion. In the English of Vatican News: