Life Support In “A Modus Vivendi?” (January 13), the editors of Commonweal speak impersonally, not to say a bit evasively: “There seems little chance that the teaching [of the Catholic Church on sex and marriage] will change in the foreseeable future.” But one can scarcely avoid hearing this as equivalently the more personal, not to say faintly confrontational “There (...)
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It's hard to know whether Gretchen Reydams-Schils is right when she suggests that replacing "born of" by "incarnate of" may have "picked up a deep strand of repulsion at the female body." That such a strand exists is hard to deny, but the phrase may have been chosen simply because of linguistic tone-deafness (and disregard of advice from those more aware of the lexical pitfalls). Maybe "enfleshed" would have been better, or maybe not.
But it's certainly true that "born of" is less hospitable to the Docetic (or Manichean or Monophysite) sensibility that can coexist with formal repudiation of the heresy. The thing about being born is that it happens inter faeces et urinam, no two ways about it. And before that must come the weeks Hopkins celebrated in "The May Magnificat," when Mary "...did in her stored/ Magnify the Lord." (As far as I know, only Hopkins has read megalyne so literally; it's something any embryologist should appreciate.)