Joachim Ventura

Mary was a sacrificial priest

“Jesus Christ presented himself in the Temple as sacrificial victim. Mary shared his feelings of compassion for people and she too presented herself in the Temple, as St Epiphanius tells us, as a sacrificial priest: “I call the Virgin a priest”. La Madre di Dio, madre degli uomini, French edition, Lyon 1845, p. 224.

Mary offered Jesus on Calvary

“If it had been necessary . . . . , she would herself have offered the nails, handed the hammer, readied the cords to tie her Son to the sacrificial wood, as Abraham had done.”
. . . It was as if, with her maternal hands, she had tied down the victim.
She wanted effectively that the sanctity and the innocence of her Son was charged with our sins . . . . that he suffered . . . . that he was treated as a criminal . . . . that he died a shameful and cruel death. She has sacrificed him for us.
While Jesus suffers, Mary drinks his pains till the last drop and becomes inebriated with them . . . . She approves of them. She agrees with them. She makes them her delight. She applauds them.” La Madre di Dio, madre degli uomini, French edition, Lyon 1845, pp. 214, 294, 297, 325-327.

Mary’s prayer on Calvary, addressed to God the Father

“Dear Father, you have abandoned him, well, so have I. You don’t spare him. Neither do I. You condemn him. I condemn him even more. Crucify him, crucify him!” See then that the same cry for the death of the innocent Jesus rises not only from the wrathful heart of the Pharisees, but also from the tender and loving heart of Mary. La Madre di Dio, madre degli uomini, French edition, Lyon 1845, p. 308.

The ORDINATION OF WOMEN in the Catholic Church

We hope that you have found this document helpful. It costs our small charity on average £10 / $20 / Euro15 to make such a document freely available to you. This is because we have to identify the best scholarship available, retrieve texts, obtain permissions, scan, edit, link and convert documents to html format and run a small office base to make this all possible. We can do this only because we are run almost entirely by volunteers. Please help us build our online library of resources so that more people can access the debate and make up their own minds about women priests. Having benefited from the online library, any donation, small or large, that you can make to support our work would be gratefully appreciated. Click here to learn how to make a donation now.