The Cult of the Virgin Mary

As in many historical, religious and socio-legal efforts by powerful men to protect, expand or consolidate their power and wealth, women are the first targets, and the issue at hand is usually related to women's sexuality. Accordingly, Condren notes that the structure existing (before the church/state powers established the cult of the Virgin Mary) had developed into a threat to those powers' desire to centralize both the state and the church:

By keeping marriage within limited degrees of kinship, the power of certain families had increased, and their accumulated wealth had not been dissipated by women marrying outside their structures. Now these powerful families posed a serious problem to the efforts to centralize the powers of both church and state. For this reason the marital practices of the Irish were destined to come under fire (155).

In other words, the church and state wanted

. . .
era of the cult of the Virgin Mary, the overall power of women was diminished: While individual women may have benefitted from male attentions, women as a whole increasingly lost further ground, especially in the legal sphere. Women's "souls" may have been loved, but their persons were now at the mercy of male politics. Aristocratic women could be idealized, but peasant women could be raped, for the knight who honored his lady considered other women fair game for his predatory attentions (159). The continuing development of the cult of the Virgin Mary meant at each stage a weakening of women's roles in society and in relation to men. Condren is effective and convincing in clarifying this negative impact on women, despite the various political, religious, social, legal and economic rationales offered by the male-dominated establishment for altering the basic structures of Irish society in that era. She writes with power and clarity of the impact on women of these profound changes: In the Age of Mary, patriarchal consciousness reached its zenith. . . . The sacrifice of the Mass celebrated by an all-male, celibate priesthood would enable and sustain the changes taking place. . . . Perhaps the crucial accomplishment of the new im
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Approximate Word count = 1529
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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