Thirteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Leonardo Boff is one of the few male liberation theologians who write on Mariology systematically. His fundamental principle is that the Holy Spirit has become hypostatically united with Mary at the moment of the Annunciation, since Mary becomes the permanent temple of the Holy Spirit from then on. As a result, Mary is the revelation of the feminine dimension of God whereas Christ is the revelation of the masculine dimension of God. Together, the two reveal the fullness of the Godhead. What is the most interesting in Boff’s writing is the seeming paradox that, on the one hand, he depicts Mary as a prophetic women of liberation, which is totally public and political, but on the other hand, he also identifies Mary as the archetype of the eternal feminine, which is not so far away from the traditional Mariology and even Marianismo, in terms of her participation in divinity and the caring virtue of motherhood. In Boff’s view, if the progressive church just keeps talking about the plan or project of God, it would unconsciously take a masculine way of faith and miss some immediate relevance of the Virgin Mary among Latin American people. He hoped that women’s political participation would infuse women’s experiences and qualities into public life and change the dangerous tendency of the male-dominated social movements that put too much emphasis on grand projects rather than people.