As a Black Catholic, I am often asked, “What made you convert to Catholicism?” I usually respond that the sacrament of the Eucharist drew me to the Catholic Church.
As the story goes, before my conversion, I attended a Black Catholic parish where I felt comfortable enough to jump the proverbial table because of a worship aide that was in the pews. The aide said—and this is a paraphrase because the COVID-19 pandemic led to the removal of paper worship aides, which are only now making a comeback—”By receiving the Eucharist, you do so believing you are receiving the real presence of Christ.”
This was a no-brainer for me for as long as I have been taking communion as a Christian. And it was in this beginning, taking the Eucharist before deciding to go through the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, that I knew that there was a there for me in the Catholic Church. I completed the RCIA in the spring of 2016 and was received into the Catholic Church in April of that same year. The sacrament of the Eucharist brought me to the Church through the power of ritually ingesting the real body and blood of Christ, but as I approach my tenth anniversary as a Black Catholic—and more specifically, a Black Catholic womanist—I am starting to believe it is Mary who keeps me in the Church.
It is here that Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones’s Immaculate Misconceptions finds me. Through this text, I have discovered a critical space to think deeply about Mary’s blood, Mary’s sisterhood, and Mary’s symbolic personhood, which deserves our sustained, rigorous attention—beyond the usual liturgical parameters. In what follows, I explore these three dimensions through reflective vignettes that place my positionality as a Black Catholic womanist in conversation with the book’s core concerns.
Blood of Mary, Blood of Christ
Unbeknownst to me, Adkins-Jones and I were taking similar journeys in exploring Mary by imagining the capaciousness of Mary’s womb and God’s “womb-mind.” Reflecting on the capaciousness of Mary’s womb, I recalled driving with a recently pregnant colleague, who shared that there is sometimes a migration of cells between the child and mother in utero. Similarly, thinking about the connection between the blood of Mary and the blood of Christ led Adkins-Jones to posit,
There is a sense, then, by which the Immaculate Conception bilaterally disrupted the placental connection to Mary to both her mother and her son. Perhaps not by the idea of the doctrine itself, but the social conditions of its expression and interpretation that necessitate the doctrine are those that set off an alarm—a cleansing genealogy of women’s wombs. (122)
Here in “A Womb of One’s Own,” a chapter that’s name is a nod to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and in which Adkins-Jones riffs on Leo Bersani’s Is the Rectum a Grave?, Adkins-Jones invites us to consider if the Black woman’s womb is, in fact, a grave. She walks with early church figures such as Tertullian, Hildegard of Bingen, and Birgitta of Sweden, and encyclicals including Ineffabilis Deus, to narrate the purification of Mary’s womb during the birthing process. This cleansing, Adkins-Jones argues, is part of the process of making Mary’s blood white.
The whiteness of Mary’s blood secures her existence as a racially white and morally pure subject and serves to construct the womb as a racial imaginary. The womb of one’s own, then, becomes a meditation on the importance of telling the whole bloody story of the birth, both that of Mary and of Black women. Adkins-Jones constructs a theological anthropology that utilizes Mary as a symbol for Black women, where the wombs of both require serious consideration, as both bear the burden of children born to die for and because of the sins of the world. Adkins-Jones makes the connection between the Black Madonna and Black women when she says, “Perhaps it is a deeper accompaniment with the Black Madonna, and Black women’s experiences as Mater Dolorosa (Our Lady of Sorrows), that posits for us broader capacity for experience of the fullness of maternal experience and human dignity” (135). Adkins-Jones’s excavation of the womb is an invitation to conceive of the womb differently by paying attention to the narratives of birth that erase, silence, and even censure experiences of pain.
As I sit with this, I cannot help but think about the pro-life ethic of the Church that defaults to a demand for reproduction without care for body and soul and provision for material conditions, versus the pro-living ethic I espouse that, theologically, politically, and socially advocates for Black birthing people’s bodily autonomy against this kind of default coerced surrogacy. Immaculate Misconceptions contributes to the formation of a pro-living ethic by helping us be sensitive to the experiences and needs of mothers at every stage, from conception to life to death. We are called to be sojourners alongside Black birthing people so that they may mostly live to mother their children instead of being compelled to mother a movement.
Just a Sister Away
As a woman who has never conceived or birthed a child and who also exists in a religious tradition that honors women’s ascent to become biological mothers, it can be difficult living in the shadow of an expectation I’m bound never to meet. Indeed, it is my choice, but my choice in relation to my Blackness can also render me least like the ideal woman.
In engaging Immaculate Misconceptions, a text that necessarily centers Mary as mother in its analysis, Adkins-Jones beautifully knits Mary together in relation to an ecology of women across time and space, reminding us that Mary is not only our mother. Mary is a daughter of Eve, a friend of Elizabeth, and always just a sister away from Mamie. Adkins-Jones goes “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden”—the name of Chapter Two—to find Eve by reading the creation accounts through a Black studies and gender studies framework.
This interdisciplinary approach exposes how Eve’s choice becomes the criterion for morally problematizing and racializing bodies as Black according to colonial logic. But as Adkins-Jones works through her re-reading, Eve emerges beautifully as a proto-womanist, willful and audacious, wanting to know more than is prudent through a piece of fruit. In Immaculate Misconceptions, Eve meets Mary not through the likes of the early church fathers who set her and Mary against one another in fulfillment of the soon-to-come Madonna-whore complex. Rather, Eve meets Mary as a mother, never to be broken in two: “Never put one over the other. Eve is Mary’s mother. Mary is the daughter of Eve” (39).
Adkins-Jones impresses upon those who want to take Mary seriously that they must read Mary in relation to Eve and to Lilith. She advances this claim by theologically reading Harmonia Rosales’s painting Eve and Lilith to join Lilith, the “non-canonical starter wife” as Adkins-Jones humorously calls her, with Eve.
Adkins-Jones continues her appeal to scripture to contextualize the intricacies of Mary’s life through a study of the Gospel of Luke’s account of Mary and Elizabeth. Here Adkins-Jones draws attention to how we come to know Mary—not at the Annunciation or the Immaculate Conception, but in relation to Elizabeth, another woman navigating miraculous pregnancy. In this friendship between Mary and Elizabeth, Adkins-Jones shows us Mary as a sister-friend, Mary in community, and Mary as someone who supports women.
The relational Mary—connected to Eve, Lilith, Elizabeth, and ultimately to Black women across time—offers Black women a way into Marian devotion that doesn’t require motherhood as a basis for affinity, only sisterhood. This is a significant move in the text because if Mary is Black, as Adkins-Jones argues throughout Immaculate Misconceptions, and if this is a womanist theological conversation, then it must also be necessary to help Black women and femmes see Mary as just a sister away. I believe this is especially important for women like me who have chosen not to have children, but do not see their role as women as any less important: the sisters who become aunts play pivotal roles in the lives of mothers and children. Thus, if Mary is truly our sister, then we are our sisters’ keepers as Mary keeps us.
Our Lady of Rigor
I have endeavored to convey the fullness of Immaculate Misconceptions, but I am aware that I have fallen short, and that is by design, both in my own mind and in the text. Adkins-Jones has written a deep and rigorous text that, at times, made me lose sight of Mary amid all the trees the book uncovers in the forest. But the trees are necessary to appreciate the forest that is Mary.
We must account for the trees that prepare the way for Mary in the form of Eve, Lilith, and Elizabeth, and the trees that are rooted in Mary in Mamie Till-Mobley, Trisha Frazier, and Aereile Jackson. We must employ multiple methods to find our way among the trees, including engaging with Black studies, Black theology, Black feminism, womanism, biblical interpretation, and art history and interpretation. Adkins-Jones’s Black Mariology is an interdisciplinary study of a woman whom we have yet to study exhaustively, and this is where the rigor resides. A proper study of Mary must be rigorous, not for the sake of the scholars who will engage this text, but for the sake of the daughter, mother, sister, and friend who Mary is to us.
Mary deserves rigor because in the year of our Lord 2025, there are still people who believe the immaculate conception is about Jesus, not about her. There is a tradition of people struggling to wrap their minds around Mary beyond the standard facts presented during Advent and Christmas. Adkins-Jones, through Immaculate Misconceptions, invites us to sit down and grapple with the complexity of Mary. Yes, Mary is complex, and we can and should be devoted to that complexity.
There is great devotion in the complex. Many know this well in the unyielding devotion they have maintained to Jesus in all his complexity. Now it is time for us to pay attention to the woman through whom and for whom we get Jesus. Such devotion need not distract us from Christ; instead, we should see it as integral to rightly and justly loving Christ by loving his Mother, Eve’s daughter, Elizabeth’s friend, and our sister with all our heart, strength, and most certainly our minds.
Thank you, Amey Victoria Adkins-Jones, for this work, which reminds me of why I may stay a little longer in the Church.
