The Marian male, I have since learned, stems from the mystery Christians celebrate on March 25 (nine months before Christmas), the Feast of the Annunciation — when the Almighty became an embryo. The angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a boy named Jesus (Luke 1:31). After her questions were answered, she consented to the invitation with an enthusiastic “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). But all Christians, male and female, are called to be like Mary as well. “There is a profound analogy between the Fiat” — “let it be” — “which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord,” wrote John Paul II.

That men, too, are called to also be like Mary is less a result of transgressive gender theory than of mainstream Christian theology. Jesus, after all, calls anyone his mother who does the will of God (Mark 3:35). “My little children,” says a maternal Paul, “for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you.” (Galatians 4:19).

For Paul, not just women, but all Christians groan in labor along with creation itself (Romans 8:22-23). Later theologians developed the motif: “Each conceives in like manner to [Mary] within himself the God of all, as she bore him in herself,” said Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022).

The medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) took such rhetoric to the extreme: “It is more precious to God to be born spiritually from every such virgin or from every good soul than that he was bodily born of Mary.” The impressive league of men named after Mary (Rainer Maria Rilke and Josemaría Escrivá, to name a few) will not find any of this a surprise.