In some respects, it means less, now, to be a mother than it once did. I do not mean, in saying that, that those women who are mothers are possessed of less worth than their own mothers were; no, their worth is the same, and their "act" of being mothers equally noble and dignified.

I mean, instead, that so much which would have at one time been thought of as a nigh-unthinkable antithesis of motherhood -- no-fault divorce, abortion-on-demand, the proliferation of birth control -- has become nothing more, nor anything less, than a series of common commercial products in our society, as easily obtained as a pack of cigarettes once was (one could glibly note that today, in stark contrast to obtaining an abortion, one must still present convincing proof of age in excess of 18 years in order to obtain cigarettes legally).

And to an event and "product," each of those things in some way flies in the face of motherhood. Divorce deprives it of its logical, biological, necessary opposite -- fatherhood. Abortion abruptly ceases the natural course of nurturing and, in due time, birthing a child -- it prevents one entirely from becoming a mother. And birth control attempts to circumvent the possibility that, through allowing the sexual act between one man and one woman to run its natural course, motherhood might result from a random conjugal act.

But I wonder...could all this have been predicted, say, from some distant moment in history?

David Warren reflects, in his usual oblique way, on Mother's Day through the lens of she who is the mother of us all: Mary, Mother of Christ, Mother of God:

In a sentence, the veneration of Mary is an inevitable extension of the worship of Christ: for if there is God the Son, there must be a Mother of God. Or to be plainer still, in line with the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D. -- the human "Jesus," and the divine "Christ," are not two different persons. They are one and the same, and He was the Son of God, and of Mary.

Hence the extraordinary veneration of Mary, from the earliest Christian times, and through the centuries -- so powerful that even the Muslims, appearing from the 7th century A.D., also venerate her. And long, long before even Christianity dawned upon the world, she is anticipated in every "Mother Goddess" known to anthropology.

A Darwinist, or a Jungian, or sociobiologist, or whatever, may hold that this is all merely a projection of the big raw fact of human motherhood -- onto a cosmos that is fearfully beyond the comprehension of the primitive human mind. This hypothesis has the glib plausibility that is required to monopolize teaching in the academy, today. It is itself a view of considerable antiquity, and the anthropologists have discovered essentially atheist primitive tribes.

This is a "secular" newspaper and I am only dealing with the pragmatic consequences of religious beliefs. What is the consequence of Marian "idolatry" (as my Protestant ancestors would call it, while turning in their graves), or as I would characterize it, the veneration of "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei" that has animated so much of this world's most magnificent art and poetry?

Its practical effect is to found all our intellectual and emotional ideas about motherhood, deep as they are, in something still deeper. It is to believe that real substance and significance underlies our natural love for our own human mothers, that it is not simply a biological quirk to be explained away by a few material causes. That it is instead the profoundest echo of what Dante finally called, "l' amor che move il sole e l' alter stele" -- "the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Buy into that, and one's own human mother is not reduced to a mechanism of "sexual selection" (to quote a zoological sage of the century before last), nor arbitrarily salvaged with the tearjerk posturing of a Mother's Day card. She is rather enlarged to her true proportions.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Were I of a combative mindset, I might speculate that one could have reasoned, from the first moment Protestant thought began to turn against Mary and Marian adoration (it serves to note that the first Reformer, Luther, was a devoutly Marian in his personal practice of Christian faith), that all this secular nightmare would come to pass. It is a tenuous thing to suggest, and not easily defensible.

But I wonder if there isn't, inherent in that historical rejection of Mary as the Mother of All (and, indeed, the Mother of God) that so infused Protestantism during its formative decades, to be found the seeds of modern secular society's rejection of motherhood on principle.