The Church as Woman and Mother demonstrates how we have inherited gendered images for the Church that derive from particular contexts and that the loss of these contexts makes the images devoid of the depth that they possessed originally. Ancient Roman concepts such as "virginity," "marriage," and "motherhood," projected onto the Church, actually pointed to positive concepts. Examples of these concepts are the cultivation of virtues, the affirmation of bodies and sex, and the call to active participation of the entire community.
The concept of "virgin-motherhood" itself is a stumbling block for many Christian women today and yet for the early Christians, aware of the implications from ancient Rome, virginity as producing spiritual/moral fecundity made perfect sense.
