Mary Alice Tetro

A really worthwhile paradigm shift in the role of Mary Magdalene. This isn’t a blockbuster, don’t think it was intended to be, but absolutely worth your time. Having watched it on Maundy Thursday (night of the Last Supper) of Holy Week, it seemed all the more poignant. The story provides background to the role of Mary Magdalene with Jesus & the Disciples. She has in all stories, with which I’m familiar, been portrayed as a repentant prostitute. That was the focal point, not her involvement with the Apostles. Having participated in church on and off most of my life, I understood her story was included because she had “learned the error of her ways”. If Jesus can forgive “prostitutes” whatever sins one may have committed, by comparison, would be insignificant. She was considered possessed because rejected the subjugated role of being given by her father to a husband; which, for that time & hundreds of years, would have caused her to be “cast out”, misfit or crazy, and labeled as such. In this story she is a follower and an apostle, an enlightened understanding for the position of a woman, and very appreciated by me. I had not known it was Pope Gregory in 591 AD who’d labeled her “a prostitute”. Given the patriarchy of the church, not surprised. Prostitutes might have been socially higher than an unfaithful wife, but still low in the social hierarchy and shunned by much of society. Pope Gregory must have needed to disregard any role for women in the life of Jesus, and especially a position where she might have been viewed seriously. I was unaware that in 2016 she was finally identified as an apostle, by the Vatican, which pleased me. I will tell my friends to watch this.