Happy 8th Day of Christmas!

Which also happens to be the feast day of Mary, the Mother of God.  And so it is only appropriate to have some discussion of the unique nature of the divine motherhood:

Way back in August 2009 I wrote concerning the in partu inviolability of Our Lady (i.e, that her hymen was unbroken by the birth of Christ) that "Rome acknowledges this opinion but does not commit us to it".

Turns out I was wrong. This is more than a pious opinion. A reader writes:

I’m not an expert on anatomy but I take it that there are significant physical changes that take place in a virgin’s body after she marries and engages in the marital act for the first time—and especially after she gives birth for the first time. The traditional Catholic understanding of Mary’s virginity is a very robust notion and includes not only so called “sex-act virginity” and “seed-act virginity” but also freedom from those physical changes I’ve just mentioned. This is what the Fathers meant when they talked about Mary being “incorrupt” in her giving birth to the Lord. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll refer to this “incorruption” with the phrase “physical virginal integrity”. The traditional Catholic doctrine of Mary’s in partu virginity involves just this “physical virginal integrity”. So that even after Mary gave birth to Our Lord, her physical virginal integrity was preserved. This is obviously impossible according to the natural course of things. So this retention of her physical virginal integrity is traditionally regarded as miraculous...

Extensive discussion of the tradition follows.