Saints and sinners

The team ran a track around Ann Campbell, like a miniature railway, so that they could wheel the camera and film her from different angles: in front of her bookcase, with her computer lying open on a desk behind her, with her head and back nestled into the stolid professionalism of a green leather armchair, but with her long red hair glinting and breaking the hard lines and finally sitting meditatively in front of a prie-dieux that much of her work revolved around.

Cameron the cameraman cut in front of her making her blink and lose her contemplative appeal and lose her train of thought.

‘…There has been a lot of insensitivity in the Catholic Church…as you’d expect…but I don’t really like the term relevance, because the church is about people, broken down people…women, of course, have been sidelined, pushed to the back, to make themselves the backbone of the church. No female saints are ever represented as having being sexual beings. No woman saint would ever have been canonised if she had uttered St Augustine, the father of the church’s famous plea to God: “grant me chastity and continence, but not yet”. It is far more likely that such a woman would have been stoned, burned, branded, or dismembered. The one exception, of course, was Mary Magdalene.

‘Mary Magdalene as we know was a prostitute. In other words she had a body, blood and bones and was not just made up of some kind of soapy bubble spirit. She was in many ways the fulfilment of the wonderfully explicit sexual images in the Old Testaments’ Song of Solomon. Hebrew has a number of different words for love so there is more than one way of looking at such imagery. An alternative reading of the book is, of course, it is about the kind of love Christ has for His church. But I just can’t see it myself. What the New Testament does suggest, however, is that Mary Magdalene had a special place in His heart. Only two people are depicted as sitting at, what is, a symbolically special place; at Jesus' feet: John, the disciple whom he loved and Mary Magdalene.

'Mary Magdalene is the bad girl of the church. And sex is always bad, even married sex, where there was even a service for cleansing woman after childbirth.

‘The good girl of the church and the prototype for all women to follow was, of course, The Virgin Mary. Not all female saints had to be called Mary, but all saints had to be virgins. The Catholic Church would, of course, argue that it does not make saints, but simply recognizes them as such. In terms of virginity the image of St Wilgerfortis stands out, not so much because she was crucified, but because she had a beard. The story goes that as a teenage noblewoman her father promised her to a pagan king. It would have been interesting to see what have happened if her father had promised her to a Christian king. But Wilgerfort refused to marry the pagan and took a vow of chastity. She asked God to make her repulsive, which He did by making a beard grow overnight. Both a long and short beard are depicted in various paintings of Saint Wilgerfort, but she became suitably hideous for the pagan king to break their engagement. Wilgerfort’s father duly had her crucified, whether for the vow of virginity, or growing a beard I’m not quite sure. She became very popular with women who were abused by their husbands, and something of a cult grew around this theme, so much so that her story was reproduced in the first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

'Your Jewish girl’s tale of regrowing her hymen comes from the same mythology and mythmaking, an imagining of other worlds, but perhaps it is closer to Greek mythology. Hades, for example, bursting thorough a cleft in the earth to rape Persephone; with Persephone rising every spring to resow the world.

'Whether, of course, a woman who has been raped can remain a virgin is an interesting point that was much debated in the Catholic Church. If we accept the premise that Jesus was born without sin and if God, or the Holy Spirit, and not Joseph, was his father, then Mary did retain her virginity. But nothing much is known about whether she in her married state to Joseph fulfilled her wifely duties and had intercourse, or any other children, by natural means. The Church’s answer was to suggest that Mary herself was born without the stain of original sin, “the immaculate Mary ever virgin” of their mythology. But in what sense then was Joseph, her husband? And if she did have a normal marriage to him could she have sex then without the sin of lust arising? This is perhaps closer to the idea that the innocent spirit of a child, such as the girl you mentioned, cannot be taken, only her body can be raped. And if God, in his wisdom, decides to mark that actuality by giving the girl a new hymen, well that fits in with that type of myth making.

'After almost 2000 years of disputes the case of Bernadette Soubirous closed the casebook on Mary’s virginity. St Bernadette described the little woman as beautiful. I think she meant in the spiritual and physical sense, but you can be beautiful in one way and not in another. The apparition at Lourdes, as late at the 1860s, told St Bernadette unequivocally that she was ‘The Immaculate Conception,’ and to prove who she was, numerous miracles were put down to her providence and intercession. And, if the Catholic Church is to be believed, continue to this day. In such a world a piece of skin regenerating every night is believable, but only if you believe. That is the paradox of faith.'