John Grondelski has a great summary about Mary as a model for humanity:
A theme that I believe remains undeveloped in Marian theology, however, is her role – along with Jesus Himself – as an exemplar of what it means to be human.
One of St. John Paul II’s favorite principles, already found in his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis, was that Jesus Christ shows what it truly means to be human: “Christ the Lord. Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling. (¶ 8 & 10) That quotation comes directly from Vatican II’s “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World,” Gaudium et spes. (¶ 22)
Note that the emphasis is put on Jesus’ humanity. Yes, Jesus fully reveals God to us. But he also reveals man to us. John Paul tirelessly invoked Christ as the model of true humanity, of the human response in love to Love Himself.
What remains relatively undeveloped is how that idea applies to Mary.
Turns out, this was addressed in the following CDF excerpt on ecclesiology, by the late great:
Mary: The Realized Church
One could not offer a true reading of the Constitution Lumen gentium without integrating somehow the bearing of its eighth chapter into our understanding of the mystery of the Church. Church and Kingdom find their highest realization in Mary The Church’s identity as the presence in mysterio of the Kingdom is illuminated in an unsurpassable way when we look at Mary, the dwelling of the Holy Spirit, model of faith, the Real symbol of the Church. This is why the Council affirms of her that “in the most Blessed Virgin the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she exists without spot or wrinkle (cf. Eph 5:27)” (LG 65). The often painful distance between the pilgrim Church and the final Kingdom is already transcended in Mary As the assumpta, she “became like her Son who himself rose from the dead, anticipating thereby the destiny of the just” (Paul VI, Profession of Faith, 15). Because of this, the Mother of Jesus “is the image and beginning of the Church as she is to be perfected in the world to come” (LG 68; cf. SC 103).
It's also fleshed out in the papal teaching on the Feminine Genius:
What is the Feminine Genius?
It is the unique capacity women have to uphold the primacy of love in human life. Written into a woman’s physiology, even if she never physically carries a child, is “room for another” and an innate sensitivity to the goodness of the human person. Man, John Paul II taught, always stands in some sense outside the life process, learning a significant part of his role as son, husband, and father from woman. Woman, then, has a great service to render humanity as custodian of the person and of the family—some women as literal mothers, and all women as spiritual mothers, by seeing persons from the heart and bringing the truth about the human person to the fore wherever they work and serve.
Because of their unique charism, women have an irreplaceable contribution to make in human society and in the Church. Women of every age and vocation, even young girls, are called to bring their feminine originality to every sector of society—family, neighborhood, workplace, and parish.
“The hour is coming, in fact has come, when the vocation of women is being acknowledged in its fullness, the hour in which women acquire in the world an influence, an effect and a power never hitherto achieved. That is why, at this moment when the human race is undergoing so deep a transformation, women imbued with a spirit of the Gospel can do so much to aid humanity in not falling.”
—Closing message of the Second Vatican Council
In fact, woman has a genius all her own, which is vitally essential to both society and the Church. It is certainly not a question of comparing woman to man, since it is obvious that they have fundamental dimensions and values in common. However, in man and in woman these acquire different strengths, interests and emphases, and it is this very diversity which becomes a source of enrichment.—John Paul II, July 23, 1995
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