At the Annunciation – which the Church celebrates on 25 March each year - Mary responds to the visit of the Angel Gabriel by totally dedicating herself to God. Does she become God’s ‘handmaid’, as we pray in the Angelus? Or ‘servant’? Or is a different word required?

At midday sharp, when I was at school, we used to leap up from our desks and say the Angelus. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, Be it done unto me according to thy word.” Even at that time I was not enamoured of the desire to be a handmaid, and I resented having the motto “I will serve” emblazoned on my breast pocket, even if it was in Latin (Serviam).

Since the publication of Margaret Atwood’s eye-opening novel The Handmaid’s Tale, about the cruel abuse of handmaids, echoing much biblical material, it should have become impossible to go on using the term. But the practice has not entirely ceased. We say the Angelus less than we did in the past, but there is no updated version in common use. “We translate the word more politely as ‘handmaiden’,” wrote Raymond Brown in 1985, “but Mary speaks of the female slave.” The word, in Greek, is doule (δο?λη). The polite translation “handmaiden” conjures up, perhaps, a romanticised image of a young and pretty girl, devoted to her master, handing around a plate of choice pastries to the guests. Women’s work. Every man would like to have a handmaiden to bring joy into his life.