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It is a good Christmas for me. I was lucky to be able to visit with my family. Not everyone is so fortunate. Not everyone is living in peace. My facebook page revealed the reality this morning when I saw the news feeds of stories from around the world. The reality of hardship in the world also hit home for people I’ve visited this week. I have seen the poor here and many have a difficult time with Christmas, particularly older, single men with substance abuse problems. Their families abandon them and they’re often homeless, or quasi-homeless. They are forced to lean on everybody they know for basic necessities and many of the people they know eventually turn their backs, either out of frustration or because of their own inability to help.

Then there are the single mothers who feel they have nowhere to turn to get out of the financial situation in which they find themselves, taking care of their children the best they can without a father in the picture. Some are saints. Some are not. But they’re doing all that they know they can do.

And the older people who celebrate alone, with nobody to share the holiday with, either because they have been isolated from their families, or because they simply don’t have any family left.

The Christians in the middle east are treated as a disease in some places. The violence against Christians in Islamic countries over the past week is heart wrenching to read about. It’s relatively peaceful here, besides having to put up with the selfishness of people who think they own the road, or the line at the shopping center. That and we have our own quirks to work out which affect our relationships with each other, but for the most part we’re not living in fear of suicide bombers walking into our churches.

All of these people suffer some sort of isolation and they all need our prayers, not just for Christmas, but until Jesus returns. Some people say prayer doesn’t solve anything, but I believe it does. Even if you don’t believe that something supernatural will happen as a result of your prayers you might just find yourself caring more about the less fortunate people who find themselves in a dark loneliness.

Jesus came to teach us and to bring salvation to us, to reconcile us to God … and I think the world is better for it, but we still have a ways to go.

The following song always seemed a little sad, but it has a lot of truth

Mariology - A Dogmatic Treatise
Part 2 - Mary’s Special Prerogatives
Chapter 1 - The Negative Prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin
Section 3 – Mary’s Perpetual Virginity

The most beautiful jewel in the crown of Our Lady, aside from her immaculate conception, is her perpetual virginity.

Virginity, in the sense of internal purity, is included in the concept of sinlessness, with which we have dealt in the preceding Section. Here we are concerned only with external or bodily virginity (virginitas carnis), and, employing the term in this meaning, we affirm that Mary was an inviolate virgin before, during, and after the birth of her Divine Son.

Thesis I: Mary was a pure virgin before the birth of Christ.

This thesis embodies an article of faith.

Proof. The period here under consideration comprises the whole previous life of Our Lady up to the Annunciation, and particularly the moment when she conceived her Divine Son. The dogma embodied in our thesis was impugned by the ancient sects of the Ebionites and Cerinthians, by the Jews,^[1] the Socinians, and many modern Rationalists, e.g. Wegscheider, De Wette, Strauss, Renan, Paulus, Venturini, etc. It is contained in the so-called Apostles’ Creed: “[Jesus Christ] was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,”^[2] and has been echoed by many councils.^[3]

a) That Mary was a virgin up to the time when the Angel announced to her the mystery of the Incarnation, is plain from Luke 1:26 sq.:  “… the Angel Gabriel was sent from God … to a virgin^[4] espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary.” Her virginity was not violated when she conceived our Lord Jesus Christ. Luke 1:35: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee.” Cfr. Matthew 1:18: “As his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together^[5] she was found with child, of the Holy Ghost.”^[6] Conceived of the Holy Ghost, without the cooperation of a human male, Christ was not the son of Joseph, but merely supposed to be such.^[7] In explanation of the unique miracle of the virgin birth, St. Matthew^[8] refers to a famous Old Testament prophecy:^[9] ”Now all this was done that it might be fulfilled which the Lord spoke by the prophet, saying: Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.”

Christian Tradition has always taken this passage to refer to the conception and birth of the Messias, because to none other can the name Emmanuel be fitly applied. We know as the result of a complete induction^[10] that the Hebrew word עַלְמָה (‛almâh) hardly ever means simply “girl” (puella, νεᾶνις), but almost without exception “virgin,” in the proper sense of that term (virgo, παρθένος).^[11] The phrase “a virgin shall be with child” must therefore be taken in sensu composito, that is, as denoting virginal conception without male cooperation. There would be nothing extraordinary in the prophecy of Isaias if it were interpreted in sensu diviso, i.e., as meaning that the virgin who was to be with child was to be a virgin only till the time of her conception, but not thereafter.^[12]

b) The Fathers are unanimous in teaching that Christ was conceived by a virgin and that the prophecy of Isaias applies to Him.

St. Justin Martyr, for example, says: “The words ‘Behold, a virgin shall be with child’ mean that the virgin shall conceive without fleshly commerce. For had she admitted such commerce, she would no longer be a virgin. But the power of God effected that she conceived as a virgin.”^[13]

An ancient image of our Lady in the catacombs (perhaps the oldest that has come down to us from early Christian times)^[14] shows the prophet Isaias clothed in a pallium, wearing sandals on his feet, and pointing with his right hand to a scroll in his left. At his right is a picture of the Madonna, in sitting posture, with stole and a short veil, holding the infant Jesus in her arms. The whole group is surmounted by an eight-cornered star.^[15] Several of the Fathers illustrate the miraculous conception of our Lord by saying that Mary conceived Him through “faith.” “It behooved a virgin to bring forth Him who was conceived by His mother’s faith, not by her lust,” says St. Augustine.^[16] Other Patristic writers develop the beautiful thought that the virginity of Mary, far from being violated, was sealed and consecrated by the conception of her Divine Son. The reasons which St. Thomas^[17] gives why it was fit that Christ should be conceived by a virgin, may, at least in part, be traced to the writings of the Fathers. They are the following: (1) It was meet that the Heavenly Father should be the sole progenitor of His Divine Son; (2) It was in accord with the purity of Christ’s eternal γέννησις (Gennesis) in the bosom of the Father that His temporal generation also should be absolutely chaste and holy; (3) It behooved the sacred humanity of our Lord to be exempt from the taint of original sin; and (4) The virginal conception of Christ was highly appropriate in view of the chief purpose of the Incarnation, which was the regeneration of the human race “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.”^[18]

c) From the theological point of view we may adduce the subjoined considerations.

Though the Blessed Virgin conceived her Divine Son without detriment to her virginity, she was the true spouse of St. Joseph.

St. Matthew^[19] tells us that Joseph was not merely the fiancé, but the husband of Our Lady. “Jacob begot Joseph, the husband of Mary,^[20] of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.” Mark well, the Evangelist does not say: “Joseph begot Jesus.”^[21] Though his marriage with the Blessed Virgin was never consummated, St. Joseph was truly “the husband of Mary,” and consequently the adoptive and legal father of Jesus. As such he enjoyed all the rights and prerogatives of a true father, e. g., that of naming the child. Cfr. Matthew 1:20, sq.: “Behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in his sleep, saying: Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife,^[22] for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost; and she shall bring forth a son: and thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.”^[23] This text furnishes a key which unlocks for us the deeper meaning of such passages as Luke 2:33: “His father^[24] and mother were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning him;” and Luke 2:48: “His mother said to him: Son, why hast thou done so to us? Behold, thy father^[25] and I have sought thee sorrowing.” St. Augustine lays special emphasis on this point. “Joseph,” he says, ” is said to be the father of Christ in the same way in which he is understood to be the husband of Mary, without carnal intercourse, by the connexion of marriage, that is to say, far more intimately than if he had been adopted in some other way.”^[26]

In 1892 Mrs. Agnes Smith Lewis and her twin sister Mrs. Margaret Dunlop Gibson discovered in the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai a palimpsest manuscript of the fourth or fifth century which lacks only about eight pages of the four Gospels. Professor Gregory^[27] believes it to be “essentially the earliest Syriac text.” This text renders Matthew 1:16, thus: “Joseph, to whom was espoused Mary the virgin, begot Jesus, who is called the Messias.” Of course we do not know whether the Syriac translator rendered his Hebrew or Greek original faithfully; but even if he did, the passage need not necessarily be explained as contradicting the virginal conception of Our Lord. The term “begot” may be taken in a wider sense as supplying the basis for a legal paternity.^[28]

That the Holy Ghost is no more the natural father of Jesus than is St. Joseph, was expressly defined by the Eleventh Council of Toledo (A. D. 675).^[29] The intrinsic metaphysical reason is this: divine generation can manifest itself outwardly only as generatio aequivoca (as, for instance, in the process of supernatural regeneration), whereas every true generation is a generatio univoca, aiming at the production of a being consubstantial with its progenitor. Such is, e. g., the eternal generation of the Son by the Father; such, too, is all organic generation on earth. The part which the Third Person took in the conception of our Divine Saviour was of the nature of a divine appropriation and consisted in supernaturally supplying the missing male principle and furnishing the impetus necessary for the development of the embryo conceived in the virgin’s womb.^[30]

The great dignity of St. Joseph, which renders him particularly worthy of our veneration, is based on the unique privilege which he enjoyed, of being both the legal father of our Lord and the true husband of His Blessed Mother. Needless to say, he was a just and holy man.^[31] Very properly do the faithful link his name with the sacred names of Jesus and Mary, and place themselves under the special protection of the Holy Family, which presents such a perfect model of all virtues. One hundred and fifty-three of the Fathers assembled for the Vatican Council petitioned the Holy See to declare St. Joseph patron of the Universal Church,^[32] This wish was gratified by Pius IX,^[33] and the patronage of St, Joseph was reaffirmed and his cult recommended by Leo XIII.^[34]

Thesis II: The Blessed Virgin Mary remained an inviolate virgin during parturition.

This is likewise an article of faith.

Proof. The virginal conception of Our Lord offers less difficulty to the human mind than His virgin birth, for the reason that maternity necessarily presupposes parturition. It is owing to this difficulty that Mary’s virginitas in partu has become a dogma logically distinct from her virginitas in conceptione. Its chief opponent in ancient times was the infamous Jovinian, a heretic of the fourth century.^[35] The fourteenth-century Lollards likewise held that the Blessed Virgin gave birth to her Son just as any ordinary mother. Modern Rationalists and infidel Bible critics quite naturally have nothing but scorn for the dogma of the virgin birth. Jovinian was condemned as a heretic by Pope Siricius at a council held in Rome, A. D. 390. The bishops of Italy and Gaul convoked in Milan by St. Ambrose solemnly declared: “Perversely they assert that she [Mary] conceived as a virgin but was no longer a virgin when she brought forth [her Son] … But if men will not believe the teaching of the priests, let them believe the pronouncements of Christ, let them believe the Apostles’ Creed ['He was born of the Virgin Mary'], which the Church has always guarded and continues to preserve.”^[36]

a) The Gospel narrative of the birth of our Divine Saviour contains nothing either to prove or to disprove His virgin birth.^[37] However, the dogma has sufficient Scriptural warrant in the prophecy of Isaias. In the sentence: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son,”^[38] the consequent (“a virgin will bear a son”), like the antecedent (“a virgin will conceive”), must manifestly be taken in sensu composito.^[39] In other words, “a virgin will bear a son” means that she will remain a virgin though bearing a son.^[40] A passage in Ezechiel is interpreted as referring typically to the virgin birth. “And the Lord said to me: This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall pass through it: because the Lord God of Israel hath entered in by it. …”^[41]

An apparent difficulty arises from the Scriptural account of the Presentation. Luke 2:22 sq.: “After the days of her purification, according to the law of Moses, were accomplished, they carried him to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord, as it is written in the law of the Lord: Every male opening the womb shall be called holy to the Lord.”^[42] The sacred writer here seems to put Mary on a level with ordinary mothers. But in matter of fact he merely cites a provision of the Mosaic law, to which the Mother of God conformed in all humility and obedience, despite the fact that the physiological suppositions did not exist in her case. We must remember that the law of Moses was made for the common run of humanity, not for the exceptional few. We must also note that the presentation of the Christ-child in the Temple is accounted for, not by the apertio vulvae et purgatio sanguinis, but by the Mosaic requirement that every firstborn infant should be consecrated to the Lord. As Jesus was the first-born son of His virgin mother, He had to be presented in the Temple and consecrated to God according to the law.^[43]

b) Tradition unmistakably attests Mary’s virginitas in partu, in fact there is not a single Father who can be said to be uncertain in his attitude towards this question.

a) The nineteenth among the “Odes and Psalms of Solomon,” lately rediscovered by Rendel Harris,^[44] expresses belief in the virgin birth. As these Odes in their present form are probably the work of a Jewish-Christian who lived about A. D. 70, the passage to which we refer may be regarded as the most ancient extra-biblical testimony to the dogma of the virginitas in partu. It reads as follows: “The Virgin’s body sprouted and she conceived and gave birth without pain to a Son; and by the fact that He became nought [humbled Himself] she received aplenty [became rich] and she asked not for a midwife; for He made her to live.”^[45] St. Ambrose declares: “The prophet Ezechiel^[46] says that he saw the building of a city upon a very high mountain. The city had many gates. Of these one is described as shut. What is this gate but Mary? And shut because a virgin. Mary, then, is the gate through which Christ came into this world, when he was shed forth by a virginal birth, without loosing the bars of virginity. The inclosure of purity remained unscathed, and the seals of integrity were kept inviolate, as He went forth from the virgin. … A good gate is Mary, that was closed, and was not opened. By her Christ passed, but He opened not.”^[47] St. Augustine thus descants on the miraculous character of this supernatural process: “The same power evolved the body of the infant from the virginal viscera of the inviolate mother, which afterwards conducted the body of the grown-up youth through locked doors. If we ask for the reason, it is not miraculous; if we demand an example, it is not singular. Let us grant that God can do something which we may as well admit we cannot fathom. In such matters the sole reason for a fact is the power of Him who causes it.”^[48] We will conclude the argument by a quotation from Pope Hormisdas (514-523): “The child by the power of God did not open his mother’s womb nor destroy her virginity. It was in truth a mystery worthy of the God who was born, that He who wrought the conception without seed, preserved the birth from corruption.”^[49]

The Fathers employ a number of beautiful analogies to elucidate the dogma of the virgin birth. Thus they point to the spotless generation of the Logos in the bosom of the Father; to the genesis of thought in the spiritual soul; to the passage of light through a glass; to Christ’s triumphant resurrection from a sealed tomb, His passing through locked doors, and so forth.

β) There are only two among the early Christian writers, Origen and Tertullian,^[50] who can be accused of false teaching in regard to the virgin birth. They were misled by a mistaken regard for the motherhood of our Lady, and partly also by a misapprehension of Luke 2:22. A few ecclesiastical writers employ the expression “vulva aperta,” but the context shows (especially when they argue against Docetism) that, far from denying the virginal character of Christ’s birth, they merely mean to assert its reality.

c) It is a certain theological conclusion that the Blessed Virgin was spared the throes of childbirth.

St. Jerome quotes Sacred Scripture in support of this pious belief. “There was no obstetrician there,” he says, “there were no sedulous women attendants. … She ‘wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger.’”^[51] St. John of Damascus testifies to the belief of the Greeks that “no pleasure preceded this delivery, no birth-throes accompanied it.”^[52] St. Bernard observes that Christ’s conception “was without reproach and His birth without pain.”^[53]

Thesis III: The Blessed Mary remained a virgin after the birth of her Divine Son.

This thesis likewise embodies an article of faith.

Proof. Though married, our Lady preserved her virginity till death. The same is true of St. Joseph, who as St. Jerome remarks, “was Mary’s protector rather than her husband, and like her, led a celibate life.”^[54]

This dogma was impugned in the early days by a sect called Antidicomarianites,^[55] in the fourth and fifth centuries by Helvidius, Jovinian, and Bonosus, and in modern times by Th. Zahn^[56] and other rationalist theologians. The Council of Capua (A. D. 389) denounced Bonosus as a heretic; his false teaching was censured at about the same time (A. D. 390) by synods held in Rome and Milan against Jovinian. The dogmatic term ever-virgin (ἀειπαρθένος, semper virgo), which had been coined early in the history of the Church, was incorporated in the Creed by the Fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople, A. D. 553.^[57] The essential elements of the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity are severally emphasized by the Lateran Council of 649, which says: “If any one refuse to confess, in accordance with the holy Fathers, that Mary was properly speaking and of a truth the holy mother of God and always an immaculate virgin … that she conceived of the Holy Ghost without seed and gave birth without corruption, her virginity remaining inviolate also after parturition, let him be anathema.”^[58] The Sixth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople (A. D. 680) expresses this truth more tersely as follows: “The virginity of Mary . . . remained before, during, and after parturition.”^[59]

"How shall this be done, because I know not man?"

a) Mary’s virginitas post partum cannot be cogently proved from Sacred Scripture, but the dogma is deducible with moral certainty from the fact that she had resolved to remain a virgin all her life. It was this resolution which inspired her timid query: “How shall this be done, because I know not man?”^[60] Only after the Angel had assured her that her chastity would remain intact, did she consent to become the mother of Jesus: “Be it done to me according to thy word.”^[61]

a) Some of the Fathers (SS. Gregory of Nyssa,^[62] Ambrose,^[63] and Augustine^[64]) held that Mary was bound by a vow of perpetual virginity. Suarez does not hesitate to call this “the Catholic view.”^[65] It is confirmed by the fact that Jesus, when dying on the Cross, entrusted His mother to the care of St. John.^[66] ”The words ‘Behold thy son,’” says the Protestant exegete Hengstenberg, “indicate that Mary had no other sons besides Jesus. To honor one’s parents by faithfully providing for them is not only the duty but the right of every child, and Jesus would have violated the rights of His brethren, had he had any, by entrusting His mother to John.”^[67]

β) All Antidicomarianite heretics since Bonosus have appealed to those well-known passages of the New Testament in which mention is made of the “brethren” of Jesus.^[68] It is to be noted, however, that these ” brethren ” are nowhere referred to as sons of Mary. Jesus alone is called the son of Mary.^[69] So long as the Rationalists do not bring proof to show that “brethren of Jesus” is synonymous with “sons of Mary,” their assertion is gratuitous.

But what does the Gospel mean when it speaks of the “brethren of Jesus”? Were they perhaps sons of St. Joseph by a previous marriage? This explanation was suggested by St. Epiphanius,^[70] but has been generally rejected since the time of St. Jerome, (1) because it is based on apocryphal sources and (2) because the universal belief of Christians is and has always been that St. Joseph, like his holy spouse, abstained from carnal intercourse throughout his life.^[71] A simpler explanation, now generally accepted is, that since the term “brother”^[72] is used in both Testaments as a synonym for “kinsman” (nephew, cousin, etc.),^[73] the so-called “brethren of Jesus” were probably near relatives of His Blessed Mother. We know this for certain in the case of three among the four who are enumerated by name as His brethren. St. Matthew records the query: “Is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Jude?”^[74] And, indeed, there appears under the Cross, as the “mother of Jacob and Joseph,” a certain Mary^[75] who, according to St. John, was identical with the wife of Cleophas and is expressly designated as a “sister” (which probably means “cousin”) of the Blessed Virgin.^[76] Hence St. James the Less, who is emphatically called “the brother of the Lord,”^[77] was a son of Cleophas and Mary, not of Joseph and Mary. That this “Iacobus Cleophae” is elsewhere called “Iacobus Alphaei” is presumably due to the circumstance that Κλωπᾶ and Ἀλφαῖος are merely two different Greek forms of the same Aramaic name. Now, if St. James the Less was a son of Cleophas (alias Alphaeus), it follows that his brother Joseph, (who is also numbered among the “brethren of Jesus”), was not a son of Joseph and Mary. St. Jude, too, who introduces himself in his Epistle as “the brother of James,” was probably a cousin of our Lord.^[78]

γ) Another difficulty against the dogma of the perpetual virginity of Our Lady is taken from Matthew 1:18: “When his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together she was found with child, of the Holy Ghost.”^[79] ”Came together” (convenirent) in this case probably means, “dwelled together under the same roof.” But even if the term were used in the sense of marital intercourse, “the πρὶν or πρὶν ἤ with infinitive, which follows, indicates either that the act was not performed or that its performance is regarded as of secondary importance.”^[80] ”From the phrase ‘before they came together’ it does not follow,” says St. Jerome, “that they came together afterwards; Holy Scripture merely intimates what did not happen.”^[81] Writing against Helvidius, the same Saint cleverly argues ad hominem in this fashion: “If I say: ‘Helvidius died before he did penance for his sins.’ does it follow that he did penance after his death?”^[82]

δ) Still another text alleged against the dogma of Mary’s perpetual virginity is Matthew 1:25: “And he [Joseph] knew her [Mary] not till she brought forth her firstborn son.”^[83] Helvidius heretically concluded from this statement that Joseph “knew” (i.e., had marital intercourse with) his spouse after she had brought forth her firstborn son. St. Jerome demonstrates the absurdity of this inference by pointing to such analogous texts as Psalm 109:1 “Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thy enemies thy footstool,” and Gen. 8:6 sq.: … the raven . . . did not return till the waters were dried up upon the earth.” Does it follow, he asks, that Christ will no longer sit at the right hand of God the Father when His enemies lie defeated at His feet? Or did the raven return to the ark after the waters were dried up?

But does not the term “firstborn” imply that Mary gave birth to more children than one? Not at all, for, as St. Jerome points out, the Scriptures^[84] frequently employ the word “firstborn” to denote a mother’s first child, no matter whether it is followed by others or remains the only one.^[85]

b) The belief in Mary’s virginitas post partum, or, more generally speaking, her perpetual virginity, is so firmly rooted in primitive Tradition that the Fathers regard its denial as an insult to our Lord Himself.

Siricius and Bede indignantly charge the opponents of this dogma with “perfidy;” Gennadius accuses them of “blasphemy,” St. Ambrose of “sacrilege,” St. Jerome of “impiety,” and St. Epiphanius of “a rashness exceeding all bounds.” St. Basil declares: “Those who love Christ will not brook the assertion that the Mother of God ever ceased to be a virgin.”^[86] St. Ambrose enthusiastically exclaims: “But Mary did not fail, the mistress of virginity did not fail; nor was it possible that she who had borne God, should be regarded as bearing a man. And Joseph, the just man, assuredly did not so completely lose his mind as to seek carnal intercourse with the mother of God.”^[87] St. Jerome appeals in support of the dogma to Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and other sub-Apostolic Fathers.^[88] Mary is venerated as ever-virgin (ἀειπαρθένος) in the earliest liturgies,^[89] and this title of honor evidently supposes that she remained a virgin all her life. It is in this sense that St. Augustine says in one of his sermons: “Behold the miracle of the Mother of our Lord: She conceived as a virgin, she gave birth as a virgin, she remained a virgin after child-birth.”^[90]

St. Thomas enumerates four principal reasons why it was morally necessary that the Blessed Virgin Mary should preserve perpetual virginity. These reasons are: (1) The unique character of Christ as the Only-begotten Son of God; (2) The honor and dignity of the Holy Ghost, who overshadowed her virginal womb; (3) The excellency of the title Deipara, and (4) The honor and chivalry of St. Joseph, who was commissioned to be the protector and guardian of his chaste spouse.^[91]

Readings : — See the Readings following Section 1, pp. 35 sqq., supra, and in addition: St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, 3a, qu. 28, art. 1-4, and the commentators, especially Billuart, De Myst. Christi, diss. I, art. 3 sqq., and Suarez, De Myst. Vitae Christi, disp. 5, sect, 1 sqq.

The teaching of the Fathers is copiously expounded by Petavius, De Incarnatione, XIV, 3 sqq. and Thomassin, De Incarnatione, II, 3 sqq.

Cfr. also *Reinke, Die Weissagung von der Jungfrau und vom Immanuel, Münster 1848; Galfano, La Vergine delle Vergini, Palermo 1882.— Franzelin, De Verbo Incarnato, thes. 15, 4th ed., Rome 1910.—*Al. Schaefer, Die Gottesmutter in der HI. Schrift, 2nd ed., pp. 11 sqq., Münster 1900 (English translation by F. Brossart, The Mother of Jesus in Holy Scripture, pp. 17 sqq., New York 1913).—J. H. Newman, Select Treatises of St. Athanasius, Vol. II, pp. 204 sqq., 9th ed., London 1903.— E. Neubert, Marie dans I’Eglise Antinicienne, pp. 159-208, Paris 1908.

Mariology – A Dogmatic Treatise
Part 2 – Mary’s Special Prerogatives
Chapter 1 – The Negative Prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin
Section 2 – Mary’s Sinlessness

 The Blessed Virgin Mary was free from concupiscence, which is the source of personal or actual sin. It follows that she was absolutely sinless, and, in a sense, impeccable. We shall make our meaning clear in three theses.

Thesis I: The Blessed Virgin Mary was throughout her life actually exempt from every impulse of concupiscence.

This proposition is theologically certain.

Proof. The term concupiscence may signify either a habit (habitus concupiscentiae, fomes peccati), or the exercise of that habit (actus concupiscentiae, motus inordinati).^[1]

As a habit, concupiscence does not involve a state of enmity with God. So long as the will withholds its free consent, the first inordinate stirrings (actus primo-primi) of concupiscence are not formally sinful and, therefore, do not per se involve a moral defect. Objectively and materially, however, they run counter to the moral law, and the only reason why they are not sinful is the absence of free consent, which is a subjective condition of sin. For this reason St. Paul calls concupiscence sin, and the Council of Trent explains that it “originates in and leads to sin.”^[2] In this sense concupiscence, both as a habit and as an act, involves a moral taint, especially if the habit be conceived as seeking vent in inordinate movements.

Revelation does not tell us whether or not concupiscence existed as a habit in the soul of the Blessed Virgin Mary. If it did, it never manifested itself in objectively sinful motions, because Our Lady, for the sake of her Divine Son, was preserved absolutely pure and immaculate. This is Catholic teaching which has at all times been so generally acknowledged that the opponents of the Immaculate Conception never ventured to attack it.

a) The Protevangelium^[3] and the Angelic Salutatio^[4] furnish no stringent proof for our thesis, because concupiscence does not necessarily entail enmity with God. The argument rests mainly on Christian Tradition, which, since about the fifth century, so consistently developed the idea of Mary’s absolute sinlessness that it became an axiom with the Scholastics that “the Mother of God must have been endowed with a purity inferior only to that of God Himself and His Christ.^[5] Now, though concupiscence is called sin only in a figurative sense, its indeliberate stirrings, as we have said, involve a moral taint, which cannot be harmonized with the notion of absolute purity. Consequently, the Blessed Virgin Mary, as the pure Mother of God, must have been entirely exempt from concupiscence.

a) Some of the traditional witnesses give explicit utterance to this conclusion. Thus Hesychius of Jerusalem refers to our Lady as “she whom the odor of concupiscence hath not touched, nor the worm of pleasure harmed.^[6] St. John of Damascus greets her as a “holy book, imperviable to evil thoughts.^[7] Other Patristic writers exalt her purity above that of the angels, and thus virtually declare her immune both from original sin and concupiscence. Thus we read in the works of St. Ephrem Syrus: “Mother of God … all-pure, all-immaculate, all-stainless, all-undefiled, all-blameless, all-worthy of praise, all-incorrupt;… after the Trinity, mistress of all; after the Paraclete, another consoler; and after the Mediator, the whole world’s mediatrix; higher beyond compare than Cherubim and Seraphim, … fulness of the graces of the Trinity, holding the second place after the Godhead.^[8]

β) The theological argument rests partly on the dogma of the Immaculate Conception^[9] and partly on that of our Lady’s perpetual virginity.^[10]

Neither of these prerogatives could coexist with concupiscence, which is an effect and a remnant of original sin and utterly repugnant to the high ideal of virginity which the Christian Church has always admired in our Lady.^[11]

But if she was exempt from concupiscence, how could she perform meritorious acts? The answer is easy: by the conscientious practice of humility, obedience, mortification, and other virtues.

b) Theologians at one time disputed the question whether concupiscence (fomes peccati) was merely checked (ligatus) or entirely extinct (extinctus) in the Blessed Virgin. ‘Now that her Immaculate Conception is an article of faith, this question can be decided by simply saying that concupiscence did not exist at all in our Blessed Mother. Being a penalty of sin,^[12] concupiscence cannot have dwelled in a soul which was never even for an instant defiled by iniquity.

Following the lead of St. Thomas, most older theologians divide the earthly life of our Lady into two periods and hold that during the first period concupiscence lay dormant in her soul,^[13] while during the second, it was totally extinct.^[14] This distinction can be defended only on the assumption that our Lady’s so-called first sanctification consisted in her being cleansed from original sin in her mother’s womb, rather than in her being entirely preserved from it. The definition of the dogma constrains us to believe, both on theological and philosophical grounds, that the habit of concupiscence was radically destroyed in the soul of our Lady by virtue of her Immaculate Conception. This is really the only consistent view to take. It was espoused by some of the earliest defenders of the dogma, e.g., Duns Scotus and Gabriel Biel. The objection that so sublime a prerogative would exalt the Mother at the expense of her Divine Son, was refuted by Suarez, who showed that, rightly understood, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception tends rather to enhance than to diminish the glory of Christ.^[15]

The foregoing considerations enable us to form a solid opinion with regard to the question whether or not the sinlessness of the Blessed Virgin may be described as a state of original justice analogous to that of our first parents in Paradise. The answer depends on how we define the term iustitia originalis. If we take it to mean the totality of those supernatural and preternatural prerogatives which our first parents enjoyed in the Garden, then Mary was not conceived and born in the State of original justice, because, unlike Adam and Eve, she was subject to death and suffering and in need of being redeemed. But if we define iustitia originalis as perfect sanctity and sinlessness, we can and must say that the state of original justice was more fully realized in Mary than in Adam and Eve.

Thesis II: The Blessed Virgin Mary was by a special divine privilege actually exempt from personal sin.

This thesis embodies an article of faith.

Proof. The Council of Trent declares: “If any one assert that man, after he is once justified, is able to avoid throughout his lifetime all, even venial sin, except by a special divine privilege, as the Church holds in regard to the Blessed Virgin, let him be anathema.”^[16]

Hence it is an article of faith that Mary, in contradistinction to all other human beings, was by a special privilege preserved from venial as well as mortal sin throughout her lifetime.

It should, however, be noted that this dogma merely asserts the fact of Mary’s sinlessness, but does not say that it is based on impeccability.^[17]

a) That the Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved from sin may be inferred (1) from the Scriptural and Patristic teaching that she enjoyed the fulness of grace,^[18] and (2) from the fact that her purity surpassed that of the angels. The argument is strengthened by a consideration of her intimate union with Christ, the “second Adam,” and her own antithetical relation to the “first Eve.”

Mary was incapable of committing mortal sin for the reason that God had put absolute and permanent enmity between her and the devil, which fact is incompatible with original, and a fortiori with mortal, sin.^[19] She could not even commit venial sin; for though venial sin does not destroy the bond of friendship with God, it involves a positive moral defect which we can not attribute to the Blessed Virgin Mary without running counter to the traditional conception of her absolute sinlessness.^[20] If Mary were not absolutely stainless, the Church could not exhort us to address her in the terms of the Canticle of Canticles: “Thou art all fair, Ο my love, and there is not a spot in thee.”^[21]

b) As regards Tradition, the dogma of the sinlessness of the Blessed Virgin, unlike that of her Immaculate Conception, did not undergo a process of clarification, but existed from the beginning in the fully developed form in which it has come down to us. “We must except the Holy Virgin Mary,” says St. Augustine, “concerning whom I wish to raise no question, when it touches the subject of sin, out of honor to the Lord.”^[22] In other words, the Blessed Virgin Mary was without sin because the honor of her Divine Son demanded it.

This quotation from St. Augustine fairly represents the belief of Western Christendom. Strange to say, the dogma of the personal sinlessness of our Lady suffered temporary obscuration in the East, where the Immaculate Conception was so tenaciously professed. St. Chrysostom holds that the petition which Mary addressed to her Son at the marriage feast of Cana was prompted by feminine vanity and her desire to speak to Jesus when He was preaching to the multitudes,^[23] by imperiousness.^[24] St. Basil^[25] and St. Cyril of Alexandria^[26] interpret the prophecy of Simeon as implying that a doubt in the Divinity of Jesus would enter the heart of Mary under the Cross. Petavius boldly censures these opinions as “preposterous.”^[27] However, the fact that they were held by such eminent authorities proves that during the first four centuries the dogma of the personal sinlessness of our Lady was not so generally believed in the East as in the West, where SS. Ambrose and Augustine proclaimed and defended it. The attitude of the Greek Fathers may perhaps be explained by the fact that they were imbued with the Oriental notion that woman is inferior to man and subject to certain frailties and defects which are not strictly speaking faults. In judging their attitude, therefore, it will be well to distinguish between an accidental popular notion and the tradition of the faith. The Madgeburg Centuriators were certainly not justified in appealing to the Fathers in their endeavor to represent Mary as a sinful woman, for St. Andrew of Crete and St. John of Damascus, and long before either St. Ephrem Syrus, faithfully voiced the true ecclesiastical belief.^[28]

Thesis III: The proximate cause of our Lady’s sinlessness was a kind of impeccability; its remote and ultimate cause was the grace of Divine Motherhood.

We are now dealing with a merely probable theological opinion.

Proof. Sinlessness (impeccantia) is actual freedom from sin; impeccability (impeccabilitas), absolute inability to sin. The former does not necessarily imply the latter, because God could preserve a human being from sin by simply withholding his physical concurrence. In the case of our Lady, however, we are justified in assuming that her purity was due to a kind of intrinsic impeccability.

Impeccability may be either metaphysical or moral. Metaphysical impeccability belongs exclusively to God, whereas moral impeccability may also be enjoyed by creatures. It is enjoyed, e. g., by the angels and saints in Heaven. God is impeccable because He is absolutely and infinitely holy;^[29] Christ, in consequence of the Hypostatic Union;^[30] the angels and saints, by virtue of the beatific vision of the Godhead which they enjoy.^[31] How are we to conceive the impeccability of the Blessed Virgin Mary? It is quite obvious that her impeccability must differ specifically from that proper to God and the God-man Jesus Christ. Hers is not a divine attribute, nor is it conditioned by or based upon a personal union of divinity with humanity. It cannot be a result of the beatific vision, because Mary during her sojourn on earth was a wayfarer like ourselves and did not enjoy beatitude.^[32] Comparing her impeccability to that of the angels and saints and to that of our first parents in Paradise, we may define it as an intermediate state between the two. It would be asserting too much to say that the Blessed Virgin was capable of committing sin like our first parents; and too little to assert that during her lifetime she was incapable of sinning as the angels and saints of Heaven are now, in consequence of the beatific vision. In what, then, did her impeccability consist? We are probably not far from the truth when we assume that God gave her the gift of perfect perseverance^[33] as against mortal sin, and that of confirmation in grace^[34] as against venial sin. Together with her freedom from concupiscence these two graces may be regarded as the proximate cause of Mary’s impeccability. For its ultimate cause we must go back to the higher and more comprehensive prerogative of her divine motherhood.^[35] God owed it to His own dignity and holiness, so to speak, to bestow the grace of perfect perseverance and confirmation in grace upon her from whom His Divine Son was to assume human nature. This idea is aptly illustrated by “the woman clothed with the sun” whom St. John visioned in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse. The analogy between Mary’s impeccability and that of her Divine Son would seem to render this theory all the more acceptable, though we must, of course, never forget that the impeccability of Christ is based upon the Hypostatic Union of Godhead and manhood, whereas that of His Mother rests merely upon the grace of divine motherhood.^[36]

Readings: — *St. Thomas, S. Theol., 3a, qu. 27, art. 4, and the commentators.— *Suarez, De Myst. Vitae Christi, disp. 4, sect. 3-6.— Vasquez, Comment. in S. Th., disp. 118.— Petavius, De Incarnatione, XIV, 1 sqq.— Albertus Magnus, Mariale, qu. 133 sqq., Lugduni 1651.—Christopher Vega, Theologia Mariana, palaestr. VII, cert. 4; IX, 1, Lugduni 1653.— *Scheeben, Dogmatik, Vol. Ill, § 280, Freiburg 1882.—Tepe, Institutiones Theologicae, Vol. Ill, pp. 708 sqq., Paris 1896.— J. Bucceroni, Commentarii de SS. Corde Iesu, de B. Virgine Maria et de S. Iosepho, ed. 4, pp. 81 sqq., Rome 1896.

PART II
MARY’S SPECIAL PREROGATIVES

Updated: Subsections 3, 4 and 5 added to make a single article.

In the first part of this treatise we have explained the teaching of the Catholic Church with regard to the unique dignity of the Blessed Virgin Mary as Deipara or Mother of God (θεοτόκος κεχαριτωμένη), and the plenitude of grace with which she was endowed.

From this fundamental teaching can be deduced by aprioristic reasoning a number of extraordinary and unique prerogatives. However, in determining these prerogatives it is advisable to discard the deductive method and to rely entirely on the data furnished by Revelation.

Divine Revelation ascribes to our Lady two distinct classes of special prerogatives, one negative, the other positive.

Mary’s negative prerogatives consist in the removal, or absence, of all defects and blemishes incompatible with divine motherhood. Her positive prerogatives may be defined as certain special privileges which God conferred upon her with a view to adorn and exalt her in a manner befitting her sublime dignity as Deipara.

CHAPTER I
THE NEGATIVE PREROGATIVES OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN

It is a dogmatic principle that the Mother of God was exempt from every defect or blemish. There are four separate and distinct prerogatives that may be enumerated under this category. They are:

(1) Exemption from original sin. This privilege of the Blessed Virgin is known as her Immaculate Conception.
(2) Immunity from personal sin. This prerogative is commonly called her sinlessness.
(3) Freedom from bodily pollution. It is this privilege we mean when we speak of her as “ever virgin.”
(4) Exemption from the dominion of death. This privilege is implied in her bodily Assumption into Heaven.

The first two of these prerogatives have exclusive reference to the soul of our Blessed Lady; the third and fourth also include her body. We will discuss them one by one in four distinct Sections.

SECTION 1
MARY’S IMMACULATE CONCEPTION

1. STATE OF THE QUESTION AND MEANING OF THE DOGMA.—a) Conception (conceptio) may be taken either actively or passively.

Immaculate Conception: Mary and Saints - Piero di Cosimo

Active conception (concipere, conceptio activa) is the parental act of generation. Passive conception (concipi, conceptio passiva) is the origin of a human being in the maternal womb. A child comes into being at the moment when the intellectual soul is infused into the product of parental generation (embryo, foetus). In speaking of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, therefore, we do not mean the procreative act of her saintly parents (which may or may not have been tainted by inordinate concupiscence), but simply and solely the creative act by which Almighty God infused her immaculate soul into the corporeal receptacle which had been prepared for it by Joachim and Anna. In other words, by a most extraordinary privilege the soul of our Lady was from the first instant of her existence preserved from all stain of original sin.

b) The fact that Mary was preserved from original sin does not necessarily imply that she was exempt from the universal necessity or need of being subject to it (debitum peccati originalis).

Theologians generally hold that, though she was de facto exempt from original sin, Mary incurred the debitum contrahendi, because else her Immaculate Conception would not be an effect of the atonement.

We may distinguish a twofold debitum, proximate and remote. Debitum remotum merely signifies membership in the human race, based on the ordinary mode of propagation, i.e., sexual generation. Debitum proximum involves inclusion in the willful act by which Adam, as the representative of the whole race, rejected the grace of God and implicated human nature in sin. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is sufficiently safeguarded by admitting that Mary was subject to the debitum remotum. The view of some older Scotist theologians, that she had not even so much as a debitum remotum incurrendi peccatum originale, cannot be reconciled with the solemn formula by which Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

Is it necessary to admit that there was also a debitum proximum. The majority of Catholic divines, following Suarez,^[1] contend that it is. The assumption of such a debitum, involving as it does the exemption of one sole individual from a strictly binding universal law, constitutes the Immaculate Conception a miracle and a far higher grace than it would be in the opposite hypothesis; but it does not sufficiently safeguard the soul of our Lady against the possibility of contamination.^[2]

c) The dogma expressly says that our Lady owed her freedom from original sin entirely to the redemptive merits of her Divine Son. Like all other human beings, she had need of a redeemer, though the manner of her redemption differed from that of the common run. She was preserved from original sin by a special and altogether unique privilege.

As this privilege is based entirely on her dignity as Mother of God, it would be rash to assume that it was granted also to other Saints, e.g., John the Baptist or St. Joseph. Inasmuch as Mary never even for one moment contracted the slightest taint of original sin, theologians commonly speak of her redemption as redemptio anticipata or praeredemptio (sometimes also praemundatio). This Preredemption, according to Catholic teaching, formally consisted in the infusion of sanctifying grace into her soul immediately after its creation. In other words, the sanctification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, like that of our First Parents in Paradise,^[3] was simultaneous with her creation.

d) All these momenta are embodied in the definition enunciated by Pius IX in his famous Bull “Ineffabilis Deus,” of December 8th, 1854: “We define that the doctrine which declares that : the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted to her by Almighty God, through the merits of Christ Jesus, Saviour of mankind, was preserved from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore must be held firmly and constantly by all faithful Christians.”^[4]

The Bull not only defines the dogma, but declares that it is “revealed by God.” The subject of this singular privilege is the person of Mary; it has nothing to do with her progenitors. The privilege itself consists in Mary’s actual preservation from original sin through the merits of Jesus Christ.

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is rejected by the Anglicans, and by Protestants generally, also by many schismatics and the so-called Old Catholics.^[5]

2. PROOF FROM SACRED SCRIPTURE.—The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is not expressly enunciated in Sacred Scripture, but, as Father S. J. Hunter justly observes, “this circumstance will have no weight against its acceptance, except with those who assume, without a scrap of reason, that the whole of the revelation given by God is contained in the inspired Books.”^[6] The Bull “Ineffabilis” cites two important texts, which certainly point to the Blessed Virgin as the recipient of some extraordinary spiritual favor, —a favor which cannot be fully explained by anything short of the dogma of her Immaculate Conception. True, the exegetical argument from these texts, taken by itself, scarcely exceeds the limits of probability; but the lack of Scriptural evidence can be abundantly supplied from the writings of the Fathers.

a) The so-called Protevangelium (Gen. Ill, 14 sq.) runs as follows: “Et ait Dominus Deus ad serpentem: …. Inimicitias ponam inter te et mulierem (הָאִשָׂה), et semen tuum et semen illius: ipsa conteret caput tuum, et tu insidiaberis calcaneo eius—And the Lord God said to the serpent: … I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.” The Hebrew text has: “he [הוּא] shall crush thy head, and thou shalt crush his heel.” The only difference between the two versions is that, whereas the Vulgate describes “the woman” as crushing the serpent, the original Hebrew text, by employing a male pronoun, ascribes this act to “the seed of the woman.” The Septuagint agrees with the Hebrew, rendering the passage as follows: αὐτός σου τηρήσει κεφαλήν, καὶ οὺ τηρήσεις αὐτοῦ πτέραν. This diversity does not, however, affect the dogmatic argument, which may be formulated thus:

According to the wellnigh unanimous interpretation of the Fathers, beginning with St. Justin Martyr and St. Ignatius of Antioch, the “serpent crusher” is a determinate person, namely our Divine Saviour Jesus Christ Himself, and the woman whose enmity is destined to prove fatal to the serpent, is the Blessed Virgin Mary. These two persons are opposed to two other beings, viz., the serpent, who is none other than Satan, and his “seed,” i.e., his clientele of sinners.^[7] God Himself has “put enmity” between these two pairs, Christ and His mother on the one side, and Satan and his followers on the other, —an enmity which will ultimately end in victory for the former and destruction for the latter. Mary, being on the side of Christ, with the same enmity between her and Satan as that which exists between the latter and her Divine Son, must also share in His triumph. This would not be the case had she, even for a single moment, been tainted by original sin; for in that hypothesis Satan would have triumphed over her, and she would have been, at least temporarily, his friend and ally, and the Protogospel would consequently be untrue. It follows that, viewed in the light of Christian tradition, the Protevangelium foreshadows not only the victory achieved by Christ through the atonement, but implicitly also the Immaculate Conception of His Blessed Mother.^[8]

b) Leaving the Old Testament, we proceed to consider the Angelic Salutation, Luke 1:28: “Hail, full of grace,” in connection with the words addressed to our Lady by Elizabeth, Luke 1:42: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”^[9] Gabriel’s greeting represents the divine favor enjoyed by the Blessed Virgin as the highest form of grace consistent with her state, and when Elizabeth, “filled with the Holy Ghost,” hailed Mary as the “mother of my Lord,” she did not pronounce a conventional salutation, but wished to say (as the Greek translation ἐν γυναιξίν of a Hebrew superlative plainly indicates) : “Thou art the only blessed one among women, because the ‘fruit of thy womb’ is the Son of God.” We have shown in a previous chapter that Mary, as the mother of God, was “full of grace.” She would have lacked the fulness of grace had she not, from the first instant of her existence, been entirely exempt from sin. In other words, her plenitudo gratiae^[10] must be conceived as unlimited in intensity as well as duration.

Rightly, therefore, does Martin Luther remark of our Lady: “We could not say to her: ‘Blessed art thou,’ if she had at any time been subject to malediction.”^[11] Thus conceived, the prerogative of plenitudo gratiae as well as the “blessedness” of Mary logically include her Immaculate Conception, as a cause includes its effect or an antecedent its consequent.

This argument is confirmed by the traditional antithesis, so often emphasized by the Fathers and Catholic divines, between Mary and Eve. “Hail [Mary],” says Pope Innocent III (d. 1216), “because through thee the name of Eve is changed. Eve was full of sin, but thou art full of grace; Eve withdrew from God, but God is with thee; Eve was cursed, but thou art blessed among women; through Eve death entered the world, through thee life returned.”^[12] This antithetical comparison would be meaningless had Mary ever, even for one brief moment, made common cause, as it were, with Adam’s sinful spouse.^[13]

Immaculate Conception - Bartolome Murillo 1678AD

3. THE ARGUMENT FROM TRADITION.—The ecclesiastical tradition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception plainly falls into two separate and distinct stages. The first may be termed that of quiet and undisputed possession. It extends up to the time of the famous controversy which broke out in 1140. The second period is characterized by a gradual clarification of the dogma in the minds of the faithful, and ends with its solemn definition by Pope Pius IX, A. D. 1854.

a) During the first period (from about 250 to 1100) the Orient, on the whole, gives evidence of a much clearer conception of the dogma than the West, though the Latins no doubt virtually believed in the Immaculate Conception. Perhaps it is not too much to say that, had the Schoolmen following St. Anselm known the writings of the Greek Fathers as well as we know them today, they would never have opposed the dogma.^[14]

α) Both the Oriental and the Latin churches held in common, as part of their primitive tradition, two central ideas, in which the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was implicitly contained. These fundamental conceptions were: (1) Mary’s transcendent purity, and (2) the striking contrast between her and Eve, so similar to that existing between Christ and Adam.

In regard to the first of these principles, the dogmatic Bull of Pius IX says:

“This doctrine so filled the minds and souls of our ancestors in the faith that a singular and truly marvelous style of speech came into vogue among them. They have frequently addressed the Mother of God as immaculate, as immaculate in every respect; innocent, and verily most innocent; spotless, and entirely spotless; holy and removed from every stain of sin; all pure, all stainless, the very model of purity and innocence; more beautiful than beauty, more lovely than loveliness; more holy than holiness, singularly holy and most pure in soul and body; the one who surpassed all integrity and virginity; the only one who has become the dwelling place of all the graces of the most Holy Spirit. God alone excepted, Mary is more excellent than all, and by nature fair and beautiful, and more holy than the Cherubim and Seraphim. To praise her all the tongues of heaven and earth do not suffice.”: (In Latin) “Atque haec quidem doctrina adeo maiorum mentes animosque occupavit, ut singularis et omnino mirus penes illos invaluerit loquendi usus, quo Deiparam saepissime compellarunt immaculatam, omnique ex parte immaculatam, innocentem et innocentissimam, illibatam et undequaque illibatam, sanctam et ab omni peccati sorde alienissimam, totam puram, totam intemeratam ac ipsam prope puritatis et innocentiae formam, pulchritudine pulchriorem, venustate venustiorem, sanctiorem sanctitate solamque sanctam purissimamque anima et corpore, quae supergressa est omnem integritatem et virginitatem, ac sola tota facta est domicilium universarum gratiarum Sanctissimi Spiritus et quae, solo Deo excepto, exstitit cunctis superior et ipsis Cherubim et Seraphim et omni exercitu angelorum natura pulchrior, formosior et sanctior, cui praedicandae coelestes et terrenae linguae minime sufficient.”^[15]

It is impossible to assume that the early Christians believed Mary to have been subject to original sin, since the Fathers of both the Greek and the Latin Church extol her as “all-holy,” “a virginal paradise preserved from the curse of God,” “a virgin without the slightest taint of sin,” “a miracle of grace, holier and purer than the angels,” etc., etc. No matter how highly we may rate the sanctity of a converted sinner, it would be untrue to say that he is absolutely stainless. For the sins which he has committed never cease to overshadow his life. To compare Mary’s sanctity to the immaculate purity of the glorious seraphs, nay, to exalt it in unmeasured terms above that purity, is but one remove from the formal declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

The dogma may also be logically deduced from the Patristic conception of Mary as the second Eve. As Adam was the counterpart of Christ,^[16] so Eve was the antithesis of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Or, to express the same truth somewhat differently: As Eve, in conjunction with Adam, embodies the principle of sin, so Mary, in conjunction with Christ, represents the wellspring of sanctity and righteousness. If the Blessed Virgin, as the anti-type of Eve, essentially participates in the sanctity of her Divine Son, she cannot possibly have been tainted by original sin; else the Scriptural parallel would be meaningless.

What renders this deduction even more convincing is the fact that the Fathers, not content with opposing Mary to sinful Eve, put her on a par with our protomother while yet in the state of original justice, that is to say, conceived her as equally holy in origin with “the mother of all the living.”

This significant parallel between Eve and our Blessed Lady is found, as a part of the traditional deposit of faith, in the writings of the earliest Fathers and ecclesiastical writers, beginning with St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, and Tertullian, down to St. John of Damascus. We will quote a few characteristic passages.

“The First-born of the Father before all creatures,” says St. Justin Martyr, “became a man through the Virgin, that by what way the disobedience arising from the serpent had its beginning, by that way also it might have its undoing. For Eve, being a virgin and undefiled, conceiving the word that was from the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death; but the Virgin Mary, taking faith and joy, when the Angel told her the good tidings . . . answered: ‘Let it be done unto me according to thy word.’”^[17] This is ” truly a most remarkable utterance in the mouth of a writer who flourished in the middle of the second century.”^[18]

Tertullian^[19] says: “For into Eve, as yet a virgin, had crept the word which was the framer of death· Equally into a virgin was to be introduced the Word of God, which was the builder-up of life; that, what by that sex had gone into perdition might by the same sex be brought back to salvation. Eve had believed the Serpent, Mary believed Gabriel; what Eve sinned by faith, Mary atoned by faith.”^[20]

In the East, St. Ephrem Syrus (+ 373) gives expression to a similar thought: “Those two innocent, those two simple women, Mary and Eve, had been indeed created quite equal, but afterwards one became the cause of our death, the other of our life.”^[21]

Theodotus of Ancyra (d. about 445), a friend and fellow-combatant of St. Cyril of Alexandria, says: “Instead of the virgin Eve, who was unto us the instrument of death, God, for the purpose of giving life, chose a virgin most pleasing to Himself and full of grace, who, included in woman’s sex, was free from woman’s sin, a virgin innocent, without taint, holy in soul and body, as a lily budding in the midst of thorns, unlearned in the evils of Eve, … who was a daughter of Adam, but unlike him.”^[22]

The same belief inspired St. John of Damascus when he wrote: “Hail, thou the only blessed one among women, who hast repaired the fall of our first mother Eve. . . . Hail, thou who art truly full of grace, because thou art holier than the angels and more excellent than the archangels. . . . Hail, thou full of grace, because thou art more beautiful than the Cherubim and more exalted than the Seraphim. . . . Hail, full of grace, thou who art higher than heaven and purer than the sun which we behold.”^[23]

β) A careful analysis of these central ideas naturally led to the explicit conclusion that the Blessed Mother of God must have been pure and holy also in her origin. This conclusion, though not formally equivalent to an enunciation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, differed but little if anything from it materially. Its logical development was partly theoretical, by means of express doctrinal judgments, and partly practical, through the introduction of the festival of the Immaculate Conception.

The theoretical development of the dogma is sufficiently illustrated by the following quotations.

St. Hippolytus (about 220), who was a pupil of St. Irenaeus, says: “The ark which was made of indestructible timber (cfr. Exodus 25:10 sqq.), was the Redeemer Himself. The ark symbolized His tent [body], which was impervious to decay and engendered no sinful corruption. … The Lord was sinless, because, according to His humanity, He was fashioned from indestructible wood, i.e., out of the Virgin and the Holy Ghost, lined within and without with the purest gold of the Logos.”^[24] Dr. Bardenhewer remarks on this passage: “This juxtaposition of our Lord and the Virgin as the only sinless representatives of the human race, constitutes the characteristic form in which the Immaculate Conception was taught in the early days.”^[25]

Dionysius the Great of Alexandria (about 250) wrote against Paul of Samosata: “Christ did not live in a servile tent, but in His holy ark … and He preserved His mother as one who was blessed from head to foot, undefiled, even as He alone knew the manner of her conception and birth.”^[26]

Our classic witness is again St. Ephrem Syrus (about 370), who represents the Church of Edessa as addressing the Lord Jesus Christ in these words: “Thou and Thy mother are the only [human beings] that are perfectly beautiful in every respect; for there is no spot in Thee, Ο Lord, nor any taint in Thy mother.”^[27]

There is an alleged “Report of the Priests and Deacons of Achaia on the Martyrdom of St. Andrew”^[28] which used to be quoted as the most ancient Patristic testimony in support of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.^[29] We know now that this report is probably no older than the fifth century. But even as a document of the fifth century it is not without value. It contains this characteristic passage: “Because the first man [Adam] was created of undefiled earth [i.e., earth which had not yet been cursed], … it was necessary that out of an immaculate Virgin there should be born the perfect man, the Son of God.”

St. Augustine’s attitude in regard to this question is of special interest. He taught (1) that, as a rule, original sin precedes personal sin, and (2) that the Blessed Virgin Mary alone of all human beings was personally sinless. These premises implicitly contain the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. But St. Augustine never formally drew this conclusion. Julian of Eclanum accused him of treating the Deipara with even greater disrespect than the heretic Jovinian: ” He [Jovinian] makes Mary’s virginity come to an end owing to the law of parturition, you transfer Mary herself to the Devil’s book, owing to the law of birth;”^[30] to which the saintly Bishop replied:^[31] “We do not transfer Mary to the Devil’s book owing to the law of birth; but the reason we do not, is that this law is broken by the grace of being born again.” What else can this mean if not: Mary ought by right to have been conceived in original sin, but the grace of God preserved her pure and holy.^[32]

γ) The popular belief in the Immaculate Conception manifested itself at a comparatively early date by the introduction into the liturgy of a distinct festival. This was known at first as Conceptio Sanctae Annae.

The reference to it in the Typikon S. Sabae (composed about 485) is spurious, but the festival undoubtedly became popular in the Orient as early as the second half of the seventh century, for a hymn written by St. Andrew of Crete (d. about 720) bears the inscription: “Die nona Decembris Conceptio Sanctae ac Dei Aviae Annae.” In the West the feast of the Immaculate Conception was celebrated about the year 840 in the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, whither it had no doubt been transplanted from the Orient. In England the festival was observed before the Norman Conquest,^[33] though it did not spread widely in that country till the time of Abbot Anselm of St. Edmundsbury, who was a cousin of St. Anselm (d. 1109). Irish Catholics probably celebrated the feast of the Immaculate Conception as early as 900.^[34]

When the festival began to make its way from Italy to Gaul, in the twelfth century, a famous theological controversy arose as to its lawfulness. This was, however, confined to the circle of the learned and never affected the masses of the people. The cult of the Immaculata steadily grew more popular and finally struck root in Rome, where the feast was first observed in the fourteenth century.^[35]

In celebrating this festival the faithful did not mean to honor the Blessed Virgin as one who, like St. John the Baptist, had been cleansed from original sin in the maternal womb,^[36] but as originally conceived without the slightest stain.^[37]

b) The second period of the controversy, which led to a general clarification of ideas in the Western world—the East never wavered in its belief in the Immaculate Conception—began in 1140, when St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote his famous letter to the Canons of Lyons, who had begun to celebrate the feast of our Lady’s Conception without having the authority of the Holy See for this “innovation.”

a) St. Bernard insisted that nothing but what is “holy” can be the object of devotion, and in a vehement letter warned the Canons against the absurdity of celebrating a “false sanctity,” that is, the sanctity of a being not yet existing, or, what would be still worse, “sin,” i.e., the carnal act of Mary’s parents. Hence, while he raised no objection to the feast of our Lady’s nativity, he did protest against celebrating her “immaculate conception.”—”No doubt,” he wrote, ” the mother of God was holy even before she was born, and the Church is by no means mistaken in keeping holy the day of her birth … But she could not be holy before she existed, as she did not exist before she was conceived. Or did sanctity perhaps commingle with her conception so that she was sanctified and conceived at one and the same time? … Or are we to assume that there was no sin [concupiscence] where there was sensual delectation? Or will some one perhaps say that Mary was not conceived of a man but of the Holy Ghost? But this is something hitherto unheard of.”^[38]

If we take the term conception in its active sense (conceptio activa sive seminalis) in contradistinction and opposition to passive conception (conceptio passiva sive personalis), which coincides with the creation of the spiritual soul and its infusion into the foetus, St. Bernard was undoubtedly right in demanding that the conception of our Lady be excluded from public and private worship. But he went too far when he argued: “Hence, if Mary could not be sanctified before her conception, since she was not yet in existence, nor in the act of conception itself, on account of the sin [concupiscence] involved therein, it follows that she was sanctified in the womb after conception, which, since she was cleansed from sin, made her nativity holy, not her conception.”^[39] This argument is fallacious, because it ignores a fourth possibility, namely the sanctification of Mary’s soul in the instant of its creation (conceptio passive personalis).

What led a number of medieval theologians to oppose the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was that they misunderstood the real point at issue. Instead of endlessly harping on the query: “Was the Blessed Virgin Mary sanctified before or after the infusion of her soul into her body?” they should have formulated the problem thus: “Was the soul of the Blessed Virgin sanctified at the moment of its creation? ” But they disregarded this intrinsic possibility, on which the dogma of the Immaculate Conception rests. It never occurred to them to put the question thus, because, while they firmly believed that the Blessed Virgin Mary stood as much in need of redemption as the rest of humankind, they were unable to conceive redemption otherwise than as a cleansing from original sin with which all men are born into the world. Had the Scholastics generally perceived, what the subtle mind of Scotus saw so clearly, viz.: that redemption may be conceived as preredemption (preservation or prevention), they would undoubtedly have been unanimous in deducing the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception as a logical conclusion from the traditional teaching on the perpetual and absolute sinlessness of Mary. It has been said of St. Thomas that he virtually held the conclusions which he formally combatted in his Mariological discussions, and this is equally true of all other Scholastic theologians who thought it their duty to oppose the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.^[40]

β) St. Bernard’s letter to the Canons of Lyons drew forth emphatic protests from such learned and pious theologians as Friar Nicholas of St. Alban’s.^[41] But these protests remained unheeded, until the famous Franciscan Duns Scotus (d. 1308) refuted the chief objection that had been raised against the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Had the “Subtle Doctor” and his school done nothing else for the Catholic cause than to defend and successfully establish this dogma, they would deserve a place of honor in the history of medieval theology.

Scotus argued as follows: “He who is the most perfect mediator must have a most perfect act of mediation in regard to some person on whose behalf he exercises his mediatorial office. Now Christ is a most perfect mediator … and He had no more exalted relation to any person than to the Β. V. Mary. … This could not be, had He not merited for her preservation from original sin.”^[42]

The subtle difficulty that Mary was a daughter of Adam before she could become an adopted daughter of God, and therefore must necessarily have experienced the taint of original sin, Scotus solved by applying the Scholastic distinction between ordo naturae and ordo temporis.^[43] In the order of nature, he argued, Mary was a daughter of Adam before she was justified; but in the order of time her sanctification coincided with the creation of her soul. In elaborating this idea he employs a beautiful simile. “Some,” he says, “have been raised up after they had fallen, but the Virgin Mary was, as it were, sustained in the very act of falling, and prevented from falling, like the two men who were about to tumble into a pit.”^[44]

The strength of the Scotistic argument lies mainly in the concept of praeredemptio. Preredemption, Scotus contends, is possible, because absolutely speaking God can infuse grace without the expulsion of any previously existing sin.^[45] Preredemption was a fit mode of preserving the Blessed Virgin from sin, because she was the mother of God, and as such could never be at enmity with God, which would have been the case, for a time at least, had she not been preserved from original sin.^[46]

The Scotists nearly all followed the lead of their master. Among the zealous Franciscan defenders of the Immaculate Conception two deserve special mention: Peter Aureolus (d. 1322), and Francis Mayron (d. 1327), who wrote copiously in defense of the famous syllogism: “Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit” that is to say: It was becoming that the Mother of the Redeemer should be free from the power of sin and Satan from the first moment of her existence; it was in God’s power to give her this privilege; therefore he gave it.^[47]

γ) It was due solely to the ancient feud between the Franciscans and the Dominicans that the latter now sharply renewed their opposition to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception with a special appeal to the authority of St. Thomas. Some Dominican divines even went so far as to censure the Scotist view as heretical. The opposition, which was at first conducted with prudent moderation by men of the stamp of Cardinal Torquemada (1388-1468), eventually developed into a veritable furor theologicus. Bondelli (1481) and Bartholomew Spina (d. 1546) were particularly vehement. Besides such moderate opponents as Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534), Francis a Sylvestris (1474-1528), and Bartholomew de Medina (1528-1581), the Order of St. Dominic, at this critical juncture, also furnished a few defenders of the doctrine, notably Ambrosius Catharinus (1487-1553), John a S. Thoma (1589-1644), and Natalis Alexander (1639-1724).

The first serious attempt to upset the authority of St. Thomas and to blaze a way for the doctrine of the Scotists, which was constantly strengthening its claims, was made by Seraphine Capponi della Porretta, O. P. (1536-1614), who endeavored to show that the Angelic Doctor had been an advocate, or at least no opponent, of the Immaculate Conception. When, in process of time, the Thomistic position was gradually perceived to be untenable, the Thomists one by one retired from the fray and tried to interpret St. Thomas in favor of the Scotistic doctrine, as the Jesuits had done from the beginning. Already before the foundation of the Society of Jesus, Cardinal Cajetan had observed that “among modern theologians the number of those who hold that the Blessed Virgin was preserved from original sin, is infinite.”^[48] The Jesuit Peter Canisius (1521-1597) could truthfully say of his own time: “Very few now hold the contrary opinion, and these are ashamed to speak their mind openly and consider it dangerous to profess their belief in public. If they dared to speak out, they would meet with public contradiction and give offense to the people; to such a degree has the opinion adverse to the Immaculate Conception been weakened, exploded, and as it were cast out.”^[49]

Those who had opposed the doctrine withdrew before long to their lecture rooms, while the Christian populace continued to profess the Immaculate Conception with constantly increasing fervor.

δ) Thus the process of clarification, which had begun in the twelfth century, gradually took its course, the Church either urging on or restraining the combatants, as prudence dictated.

The Council of Bâsle (1439), in its thirty-sixth session, declared the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to be the official teaching of the Church. Though not a binding definition (for the Council was at that time without a head), this declaration attests the belief of the fifteenth century.

Sixtus IV, by a decree dated February 28, 1476, granted indulgences to all who recited the canonical office or assisted at the Mass of the Immaculate Conception,^[50] and when this did not abate the conflict, in 1483 issued an Apostolic Constitution (“Grave nimis“) in which he threatened to excommunicate all those of either school who dared to charge their opponents with heresy.

The Council of Trent left the question where Sixtus IV had put it, but “declared that it is not the intention of this holy Synod to include in the decree which treats of original sin the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of God, but that the constitutions of Pope Sixtus IV, of happy memory, are to be observed under the pains inflicted by the said constitutions, which it [the Tridentine Council] renews.”^[51]

In 1567, Pope St. Pius V condemned the proposition (No. 73) of Baius, that “no one but Christ was without original sin, and that therefore the Blessed Virgin died in consequence of the sin contracted through Adam, and endured afflictions in this life, like the rest of the just, as punishments for actual and original sin.”^[52] A year later the same Pope made the feast of the Immaculate Conception a holyday of obligation for the entire Church.

Paul V, in 1616, forbade public discussion of the subject in pulpit and rostrum, and Gregory XV, in 1622, imposed absolute silence on all parties, with but one exception in favor of the Dominicans, who were permitted to debate the Immaculate Conception in private.

Finally, Pope Alexander VII, by the famous Constitution “Solicitudo,” of December 8, 1661, renewed all the decrees of his predecessors and subjected the writings of those who attacked the Immaculate Conception to the rules of the Roman Index.^[53]

From this time on the question was ripe for a final decision; but it was not until nearly two centuries later that Pope Pius IX formally defined and promulgated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

4. THE THEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT.—The theological argument for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception rests entirely on reasons of fitness, viz.: (a) due regard for the infinite majesty and honor of the Divine Logos, for whose sake our Lady was preserved from sin, and (b) the exalted dignity of her divine motherhood.^[54]

a) The Immaculate Conception constitutes a most extraordinary personal privilege, which our Lady received not for her own sake but for the sake of Christ. As the glory of a child reflects honor on his parents, so the shame of a parent brings disgrace upon the child.^[55] Hence any sinful taint in Mary would have reflected unfavorably on her Divine Son. Besides, the granting of such an extraordinary privilege to His mother redounds to the glory of Christ in His capacity of Redeemer. Far from diminishing, the Immaculate Conception enhances and shows forth His dignity and power.

A man may be redeemed in a twofold manner, either by being cleansed from sin or by being preserved from it altogether. The latter mode of redemption is undoubtedly the more perfect of the two, for, as Lorinus observes, “To prevent one from falling into something from which he would have to be rescued, is the nobler way of liberation.”^[56] To hold that Mary was exempt from original sin is not to deny that she was redeemed by Jesus Christ, but to assert that she was redeemed by Him in a most perfect manner, which greatly redounds to the glory of the Redeemer.

b) Our reason shrinks from the thought that she who was from all eternity predestined to be the living temple of the Logos, the Sanctum Sanctorum of the New Testament, should have been even temporarily tainted by original sin. St. Bonaventure holds that the dignity of divine motherhood raised Mary to a unique rank unattainable by any other creature. This being the case, logic demands that she should be absolutely, pure and stainless. Had she ever, even for a single moment, been under the yoke that weighs so heavily on the “children of anger,” she would not have been always and absolutely pure.

As Deipara Mary undoubtedly surpasses Eve and all the angels of Heaven in dignity. Now Eve and the angels were created in a state of original holiness, hence it would not be reasonable to suppose that Mary, whose dignity is so far superior to theirs, and who is rightly called the “Heavenly Eve” and “Queen of Angels,” was created in the state of original sin.^[57]

St. John the Baptist was sanctified in his mother’s womb because he was destined to be the precursor of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Mary must have been sanctified from the very beginning of her existence, for else she would be on a par with the precursor, which is repugnant.

The opponents of the dogma never denied that the Blessed Virgin, on account of her exalted dignity, was preserved from personal sin (peccatum actuale) and the effects of concupiscence (concupiscentia) all her life.^[58] Now, according to St. Augustine, original sin is related to actual (or personal) sin as cause to effect. Actual or personal sin mostly originates in concupiscence, which in its turn is a penalty of original sin.^[59] Hence the absence of one implies absence of the other. Mary never committed actual sin, consequently she must have been conceived without original sin.

Again, it is the teaching of the Fathers that Christ was exempt from original sin, not only because He was the Divine Logos, but also because of His virginal conception and birth.^[60] “He alone was born without sin,” says St. Austin, “whom His virgin mother conceived without the embrace of a husband, not by the concupiscence of the flesh, but by the submission of her mind.”^[61] It was meet that Christ should confer the immunity to which He was entitled as King, at least as a privilege upon His Queen, according to the principle laid down by the Roman legist Ulpian, that “A king is not subject to the laws, and though his queen is subject to them, the king grants her the same privileges which he himself enjoys.”^[62] This explains the deeper meaning of the memorable words which King Assuerus spoke to Esther, who was a prototype of the Blessed Virgin Mary: “Fear not, Thou shalt not die; for this law is not made for thee, but for all others.”^[63]

5. THE TEACHING OF ST. THOMAS.—Theologians are divided in their opinion as to what was the mind of St. Thomas in regard to the Immaculate Conception. Some^[64] frankly admit that he opposed what in his day was not yet a defined dogma, but insist that he virtually admitted what he formally denied. Others^[65] claim that the Angelic Doctor expressly defended the Immaculate Conception and that the (about fifteen) adverse passages quoted from his writings must be regarded as later interpolations. Between these extremes stand two other groups of theologians, one of which^[66] holds that St. Thomas was undecided in his attitude towards the Immaculate Conception, while the other^[67] merely maintains the impossibility of proving that he opposed the doctrine.

a) In order to arrive at a just and impartial idea of St. Thomas’ position we shall have to study his teaching in connection with what may be called its theological environment. Influenced by the attitude of St. Bernard, who was otherwise an ardent devotee of the Blessed Virgin, all the predecessors and contemporaries of the Angelic Doctor — with the exception perhaps of his fellow Dominican Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264)—opposed the Immaculate Conception. Of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the “Father of Scholasticism,” it has been truly said that, like Aquinas, he virtually asserted the Immaculate Conception in his premises and denied it formally in his conclusions.^[68] It is to Anselm that Scholasticism owes the oft-quoted Mariological principle: “It was meet that the Blessed Virgin should shine in a splendor of purity than which none greater can be conceived under God, that virgin to whom God the Father had determined to give His Son, whom He had begotten as His equal, and whom He loved like Himself,—and He gave Him in such wise that He would be the Son of both God the Father and the Virgin.”^[69]

Peter Lombard (d. 1164) taught that “the Blessed Virgin bore the taint of original sin, but was entirely cleansed before she conceived Christ.”^[70] This was the common teaching in the Franciscan Order. No wonder that the most eminent theologians of that Order, up to the time of Duns Scotus (d. 1308), battled side by side with the Dominicans.^[71] Not to mention Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), St. Bonaventure, who was one of the greatest lights among the Minorites, while admitting that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception might be defended as probable on the strength of certain considerations of fitness,^[72] openly espoused the opposite view.^[73]

b) Placed in a theological environment in which the true solution of the problem was not yet attainable, St. Thomas, in common with the most eminent and saintly doctors of his time, had a perfect right to defend a thesis which was by no means regarded as scandalous but open to discussion· The dogma of the Immaculate Conception was still in process of clarification.

The Angelic Doctor nowhere expressly teaches the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the sense in which it has since been defined as an article of faith. True, he says with St. Anselm: “Purity is constituted by a recession from impurity, and therefore it is possible to find some creature purer than all the rest, namely one not contaminated by any taint of sin; such was the purity of the Blessed Virgin, who was immune from original and actual sin, yet under God, inasmuch as there was in her the potentiality of sin.”^[74] But the “immunity from original sin” which St. Thomas ascribes to our Lady is not synonymous with “immaculate conception,” as can be seen from the third part of the famous Summa Theologica, qu. 27, art. 2, ad 2. Consequently, it is not fair to charge the Angelic Doctor with inconsistency because in numerous other passages, where he treats the question ex professo, he denies the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. He did not hold that God could not create a perfectly spotless creature,— his objections are mainly based on the privileged character of the Redeemer and the absolute necessity of redemption for all human beings without exception. The following passage from the Summa Theologica shows that its author consistently adhered to his standpoint up to the time of his death. “If the soul of the Blessed Virgin had never been defiled by original sin, this would derogate from the dignity of Christ as the Redeemer of all mankind. It may be said, therefore, that under Christ, who as the universal Saviour needed not to be saved Himself, the Blessed Virgin enjoyed the highest measure of purity. For Christ in no wise contracted original sin, but was holy in His very conception . . . The Blessed Virgin, however, did contract original sin, but was cleansed therefrom before her birth.”^[75]

This is the uniform teaching of Aquinas in all his writings, viz.: that the birth of our Lady was holy and immaculate, but not her conception.^[76]

The following is from a German Wikipedia Article. It was translated with Google translate, and I have attempted to repair any awkward phrasing. I probably could have done better, but I don’t understand German, and the computerized translation is very sloppy.

Joseph Pohle (* March 19 1852 in Niederspay in Koblenz , † February 21 1922 in Wrocław (Breslau)) was a Catholic theologian.

Pohle studied in Trier, Rome (1871-1879, Collegium Germanicum ) – and astronomy with Angelo Secchi – and Würzburg (1879-1881). In 1878 he was ordained a priest. Pohle was initially a teacher from 1881 to 1883 in Baar , Switzerland, then from 1883 to 1886 as professor of moral theology at Leeds , England, then as a professor of exegesis and theology, then from 1886 to 1889 professor of philosophy at Fulda. There he founded the 1888 Yearbook of Philosophy , along with Konstantin Gutberlet . 1889 to 1893 he worked in Washington as the first cast of the newly founded Catholic University of apologetics . Pohle taught dogma from 1894 to 1897 in Munich, and 1897 to 1921 in Breslau . There he lectured accompanied by his three-volume textbook of dogmatics. The first edition appeared from 1902 to 1905, and quickly became a standard work replacing the textbook by Hermann Schell, which had been indexed (Index Librorum Prohibitorum). Revisions were made ​​by Michael yaw and Joseph Gummersbach . An English translation by Arthur Preuss appeared from 1911 to 1917 in St. Louis. Pohle was employed from 1910 to 1912 at the state lexicon, in addition to the Catholic Encyclopedia , the Church and the magazines Handlexikon, The Catholic , Historically Blätter , nature and revelation .

Section 2
Mary’s Fulness of Grace

Ripalda^[1] and Scheeben^[2] refer to Mary’s Divine Motherhood as her immediate forma sanctificans. This view is based on a misapplied analogy with the Hypostatic Union and therefore untenable. But there can be no doubt that the dignity of Divine Motherhood imperatively postulates for its bearer the highest possible measure of interior grace and sanctification. For, though motherhood is merely a grace of vocation (gratia gratis data), its inherent dignity requires a corresponding worthiness on the part of the bearer. The mother of God could not have been a sinful woman. This reasoning finds strong support in Holy Scripture and Tradition.

1. THE DOGMATIC ARGUMENT.—Both Holy Scripture and Tradition teach that the Mother of Jesus was “full of grace.”

a) The dogma of our Lady’s “plenitudo gratiae” (fulness of grace) is formally contained in the angelic salutation: “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”^[3] In the original Greek this text is even more graphic: “χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ Κύριος μετὰ σοῦ.” The emphasis is on the word κεχαριτωμένη, which is evidently intended to point out a predominant trait of the Virgin. That the salutation was quite extraordinary appears from the fact that Mary was “troubled” at the Angel’s words and “thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be.”^[4]

In its primitive sense χαριτόω means I show grace or favor. God’s way of showing favor to a rational creature is to endow him or her with sanctifying grace. Cfr. Ephesians 1:6 : “τῆς χάριτος αὐτόν, ἐν ἧ ἐχαρίτωσεν ἡμᾶς — of his grace, in which he hath graced us …” Hence κεχαριτωμένη means a woman full of grace,— endowed not merely with the extrinsic graces proper to her state of life, but with a full measure of sanctifying grace, which precedes the grace of vocation, strictly so called, by way of preparation and endowment. Mary was not yet de facto the Mother of God when the Angel addressed her as κεχαριτωμένη, for she had not yet given her consent. The phrase: “The Lord is with thee,” is not part of the salutation proper; it is a statement, couched in ordinary Scriptural terms, promising her the divine protection for some definite task or mission. But as divine motherhood is conditioned upon intrinsic purity and holiness, and presupposes in its bearer many actual graces, the phrase “Dominus tecum” in this connection manifestly has the same meaning as “gratiâ plena,”

Following the lead of certain Fathers, we may moreover apply to the Blessed Virgin Mary a large number of Old Testament texts which find their full application in no one else but her. For example, Proverbs 31:29; “Many daughters have gathered together riches: thou hast surpassed them all.” The enthusiastic description of the “Spouse” in the Canticle of Canticles can likewise be applied in its plenary sense only to the Mother of God.^[5]

b) The Fathers delighted in unfolding the logical implications of the Angelic Salutation and in so doing measured the intrinsic graces of Mary by the standard of her sublime dignity as Mother of God.

St. Epiphanius says that she was “full of grace in every respect.”^[6] St. Athanasius, that she is called “full of grace, because, being filled with the Holy Ghost, she overflowed with all graces, and was overshadowed by the power of the Most High.”^[7] In an ancient homily wrongly ascribed to St. Gregory the Wonder-worker we read: “The most holy Virgin is truly the precious ark which received the whole treasure of sanctity.”^[8]

Other Patristic texts are even more convincing. We refer the student especially to those which, in connexion with Psalms 44:12,^[9] declare that Mary attracted the Son of the Heavenly King by her extraordinary beauty and holiness. It will suffice to quote St. Augustine, who says: “An abundance of grace was conferred on her, who merited to conceive and bear Him of whom we know that He was without sin.”^[10] Our Lady’s personal merit must not, however, be conceived as a meritum de condigno (merit of her own worthiness) but merely de congruo. In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “The Blessed Virgin is said to have merited the privilege of bearing the Lord of all, not because it was through her merits that He became incarnate, but because, by the grace bestowed upon her she merited that measure of purity and holiness which fitted her to be the mother of God.”^[11]

c) The theological argument for our dogma is based partly on the self-evident truth that the grace bestowed upon any person is commensurate with his or her dignity or office, and partly on the consideration that the measure of interior graces with which our Lady was dowered must have corresponded to her triple relationship to the three Persons of the Divine Trinity.^[12]

It was a duty of honor, so to speak, for the Most Holy Trinity to endow the Deipara with a full, nay with a superabundant measure of interior grace. “The more closely one approaches a principle of any kind,” says St. Thomas, “the more one participates in the effect flowing from that principle. . . . Now Christ is the principle of grace; as God He is its author, as man its instrument. . . . But the Blessed Virgin Mary was nearest to Christ in His humanity, because He assumed His human nature from her. Consequently, she must have received from Him a greater fulness of grace than any one else.”^[13] This truth is emphasized in the dogmatic Bull “Ineffabilis Deus” (Ineffable God) of Pope Pius IX (Dec. 10th, 1854).^[14]

2. THEOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE DOGMA. — We now proceed to consider the dogma from the specifically theological standpoint by studying (a) its scope and (b) its limitations.

a) The state of grace, generally speaking, culminates in sanctifying grace. Hence the fulness of grace enjoyed by the Blessed Virgin Mary must be conceived as a superabundance of interior holiness.

How is her sanctity to be measured in the concrete? In trying to estimate it at its proper worth, let us compare the Mother of God, first to her Divine Son, and secondly to the Angels and Saints.

Her sanctity was inferior to the created sanctity of Jesus in proportion as divine motherhood falls short of the prerogative of the Hypostatic Union. In comparing her sanctity to that of the Angels and Saints, we shall find it difficult to establish a definite line of demarcation. No doubt the sanctity of the Blessed Virgin, while vastly inferior to the created sanctity of Christ, surpasses that of the most glorious seraph and the greatest Saints.

The epithet “full of grace” has a different meaning as applied by Sacred Scripture (1) to our Lord Himself,^[15] (2) to St. Stephen,^[16] (3) to the Apostles,^[17] and (4) to our Blessed Lady. Though infinitely below the Godman, yet as Mother of God, Mary ranks high above her fellow creatures. Analogously, her plenitudo gratiae is intermediate between the fulness of grace peculiar to Christ and that of the holy Angels and Saints, far outranking the latter. Theologians are wont to describe it as “plenitudo summae abundantiae,” (the sum of the fullness of abundance) or “plenitudo redundantiae,” (superabundant fullness) but they deny that it is actually infinite, since not even the created sanctity of our Lord Himself can be conceived as gratia actu infinita (actually infinite grace).^[18] To obtain some idea of the high degree of sanctifying grace peculiar to our Lady, we may assume with Suarez that it transcends by far the combined sanctity of all the Angels and Saints.^[19]

What is true of sanctifying grace, must, mutatis mutandis, also be true of its supernatural effects, such as the theological virtues, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, and the infused moral virtues, with the sole exception of contrition, which our Blessed Mother cannot have exercised because she was sinless.

b) The Schoolmen reduced the truths we have just set forth to a technical axiom, to wit: “Alii ad mensuram gratiam acceperunt, Maria autem gratiae plenitudinem.” (Others received a measure of grace, but Mary received the fullness) Being liable to exaggeration, however, this axiom must be carefully circumscribed.

α) First, the plenitudo gratiarum (fullness of grace) does not mean that all possible supernatural prerogatives are superadded to sanctifying grace and its concomitant privileges.

Those who are guilty of this exaggeration (we are sorry to see Terrien among their number) are compelled to attribute to Mary all the prerogatives enjoyed by our First Parents in Paradise, viz.: bodily immortality, impassibility, and an infused knowledge of all natural truths. This theory is refuted by the tribulations which our Blessed Lady suffered and by the fact that she died a natural death.

A seventeenth-century divine, Christopher Vega, asserted that the soul of our Lady enjoyed the beatific vision of God throughout life.^[20] If this were true, the Blessed Virgin could not have acquired any earthly merits by faith, and Elizabeth would have been mistaken when she said to her: “Blessed art thou that hast believed.”^[21] At most we may adopt the pious, though unproved and unprovable opinion of Suarez,^[22] that Mary had a fleeting vision of the Blessed Trinity at the moment when she conceived, and again when she gave birth to her Divine Son.

St. Alphonsus de’ Liguori held, and his opinion has found a recent defender in Fr. Terrien, that the Blessed Virgin enjoyed full consciousness and the use of reason from the moment of her conception. This assumption (which, by the way, dates back no farther than the fourteenth century), is utterly untenable. Not even the shred of an argument can be produced in its favor. St. Thomas expressly declares that Mary did not have the use of free-will while in her mother’s womb but that this was the unique privilege of Christ.^[23]

Equally untenable is the more recent assertion of Jean-jacquot^[24] that the Blessed Virgin during her earthly life knew personally —· as she now knows in Heaven — all those pious souls who in course of time would have recourse to her as the “Help of Christians.”

It is, however, perfectly consonant with her dignity as Deipara to hold that Mary possessed a deep and extensive supernatural knowledge in matters of faith,— so wide and profound in fact, that she deserves to be called “Seat of Wisdom.” Note, however, that, as applied to her in the liturgy, this epithet does not necessarily mean anything more than that our Lady is the bearer and mother of the increate Wisdom of the Logos, and that, consequently, we are not justified, on the strength of mere α-priori deductions, in ascribing to Mary in the wayfaring state an altogether singular knowledge of the divine mysteries and an infused familiarity with the wisdom of Sacred Scripture. The question she addressed to the Archangel Gabriel proves that she was unaware of the mystery of the Incarnation; for, as “the handmaid of the Lord” she makes an humble profession of faith. That her earthly life was one of faith, is evidenced also by the prophecy of Simeon^[25] and by the reply she got from her twelve-year-old Son in the Temple, and which she believingly treasured in her heart.^[26] To assume that she was versed in the natural sciences or that her “wisdom” equalled the “infused knowledge” of the Angels, is unwarranted. Unlike her Divine Son, the humble “handmaid of the Lord” was not skilled in profane knowledge, nor did her exalted mission necessitate any intellectual attainments beyond those which strictly belong to the supernatural order.

While Mary, especially after she had “conceived of the Holy Ghost,” undoubtedly enjoyed to an exalted degree the gift of contemplation, Scheeben exaggerates when he says that she lived in a continuous ecstasy uninterrupted even by sleep.^[27] It is difficult to see the object of such mystical extravagances.

Did the plenitudo gratiae with which our Lady was endowed comprise such free and special graces as the power conferred by the Sacrament of Holy Orders? No; our Lord gave this and similar powers (spiritual jurisdiction, etc.), to St. Peter and the other Apostles, not to His mother. The same limitation applies to all other functions proper to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. However, there is nothing to prevent us from assuming that after the descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost day the Blessed Virgin Mary possessed the threefold gift of prophecy, tongues, and miracles in a measure corresponding to her eminent position in the primitive Church.^[28]

β) The “fulness of grace” enjoyed by our Blessed Mother was not complete and perfect at the outset, but developed gradually, reaching its climax at the moment of her death.

Unlike her Divine Son,^[29] Mary advanced in grace and virtue. Catholic theologians distinguish three stages in her spiritual development. The first of these comprises her infancy up to the time when she conceived our Divine Lord. The second coincides with the period from the conception of Christ to her death. The third is the term of her everlasting beatitude in Heaven.^[30] It should be noted, however, that St. Thomas erred in representing the perfectio sanctificationis (perfection of sanctification) characteristic of the first stage as liberatio a culpa originali (liberation from original guilt); it must be defined as praeservatio a culpa originali (preservation from original guilt), as we shall demonstrate further on.

Some few theologians hold that Mary attained to perfection of grace at the end of the first stage, i.e., when she conceived her Divine Son. But this theory entails an inadmissible corollary, namely, that she received no increase of sanctifying grace after the Incarnation, neither ex opere operato (from the work performed), as during the descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost day, nor ex opere operantis (from the work of the doer), e.g, by the merits of her virtuous life. Who would admit such an incongruity? The honor of our Lady is not enhanced by untrue, unprovable, and questionable asseverations, no matter how well-intentioned the zeal of those who put them forth. She is so very great and holy that there is no need of exaggerating the graces with which she was endowed.

3. THE NAME “MARY.”—To derive the dogma etymologically from the name “Mary” is a rather difficult undertaking, as the root-meaning of the word remains doubtful.

The word “Mary” (מִרְיָם, Aramaic מַרְיַם, Septuagint Μαριάμ) is genuinely Hebraic. The first woman who bore it in Bible history is the sister of Moses. Lauth’s attempt to derive the word from the Egyptian has proved a failure. The Aramaic etymon signifies “Lady” (Domina, from מָרְא, Lord). According to the various Hebrew words that have been assigned as its root, the word may have any one of a variety of meanings. First, illuminatrix (φωτίζουσα from מָאו֗ר, light-bearer). Then, the stubborn, refractory one (from מָרָה, to be stubborn). It is not likely that a father would give his new-born daughter either of these fantastic names. As regards the other proposed derivations, myrrh (myrrha, μύῤῥα; Heb. מו֗ר), which is both ancient and popular, will hardly be displaced by Bardenhewer’s^[31] more recent and rather prosaic interpretation of the corpulent one (from מָרָא, to fatten).^[32] Akin to this derivation is an older but nobler one, i.e., the strong, the tall. The final syllable iam is usually treated as the suffix characteristic of Hebrew adjectives and abstract nouns, though some interpret it substantively and explain Miriam to mean the bitter sea (mare amarum, πικρὰ θάλασσα, from מַר, bitter, and יָם, sea) or a drop of the sea, (stilla maris, from מַר, drop, and יָס, sea).^[33] On purely linguistic grounds “Mary” may also be derived from Marjam, i.e., the bitter, or, figuratively, the sorrowful one (amara, afflicta).

Since the etymological derivation of the name is, and most likely will always remain doubtful, its typical and historic interpretation deserves all the more attention. “Mirjam [i.e. the sister of Moses as a type of the mother of God] was the Israelite; Mary — as the anti-thesis between herself and Eve shows — is the Christian. Mirjam was par excellence ‘she who had been healed’ [of leprosy] in the Old Testament, an earnest of God’s fidelity in keeping His promises; Mary is preeminently ‘she who has been redeemed,’ the token of salvation. As a member of the human race, a child of Adam, Mary, like the rest of us, had need of being redeemed. Had not our Lord in a most unique manner become her Redeemer, she too would have been overwhelmed by the bitter flood of original sin. . . . But as the old Testament Mirjam was preeminently the one who had been healed, so the New Testament Mary is preeminently the one who has been endowed with grace. It is for this reason that the Angel reassured her [Luke 1:30]: ‘ Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace (χάριν) with God.’”^[34]

CHAPTER II
MARY’S DIGNITY AS MOTHER OF GOD AND THE
GRACES ATTACHED TO HER DIVINE MOTHERHOOD

Like the Hypostatic Union of the two Natures in Christ, the Divine Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary may be regarded from a twofold point of view: (1) ontologically, i.e., in its objective dignity (dignitas maternitatis divinae in se); and (2) ethically, in its causal connexion with the prerogatives proper to this exalted office (plenitudo gratiae correspondens dignitati). Christology shows how the Hypostatic Union immediately and substantially sanctified the manhood of our Lord in direct proportion to His infinite dignity as Godman.^[1]  In a similar though not precisely the same manner Mary’s objective dignity as mother of God constitutes both the intrinsic principle and the extrinsic standard of her supernatural purity and holiness. The one postulates the other as a cause its effect.

SECTION 1
The Objective Dignity Of Mary’s Divine Motherhood

Scheeben^[2] lucidly demonstrates the unique dignity of Mary’s Divine Motherhood by pointing out, (1) that it confers upon her a rank vastly superior to that of any other creature; (2) that it constitutes her the very centre of the hierarchy of rational creatures, and (3) that it makes her an intermediary between God and the universe.

1. The Transcendent Rank of Mary as Mother of God.—The Blessed Virgin Mary, as Mother of God, ranks high above all other creatures; in fact she is in a category all her own, inasmuch as she embodies the most perfect type of created personality, just as the manhood of our Lord Jesus Christ represents the most perfect type of human nature.

a) As mother of the Divine Logos, Mary stands in a unique relation to the Second Person of the Trinity. The Logos is the true Son both of His Heavenly Father and of His earthly mother. This double consubstantiality (ὁμοουσία), based upon His twofold birth, is strongly emphasized in the ancient creeds and conciliar definitions.

The so-called Athanasian Creed^[3] teaches: “For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man: God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man, of the substance of His mother, born into the world.”^[4] And the Fifth Council of Constantinople (A. D. 553) defines: “If any one do not confess that the Word of God has two births, the one before the worlds from the Father, out of time and incorporeally, and the other . . . from the holy and glorious Deipara and ever Virgin Mary, … let him be anathema.”^[5]

The dignity of Mary’s maternal relation to the Second Person of the Trinity cannot be adequately expressed in human terms. The Fathers try to explain it by applying to her certain passages of the Psalms,^[6] wherein the beauties of the Ark of the Covenant, the Temple of Solomon, and the great City of Zion are described in exalted terms. In fact they regard the Ark of Noah, the Ark of the Covenant, the Golden Bowl, etc., as types of the Blessed Virgin.^[7]

b) Mary’s Divine Motherhood entails an altogether unique relation to the First Person of the Trinity. She can claim one and the same Son with God the Father, not, of course in the heathen sense, as god and goddess, but in the Christian sense, as the Divine Father and a human mother. This miraculous relationship on the part of Mary may be technically described as her daughterhood. It forms the theological counterpart of her motherhood and is a prerogative peculiar to Our Lady, resulting in a special kind of adoption. God the Father cannot but look with unalloyed pleasure upon the mother of His Divine Son. She is His adopted daughter (filia adoptiva), who excels all His other adopted children by right of primogeniture.

On this prerogative are based Mary’s sublime titles of “Lady” (Domina, κυρία) and “Queen” (regina βασίλεια). St. John of Damascus observes that “in becoming the mother of the Creator she became the mistress of all His creatures.”^[8] To emphasize this aspect of her dignity some Fathers and medieval theologians apply to Mary, though not of course in a strict sense, certain epithets ascribed to the sapientia ingenita by the Sapiential Books^[9] of the Old Testament. The Church has incorporated a number of these into her liturgy.^[10]

c) Mary’s relationship extends also to the Holy Ghost, because He is the product of the joint spiration of the Father and the Son.^[11] In this capacity she has been aptly compared to a spouse,—an analogy adumbrated by the Apostles’ Creed when it says that Christ “was conceived by the Holy Ghost.” This appropriation excludes the cooperation of a human male and represents the fruit of Mary’s womb as a supernatural product.^[12]

Catholic theologians and the Church in her liturgy illustrate this sublime relation between the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Ghost by quotations from the Canticle of Canticles. The “Spouse” is sometimes explained to be Mary, sometimes the Church, and sometimes the human soul.^[13]

Thus we have seen that Mary is the mother of the Divine Logos, the daughter of God the Father, and the spouse of the Holy Ghost. What mortal mind can form an adequate conception of this threefold dignity? Need we wonder that some ecclesiastical writers exalt it as ineffable and compare it with the inscrutability of the Almighty Himself? Thus Bishop Basil of Seleucia (d. about 459) says in one of his sermons: “As it is impossible to conceive and utter God, so the stupendous mystery of the mother of God transcends every intellect and tongue.”^[14]

This sublime dignity is not a quality, but a relation, and as such may be termed infinite; for infinitude, applied to dignity, does not involve infinity of person. Albertus Magnus teaches: “The Son endows with infinity the goodness of His mother; if the fruit is infinitely good, the tree too must in a sense possess some infinite goodness.”^[15] And his great pupil St. Thomas Aquinas says: “From the fact that she is the Mother of God, the Blessed Virgin has a certain infinite dignity, derived from the infinite Good who is God, and on this account there cannot be anything better, just as there cannot be anything better than God.”^[16]

Our Lady’s infinite dignity must not, however, be conceived as separable from her character as God’s favorite daughter with its claim to a corresponding measure of grace and glory. Without this character the dignity of divine motherhood would remain in a sense imperfect. It was for this reason no doubt that our Divine Lord answered the woman who exclaimed: “Blessed is the womb that bore thee,” by saying: “Yea, rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.”^[17]

2. MARY’S RELATION TO HER FELLOW-CREATURES.—The Blessed Virgin Mary is the most eminent member of the human family. With the sole exception of her Divine Son, (“the first-born of every creature,” with whom, of course, she cannot be compared either from this or any other point of view), she is undoubtedly the loveliest flower that ever bloomed on the tree of humanity, and we are perfectly justified in addressing her as “Mystic Rose” and “Spiritual Lily.” We show a still profounder conception of her dignity and mission when we venerate her as the human organ specially chosen by the Holy Ghost for the miracle of the Incarnation, whereby she became a most precious “Spiritual Vessel,” for, as we pray in the Ave Maria: “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

How are we to define Mary’s relationship to her fellow-creatures ?

She is not, of course, the “head” of the human race. That dignity belongs solely to Jesus Christ, the “second Adam,” who restored our lost innocence. Mary gave birth to her own spiritual and supernatural head in the person of Christ. Her unique position in the mystic body of the Church has been likened to that of the “neck,”^[18] but she is perhaps more appropriately compared to the heart, which of all the bodily organs most perfectly reflects the energy of the head and most effectively sustains its vital functions.^[19] Thus Mary’s Divine Motherhood takes on the character and functions of a spiritual motherhood in relation to all men, especially those who are living members of the body of Christ. As St. Augustine beautifully says: “[She is] spiritually the mother not indeed of our Head, i.e., the Saviour Himself, from whom rather she is spiritually born … but [the spiritual mother] of His members, i.e., ourselves, because she cooperated in love towards the birth of faithful [Christians] in the Church who are the members of that Head; bodily she is truly the mother of that Head.”^[20] Some of the Fathers describe Mary’s mystic relation to the human race by referring to her as a root (radix) or vine (vitis), — two analogies which, of course, in an infinitely higher sense apply to our Lord Himself.

3. MARY AS AN INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN GOD AND THE WORLD. — Like her Divine Son, though not in the same sense, Mary is an intermediary between God and His creatures. , Christ’s mediatorship is based on the Hypostatic Union of the two Natures in one Person; that of the Blessed Virgin depends entirely on her Divine Motherhood. Hers is therefore a participated and secondary mediatorship (mediatio participata s. secundaria), which derives its essence and effectiveness solely from the grace of Christ; furthermore, it is not an end in itself, but merely a means to an end.

Many Fathers and theologians compare the mediatorship of Mary to the ladder which Jacob beheld in his dream, “standing upon the earth, and the top thereof touching heaven.”^[21] She is the ladder by which the Son of God descended from, and by which men ascend to heaven.^[22] Other favorite Patristic metaphors are a ring (annulus) and a bridge (pons) restoring the lost connection of mankind with God. St. Proclus (+466) combined all these similes in an enthusiastic eulogy. “Mary, I say, maiden and mother, virgin and heaven, the singular bridge between God and men, the astonishing weaver’s beam of humanity, on which in an ineffable manner was woven the garment of that [Hypostatic] Union, the Holy Ghost Himself being the weaver, the connecting thread the power from above, the wool that ancient fleece of Adam, the woof the immaculate flesh taken from the Virgin, the shuttle the immeasurable grace of the bearer, the artist the Logos, entering through her hearing.”^[23]

The objection that these prerogatives are not all expressly enumerated in Holy Scripture is met partly by reference to certain Old Testament texts and types, and partly by the statement that the dignity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is sufficiently indicated in the pregnant passage: “From her was born Jesus, who is called the Christ.”^[24]

I just watched the following video

And then I checked to see what all of this is about and found a link from Catholic Answers Forums regarding the matter. The link on the forum post takes you to the World Youth Day site where they singled out Real Catholic TV in such a way as to make you think that

A) They do not present authentic Catholic teaching and
B) That they promote disunity

The article doesn’t say that. Instead, what it says is the following

“Participants were selected for Cultural program by the World Youth Day organization in close collaboration with the Pontifical Council for the Laity. Those groups participating in the World Youth Day 2011 Cultural Festival have been selected because, through their various activities, they promote the authentic teaching and unity of the Roman Catholic Church and have been endorsed by their local Bishop and Espiscopal conference. Michael Voris, “Real Catholic TV” and “No Bull in Madrid” did not receive such endorsement from their Bishop or Episcopal Conference.

Michael Voris, “Real Catholic TV” and the program “No Bull in Madrid” are not accredited to or recognized by World Youth Day 2011.”

Maybe I’m misreading this but it looks like a cleverly crafted statement which leaves the reader with the suggestion that Real Catholic TV does not “promote the authentic teaching and unity of the Roman Catholic Church.”

In all of the time since Real Catholic TV started I have never, ever seen them promote anything other than authentic Catholic teaching. As for unity, some teaching, authentic Catholic teaching, isn’t entirely unifying. If it were unifying there would not be large groups of Catholics (usually those who don’t attend Mass or support the Bishops or WYD in any meaningful way) dissenting from official Catholic teaching on matters of faith, the role of the priest, women priests, abortion, birth control and so on. The official Church teachings, which Real Catholic TV absolutely supports, stand opposed to these dissenters and by themselves are only unifying as long as the people accept them.

If the people who wrote that article did not intend to vilify the producers of Real Catholic TV then they should have pointed out that they did not intend to suggest in any way that Real Catholic TV does not promote authentic Catholic teaching, because that’s how it comes across.

INTRODUCTION

Mariology is that part of Dogmatic Theology which treats of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of our Divine Redeemer.

Mariology is closely related to both Christology^[1] and Soteriology.^[2] Mary is truly Deipara because Christ is truly Godman. As His mother she is the mother of our Redeemer, and thus intimately bound up with the atonement.

The chief prerogative of the Blessed Virgin is her divine motherhood. From it flow all her other prerogatives. Hence Mariology naturally falls into two main divisions:  (1) The divine motherhood of Mary considered as the source of all her prerogatives, and (2) These prerogatives considered in themselves.

PART I
MARY’S DIVINE MOTHERHOOD AS THE SOURCE OF ALL HER PREROGATIVES

The Blessed Virgin Mary is really and truly the Mother of God. This fact is the source and font of all her privileges. The dignity of divine motherhood has its correlative in a series of supernatural gifts, which by a general term we may describe as “fulness of grace” (plenitudo gratiae).

CHAPTER I
MARY THE MOTHER OF GOD

1. THE HERESY OF NESTORIANISM.—The Ebionites, Photinus, and Paul of Samosata had undermined the dignity of Mary by attacking the Divinity of Jesus Christ; Nestorianism directly assailed the dogma of her divine motherhood.

a) Nestorius was a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia,^[3]  who held that the incarnation involved a complete transformation of the Logos, and that, consequently, Mary was the mother not of God (Theotokos, θεοτόκος), but of a mere man, though this man was the bearer of the Divine Logos.^[4] This Mariological error naturally developed into the Christological heresy that there are two physical persons in Christ.

b) The Third Ecumenical Council, which met in Ephesus on Whitsunday, 431, under the presidency of St. Cyril of Alexandria,^[5] defined it as an article of faith that Mary is really and truly the mother of God. To emphasize this truth the Council employed the dogmatic term θεοτόκος, which was destined to become a touchstone of the true faith and, like ὁμοούσιος, transsubstantiatio, and ex opere operato, played an important part in the history of dogma.

The very first of the anathematisms pronounced by the Council of Ephesus reads: “If any one does not profess that Emmanuel is truly God, and that consequently the Holy Virgin is the Mother of God—inasmuch as she gave birth in the flesh to the Word of God made flesh, according to what is written: ‘The Word was made flesh’—let him be anathema.”^[6] This important definition was reiterated and confirmed by several later councils, notably those of Chalcedon (A. D. 451) and Constantinople (A. D. 553).^[7]

2. THE DOGMA OF MARY’S DIVINE MOTHERHOOD PROVED FROM SACRED SCRIPTURE.—The dogma that Mary is the mother of God is clearly and explicitly contained in Holy Scripture.

a) True, the Bible does not employ the formal term “Mother of God,” but refers to the Blessed Virgin merely as “the mother of Jesus”^[8]  or at most as “mother of the Lord.”^[9] However, since Jesus Christ is true God, all texts that refer to Mary as His mother are so many proofs of her divine maternity. And such texts abound. Thus, while Sacred Scripture represents St. Joseph^[10]merely as the foster-father of our Lord,^[11] it attributes to Mary all the ordinary functions of motherhood—conception, gestation, and parturition.^[12] The motherhood of the Virgin had been foretold by Isaiah: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel [i. e., God with us].”^[13] The fulfilment of this prophecy was announced in almost identical terms by the Archangel Gabriel. Luke 1:31: “Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb,^[14] and shalt bring forth a son,^[15] and thou shalt call his name Jesus;” and the heavenly messenger expressly added: “Therefore the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”^[16] Since Mary gave birth to the Son of God, she is really and truly the mother of God. St. Paul says in his Epistle to the Galatians 4:4: “When the fulness of time was come, God sent his son, made of a woman.”^[17] If the man Jesus, “made of a woman,” is the Son of God, then that “woman” must be the mother of a Divine Son, and, consequently, mother of God.^[18]

b) The argument from Tradition is most effectively presented by showing from the writings of the Fathers who flourished before the time of Nestorius that Nestorianism and not the Council of Ephesus was guilty of innovation.

α) The primitive Christian belief in the divine motherhood of Mary is evidenced by certain pious practices common at a time when the faithful had hardly yet begun to make their faith the subject of reflection. Such practices were: the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, which was also the early form of baptism, and the liturgical prayers employed in public worship. The Apostles’ Creed professes faith in “Jesus Christ, His [God the Father's] only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.” This is an unequivocal assertion of two truths:  (1) that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the mother of Christ, and (2) that she is really and truly the mother of God. The ancient liturgies expressly refer to her as θεοτόκος or Deipara.^[19]

β) There is direct Patristic evidence to the same effect.

In spite of a few dissenting voices (e. g., Theodore of Mopsuestia and other teachers of the Antiochene school), the orthodox contemporaries of Nestorius confidently appealed to the early Fathers in support of their contention.

The word θεοτόκος itself originated at Alexandria in the third century.^[20]

St. Cyril freely admits that it does not occur in the New Testament. But he hastens to add: “However, they have handed down to us the belief [itself], and in this sense we have been instructed by the holy Fathers [= sacred writers].”^[21] —”This name θεοτόκος,” he says in another place, “was perfectly familiar to the ancient Fathers.”^[22]

There is a treatise “On the Mother of God”^[23] mentioned in the extracts of Philippus Sidetes,^[24] and ascribed by him to Prierius, a priest of Alexandria in the time of Bishop Theonas (281-300); but its authenticity is doubtful. We know for certain, however, that, at about the same time, Bishop Alexander of Alexandria, who had ordained St. Athanasius to the diaconate in 319, employed the term θεοτόκος in a letter addressed to Alexander of Constantinople in reference to the heresy of Arius. We also have the undoubtedly genuine testimony of Theodoret of Cyrus, the most violent and at the same time most learned opponent of St. Cyril, to the effect that “The first step towards innovation was the assertion that the holy Virgin, who, by the assumption of flesh from herself, gave birth to the Word of God, must not be called mother of God (θεοτόκος), but only mother of Christ (χριοτοτόκος), whereas the most ancient heralds of the orthodox faith taught the faithful to name and believe the Mother of the Lord θεοτόκος, according to the Apostolic tradition.”^[25]

John, Patriarch of Antioch, who sided with Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus and did not make peace with St. Cyril till 433, observes: “No ecclesiastical teacher has put aside this title [θεοτόκος]; those who have used it are many and eminent, and those who have not used it have not attacked those who used it.”^[26]

This statement can be easily substantiated from the writings of St. Athanasius, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, St. Ignatius of Antioch, and others of the early Fathers. Thus St. Athanasius (+373) says: “We confess that the Son of God became man by the assumption of flesh from the virgin mother of God.”^[27] St. Gregory Nazianzen declares: “Let him who will not accept Mary as the mother of God be excluded from God.”^[28]

The word θεοτόκος must have readily suggested itself to the later Fathers when they noted such expressions as this in the Epistle of St. Ignatius to the Ephesians: “Our God Jesus Christ was borne (ἐκυοφορήθη) by Mary in her maternal womb.”^[29]

It is not necessary for our present purpose to cite the Fathers who wrote after the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus. The teaching of the Greek Fathers was sifted with Scholastic thoroughness by St. John of Damascus in the third part of his famous “Fountain of Wisdom.”^[30]

3. THEOLOGICAL DISCUSSION.—For a deeper understanding of the dogma let us consider in what motherhood essentially consists, and how Christ’s eternal γέννησις (“genesis”: begottenness) from the Father is related to His temporal birth from the Virgin Mary.

a) Nestorius’ chief objection grew out of a radically false idea of motherhood. He contended that Mary could not have been the mother of God because this would necessarily entail the pagan fallacy that God begot a divine son from a human mother, or that a human mother endowed her son with a divine nature. This inference is based on a misconception of the Hypostatic Union and of the nature of generation. To become truly the mother of God it was not necessary for Mary to communicate to her Son a divine nature. All that was required was that the Son whom she conceived and brought forth, was the Divine Person of the Logos. Every mother, when she gives birth to a child, brings forth a person, not merely the body of a person. In the case of the Blessed Virgin Mary this person was the Son of God. Hence, though Mary did not bring forth the Godhead as such, but merely a Divine Person, she is truly the Mother of God. The fact that she conceived and gave birth to the body but not to the spiritual soul of her son in no way derogates from her motherhood. “No one will say of Elizabeth,” observes St. Cyril to Nestorius, “that she is the mother of St. John’s flesh, but not of his soul; for she gave birth to the person of the Baptist, i.e. a human being composed of body and soul.”^[31]

Mary not only gave birth to the Divine Logos, she also conceived Him. If it could be shown that she conceived a mere man, even though this man was subsequently, before his birth, transformed into a Godman, Nestorius would have been justified in denying her the title of θεοτόκος, for in that hypothesis she would indeed have been a mere άνθρωποτόκος, since motherhood is founded on the act of conception. It was with a view to safeguard the dogma of the Hypostatic Union that the Church dogmatically defined the temporal coincidence of Christ’s conception with the Hypostatic Union.^[32]

The conception of Christ includes three simultaneous events: (1) the formation of His human body from the maternal ovum; (2) the creation and infusion into that body of a spiritual soul; and (3) the Hypostatic Union of body and soul, per modum unius, with the Divine Person of the Logos. When Mary said: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to thy word,”^[33] the mystery of the Incarnation was consummated.

From the fact that these three events occurred simultaneously, the medieval Scholastics concluded that our Lord’s body was informed by the spiritual soul from the first moment of its existence, and that it was at once complete and perfectly organized.^[34] The last-mentioned of these conclusions was based on the false Aristotelian theory that the human embryo is at first inanimate and becomes quickened by the spiritual soul only after it has reached a certain stage of physiological development,— a process which in the male was believed to require forty, in the female, sixty days from the instant of conception. As this principle was manifestly inapplicable to Christ, the Scholastics had recourse to a miracle and simply denied the existence of successive stages in the embryological evolution of the Godman.

It is more in conformity with modern science to assume that the spiritual soul informs the human embryo from the moment of conception and gradually builds up the body and its organs, until the child becomes normally capable of living outside the uterus. Applying this theory to Christ, we hold that Christ’s spiritual soul was infused into the inchoate embryo at the moment of His conception. This is but another way of saying that the sacred humanity of our Divine Lord was subject to the ordinary laws of human development, and that He became like unto us in all things except sin.^[35]

The objection that a being composed of a spiritual soul and an incomplete body would not be a true man, may be dismissed with the remark that such a being falls squarely under the philosophical definition of animal rationale.

If we except Christ from the general law of nature and postulate unnecessary miracles, we divest the motherhood of the Blessed Virgin of its true meaning and teach a refined Docetism. For the gradual development of a child under the influence of the plastic powers of nature constitutes one of the essential notes of maternity.

b) As there are two natures in Christ, a distinction must be made between His eternal generation from the Father and His temporal birth from the Virgin Mother. This basic dogma of Christology^[36] necessarily entails a twofold son-ship. By His eternal γέγγησις from the Father, Jesus is the true Son of God; by His temporal birth from the Virgin He is the true Son of Mary. Being one undivided person, the Son of God is therefore absolutely identical with the child of the Virgin, and Mary is consequently in very truth the mother of God. It follows that the dogma of Christ’s twofold sonship does not involve the Nestorian and Adoptionist implication that there are two Sons of God.

Theologians have raised the question whether the relation between Christ’s Divine Sonship and the motherhood of Mary is real or merely logical.^[37]

Christ’s relation as a man to His human mother is no doubt as real as Mary’s relation to her Divine Son. Christ’s relation as Son of God or Logos to His human mother, on the other hand, is purely logical, because, as a self-existing and absolutely independent Being, God cannot stand in any real relation to a creature. Hence St. Thomas teaches: “From the temporal birth there arises no real, but only a logical sonship, though Christ is really the Son of the Virgin. God is really the Lord of His creatures, despite the fact that His dominion over them is no real relation. He is called Lord in a real sense, because of the real power which He exercises. Similarly Christ is in a real sense the Son of the Virgin, because of His real birth from her.”^[38]

Rite of Ordination

My intention here is not to argue for or against the validity of Anglican holy orders. It’s to show this information in the context of the discussion as it exists between sedevacantists and the Catholic Church in Communion with the Bishop of Rome, His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI.

Sedevacantists and others claim that there is a deficiency in the Rite of Ordination of “Novus Ordo” or “Vatican II” priests and bishops. They claim that the current Rite is the same as the Anglican Rite, and that it is therefore invalid. They claim that bishops are not ordained to be bishops and that priests are not ordained to offer Sacrifice. The following links will take you to the relevant documents so that you can see for yourself whether there is some deficiency in the current Rite of Ordination in the Catholic Church.

First things first. Here’s the text of Apostolicae Curae

The Edwardian or Edwardine Ordinal from 1549 and 1552. This page at CCEL (Christian Classics Ethereal Library – a Calvinist website) shows us the Edwardian Ordinal that was deemed to be invalid, or null and void, in the document “Apostolicae Curae” issued by Pope Leo XIII.

The prayer of consecration of an Anglican priest is here
RECEIVE the holy goste, whose synnes thou doest forgeve, they are forgeven: and whose sinnes thou doest retaine, thei are retained: and be thou a faithful despensor of the word of god, and of his holy Sacramentes. In the name of the father, and of the sonne, and of the holy gost. Amen.

The Ordinal of 1662. – This Rite of Ordination for Anglican priests included an addition line in the Prayer of Consecration which states that the person being ordained is being ordained to the priesthood, as understood by the Anglican Communion. Apostolicae Curae made the point that even with this addition, which indicates that the Anglicans perceived a deficiency in the Edwardian Rite, there are still problems. Those problems are 1) that more than 100 years had passed and that all of the priests and bishops alive at that point had been ordained under an invalid rite, thereby leaving the Anglican Communion without an episcopacy… and 2) that the validity is contingent upon what is intended when ordaining someone to the priesthood, suggesting that there is a deficiency in the Anglican understanding of the priesthood which is more than adequate to make the ordination null.If you click “Next” at the bottom of the page it will take you to the ordination of bishops.

The updated prayer from 1662 follows:

Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the Imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful Dispenser of the Word of God, and of his holy Sacraments; In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Catholic Rites – On this page there are links to the Rite of Ordination for bishop and priest. You will see them if you scroll down. When you read these you will notice that in the ordination of a priest he is ordained to offer sacrifice, and he is ordained to the office of priest, and the bishop is ordained to the office of bishop. These roles are defined in several Catholic documents and the priests and bishops are ordained according to the intent of the Catholic Church, but since the criticism is thrown against the post Vatican II Church I think it’s best to let a document from Vatican II speak on the subject of the priesthood. Below is one example, among many in the Vatican II documents, that tells us who a Catholic priest is, and a brief explanation of the Sacrifice of the Mass which is what the quote below presents.

For the order of the priesthood we read …

To accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, not only in the person of His minister, “the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross” (20), but especially under the eucharistic species. By His power He is present in the sacraments, so that when a man baptizes it is really Christ Himself who baptizes (21). He is present in His word, since it is He Himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church. He is present, lastly, when the Church prays and sings, for He promised: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20) . Sacrosanctum Concilium.CH. I . Part I. Paragraph 7.

The priest in the Catholic Church does offer the Sacrifice of the Mass. The Bishop is ordained to the office of bishop. You can search the Vatican II documents yourself at this website.