Why Did It Take So Long For The Catholic Church To Officially Define The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception Of The Blessed Virgin Mary?
Oct 12, 2018 17:01:48 #
04/04/18 Why did it take so long for the Catholic Church to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary? (Part 1)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
Part 1: How the Church comes to a decision about officially defining a doctrine or dogma
In debates between Protestants and Catholics about Church doctrine and dogma, the Marian dogmas often come up.
The question I’ve heard asked the most is “If the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are true, and the Church has always believed in them and taught them, how come it took thousands of years to officially pronounce them as dogmas?
It’s a fair question.
The Church has always believed these dogmas, but for various reasons, which I’ll explain in depth later in this article, it had no need to define them.
But the lack of an official pronouncement from the Church on something doesn’t necessarily mean the Church does or doesn’t believe in something.
Protestants will also point to various heretics throughout history who didn’t believe in these dogmas, but that argument is a nonstarter because heretics are no longer members of the Church since they’ve rejected one or more of her dogmas or doctrines.
One has to remember that the Church is made up of people, and people err and go astray.
All that matters is that the Church as a whole teaches these things infallibly, and it only does so when the Pope, either alone or together with the entire Magisterium, makes an official statement on a matter of faith and morals.
So, why did the Church wait so long to define the Marian dogmas?
For the same reason it took centuries to create the canon of the Bible and define the dogma of the Trinity at the First Council of Constantinople:
There was a debate over them, and clarification was needed, which can only be done by putting the beliefs in writing and making them official.
It was the Church saying “we’re making these teachings crystal clear and publicly settling this debate once and for all”.
The Church already collectively believed what the Church defined, it just wasn’t in writing yet.
Does that mean the early Christians didn’t believe in the Trinity til the year 381?
No. The Church defined it then to clarify the doctrine so that all lay Catholics could understand it, and to correct the heretics who were attempting to discredit it at that time.
It was the same with the Marian doctrines later on.
These are complicated teachings-mysteries, in fact, and for most of history the average person wasn’t educated, so he or she didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand them to the degree we do today.
All faithful Catholics still believed these teachings of the Church to the best of their abilities, but at times throughout history, certain prominent people, the best examples being Arius and Luther, would create confusion among the faithful by teaching something that was antithetical to Catholic doctrine.
That’s when the Church has decided that a certain belief must be properly defined.
Until then, there was simply no reason to do so, since most Catholics believed these things and had no reason to doubt them because all of the Church leaders taught them.
All one has to do is read the writings of the early Church Fathers, and even some historians to find out that this is what the Church always believed and taught.
a. www.catholicbridge.com/catholic/mary_in_the_early_church.php
b. www.catholiceducation.org/en/religion-and-philosophy/apologetics/why-catholics-believe-in-the-immaculate-conception.html
As I mentioned above, it took centuries for the official canon of the Bible to be created, but Protestants conveniently don’t have a problem with the development of that, so it seems the development of a dogma over time isn’t the issue here, just the development of these dogmas.
The early Church was busy dealing with philosophers and heretics both inside and outside the Church who were spreading false teachings about Jesus’s divinity, the Incarnation, etc, so it had to focus on those things first.
After all, all Marian doctrines are Christocentric in nature, so it would only make sense that the Church made sure it got its doctrines on Jesus and the Trinity right first.
The Church has always taught that there’s a hierarchy when it comes to its dogma, which reflects the hierarchy of grace that has existed from all eternity in God’s mind.
The Trinity is at the top of the hierarchy, followed by Jesus and His human and divine nature.
Mary is one step below that since she’s part of the created order of things and isn’t divine, as Jesus is.
Beyond that, there was much debate within the early Church about what Original Sin was.
Since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception teaches that Mary was conceived without Original Sin, the debate over that had to be resolved first.
It took centuries for that to happen, but it finally was in the 14th century when a brilliant Franciscan priest and theologian named Blessed John Duns Scotus clarified what Original Sin was.
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?
https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya2.htm
Once he did that, he was able to logically and theologically prove in an original way that Mary was conceived without it. Ironically enough, Martin Luther himself believed in the Immaculate Conception.
So Protestants are very selective when it comes to the evidence they use to justify believing or not believing a certain dogma.
They point to some people in the early Church who believed in this dogma, just not exactly the way we do today (again, because of their lack of knowledge of science and a misunderstanding of original sin), but then ignore the fact that the founder of their own religion believed in it.
One way to think of the sources of revelation for Catholics is as a three legged stool.
Instead of the Bible alone, we have these three things that guide us:
1. The Bible
2. The Church (Pope and Magisterium) and
3. Sacred Tradition (what was passed down orally by the apostles and their successors).
Lay Catholics also have a role in the development of doctrine and dogma because through the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit, they believe the truths that have been passed down to them from previous generations of Catholics, even ones that haven’t been officially defined, as was the case with the Marian dogmas.
When deciding on whether or not to define a dogma, the Church can and has looked to what the lay members of the Church already believe, and how they pray and worship with respect to those specific dogmas.
It doesn’t make the decision solely based on the beliefs of the majority of the faithful because that would be nothing more than a democracy, but it’s one factor among many the Church takes into account.
This collective belief in a dogma or doctrine of the faith by the lay members of the Church is known as the “sensus fidelium”.
a. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedia...
b. https://www.churchmilitant.com/catholicism/article
It’s Latin for “sense of the faithful”, and it simply is referring to what the masses of lay Catholics believe in their hearts about a certain subject or issue, but which hasn’t been officially defined by the Church yet.
When the Church realizes that most Catholics believe something, and it thinks that belief needs to be defined, it uses that belief of the masses as part of the justification for the official definition.
The reason for this is that the Holy Spirit guides not just the Church leaders and the Pope, but the Body of Christ collectively, over time, since it resides in the hearts of the faithful and would never lead them astray.
If Jesus founded a Church to guide the faithful on Earth after His ascension, it would only make sense that He would ensure that Church could be relied upon to teach correct doctrines and dogmas and lead people to Him, otherwise it would be worthless.
In fact it would be worse than worthless, it would be leading people to Hell. So He did this by sending the Holy Spirit to Peter, the first pope, and the apostles, and then to every subsequent pope to give them the gift of infallibility on all matters of faith and morals.
Jesus had to make sure that His Church, which He loves as a spotless bride, would be inerrant, and He’s done so through the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Pope, Magisterium, and all faithful lay Catholics. www.biblehub.com/ephesians/5-27.htm
Therefore, when there’s a consensus among Catholics about a belief, that’s an indication that it’s a true belief since it wouldn’t have been reached without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which the Pope and Magisterium take as a sign that it can be declared an official doctrine or dogma of the Church.
It was already being taught by the Church both currently at the time in question and in the past, just not officially, and that teaching caused a majority of Catholics to believe it.
Jesus says that we must become like children to enter Heaven. He also says in Matthew 11:25, “I praise you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”.
I think this verse undergirds the concept of the sensus fidelium.
The Holy Spirit in its infinite wisdom enabled all lay Catholics who were open to it to believe in the Marian doctrines, and all other doctrines and dogmas.
They just couldn’t understand and articulate it the way theologians and doctors of the Church could.
When controversies and/or debates arose around these doctrines and dogmas, the Church could look to that groundswell of support among the faithful as evidence of their truthfulness.
(End Part 1)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
Part 1: How the Church comes to a decision about officially defining a doctrine or dogma
In debates between Protestants and Catholics about Church doctrine and dogma, the Marian dogmas often come up.
The question I’ve heard asked the most is “If the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are true, and the Church has always believed in them and taught them, how come it took thousands of years to officially pronounce them as dogmas?
It’s a fair question.
The Church has always believed these dogmas, but for various reasons, which I’ll explain in depth later in this article, it had no need to define them.
But the lack of an official pronouncement from the Church on something doesn’t necessarily mean the Church does or doesn’t believe in something.
Protestants will also point to various heretics throughout history who didn’t believe in these dogmas, but that argument is a nonstarter because heretics are no longer members of the Church since they’ve rejected one or more of her dogmas or doctrines.
One has to remember that the Church is made up of people, and people err and go astray.
All that matters is that the Church as a whole teaches these things infallibly, and it only does so when the Pope, either alone or together with the entire Magisterium, makes an official statement on a matter of faith and morals.
So, why did the Church wait so long to define the Marian dogmas?
For the same reason it took centuries to create the canon of the Bible and define the dogma of the Trinity at the First Council of Constantinople:
There was a debate over them, and clarification was needed, which can only be done by putting the beliefs in writing and making them official.
It was the Church saying “we’re making these teachings crystal clear and publicly settling this debate once and for all”.
The Church already collectively believed what the Church defined, it just wasn’t in writing yet.
Does that mean the early Christians didn’t believe in the Trinity til the year 381?
No. The Church defined it then to clarify the doctrine so that all lay Catholics could understand it, and to correct the heretics who were attempting to discredit it at that time.
It was the same with the Marian doctrines later on.
These are complicated teachings-mysteries, in fact, and for most of history the average person wasn’t educated, so he or she didn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand them to the degree we do today.
All faithful Catholics still believed these teachings of the Church to the best of their abilities, but at times throughout history, certain prominent people, the best examples being Arius and Luther, would create confusion among the faithful by teaching something that was antithetical to Catholic doctrine.
That’s when the Church has decided that a certain belief must be properly defined.
Until then, there was simply no reason to do so, since most Catholics believed these things and had no reason to doubt them because all of the Church leaders taught them.
All one has to do is read the writings of the early Church Fathers, and even some historians to find out that this is what the Church always believed and taught.
a. www.catholicbridge.com/catholic/mary_in_the_early_church.php
b. www.catholiceducation.org/en/religion-and-philosophy/apologetics/why-catholics-believe-in-the-immaculate-conception.html
As I mentioned above, it took centuries for the official canon of the Bible to be created, but Protestants conveniently don’t have a problem with the development of that, so it seems the development of a dogma over time isn’t the issue here, just the development of these dogmas.
The early Church was busy dealing with philosophers and heretics both inside and outside the Church who were spreading false teachings about Jesus’s divinity, the Incarnation, etc, so it had to focus on those things first.
After all, all Marian doctrines are Christocentric in nature, so it would only make sense that the Church made sure it got its doctrines on Jesus and the Trinity right first.
The Church has always taught that there’s a hierarchy when it comes to its dogma, which reflects the hierarchy of grace that has existed from all eternity in God’s mind.
The Trinity is at the top of the hierarchy, followed by Jesus and His human and divine nature.
Mary is one step below that since she’s part of the created order of things and isn’t divine, as Jesus is.
Beyond that, there was much debate within the early Church about what Original Sin was.
Since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception teaches that Mary was conceived without Original Sin, the debate over that had to be resolved first.
It took centuries for that to happen, but it finally was in the 14th century when a brilliant Franciscan priest and theologian named Blessed John Duns Scotus clarified what Original Sin was.
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?
https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya2.htm
Once he did that, he was able to logically and theologically prove in an original way that Mary was conceived without it. Ironically enough, Martin Luther himself believed in the Immaculate Conception.
So Protestants are very selective when it comes to the evidence they use to justify believing or not believing a certain dogma.
They point to some people in the early Church who believed in this dogma, just not exactly the way we do today (again, because of their lack of knowledge of science and a misunderstanding of original sin), but then ignore the fact that the founder of their own religion believed in it.
One way to think of the sources of revelation for Catholics is as a three legged stool.
Instead of the Bible alone, we have these three things that guide us:
1. The Bible
2. The Church (Pope and Magisterium) and
3. Sacred Tradition (what was passed down orally by the apostles and their successors).
Lay Catholics also have a role in the development of doctrine and dogma because through the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit, they believe the truths that have been passed down to them from previous generations of Catholics, even ones that haven’t been officially defined, as was the case with the Marian dogmas.
When deciding on whether or not to define a dogma, the Church can and has looked to what the lay members of the Church already believe, and how they pray and worship with respect to those specific dogmas.
It doesn’t make the decision solely based on the beliefs of the majority of the faithful because that would be nothing more than a democracy, but it’s one factor among many the Church takes into account.
This collective belief in a dogma or doctrine of the faith by the lay members of the Church is known as the “sensus fidelium”.
a. https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedia...
b. https://www.churchmilitant.com/catholicism/article
It’s Latin for “sense of the faithful”, and it simply is referring to what the masses of lay Catholics believe in their hearts about a certain subject or issue, but which hasn’t been officially defined by the Church yet.
When the Church realizes that most Catholics believe something, and it thinks that belief needs to be defined, it uses that belief of the masses as part of the justification for the official definition.
The reason for this is that the Holy Spirit guides not just the Church leaders and the Pope, but the Body of Christ collectively, over time, since it resides in the hearts of the faithful and would never lead them astray.
If Jesus founded a Church to guide the faithful on Earth after His ascension, it would only make sense that He would ensure that Church could be relied upon to teach correct doctrines and dogmas and lead people to Him, otherwise it would be worthless.
In fact it would be worse than worthless, it would be leading people to Hell. So He did this by sending the Holy Spirit to Peter, the first pope, and the apostles, and then to every subsequent pope to give them the gift of infallibility on all matters of faith and morals.
Jesus had to make sure that His Church, which He loves as a spotless bride, would be inerrant, and He’s done so through the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Pope, Magisterium, and all faithful lay Catholics. www.biblehub.com/ephesians/5-27.htm
Therefore, when there’s a consensus among Catholics about a belief, that’s an indication that it’s a true belief since it wouldn’t have been reached without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, which the Pope and Magisterium take as a sign that it can be declared an official doctrine or dogma of the Church.
It was already being taught by the Church both currently at the time in question and in the past, just not officially, and that teaching caused a majority of Catholics to believe it.
Jesus says that we must become like children to enter Heaven. He also says in Matthew 11:25, “I praise you, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children”.
I think this verse undergirds the concept of the sensus fidelium.
The Holy Spirit in its infinite wisdom enabled all lay Catholics who were open to it to believe in the Marian doctrines, and all other doctrines and dogmas.
They just couldn’t understand and articulate it the way theologians and doctors of the Church could.
When controversies and/or debates arose around these doctrines and dogmas, the Church could look to that groundswell of support among the faithful as evidence of their truthfulness.
(End Part 1)
Oct 12, 2018 17:05:56 #
04/04/18 Why did it take so long for the Catholic Church to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary? (Part 2)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
Part 2: The theological origins and rationale of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception:
This dogma first became controversial when theologians in the 13th century rejected the idea that Mary was conceived without sin on the basis that Mary was a creature just like the rest of us, therefore she would’ve had to inherit Original Sin in order for Jesus’s death to merit her salvation.
It should be noted, however, that they still believed she was born without sin, because they believed that it was sometime between conception and birth that God created a person’s soul and placed it in their body.
Back then, they believed that the soul wasn’t created at conception, as we now believe it is, but rather at “the quickening”, which happened at the third month of pregnancy when the baby started moving in the mother’s womb.
They believed that since Original Sin was transmitted through the body, which began to be formed at conception, then that’s also when every human being contracted Original Sin, including Mary.
Thus she couldn’t have been preserved from Original Sin because if God sanctified her soul with an abundance of grace, it would’ve happened after she contracted Original Sin since the body was infused with the soul at some point after conception.
Or so the argument went.
The other main argument these theologians made was that if Mary was born without Original Sin, then she wouldn’t have needed a redeemer, since there was nothing to redeem.
That would’ve made her different than all other humans in that regard, which seemed to contradict Romans 3: 23, which says :
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.
Blessed John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan priest and theologian I mentioned earlier, who was known as “The Subtle Doctor” for his profound theological insights, answered every objection these theologians made.
He masterfully answered both of these objections in one fell swoop.
He said Mary needed a redeemer even more than the rest of us because she was the person God chose to bring His Son into the world.
Therefore, she needed to be spotless from both actual sin and the effects of Original Sin in order to bear the perfect Redeemer Himself into the world.
The theologians’ argument was based on a human understanding of how God works.
They tried to imagine God’s redemptive action through human eyes rather than through God’s eyes.
Scotus showed them that because God exists outside of time and space, He wasn’t confined to those restraints when it came to redeeming Mary.
He saw from before time began that she needed to be free of Original Sin, so He applied the grace of His Son’s future death to her soul as soon as it was created.
She was redeemed just like the rest of us, just preservatively redeemed.
Before I go on to explain Scotus’s defense of this dogma in more depth, I want to point out that this was no easy task, because he was in the minority at the time at the University of Paris, and was asked by his superiors there to publicly defend the statements he was making in defense of his idea of the Immaculate Conception.
So he prepared as much as possible, and the day of the defense, a miracle happened:
www.ewtn.com/library/mary/scotus.htm
“When the fixed day of the dispute arrived, on leaving the convent, he passed before a statue of Our Lady and with suppliant voice entreated her:
“Allow me to praise You, O Most Holy Virgin; give me strength against your enemies.”
Our Lady responded with a prodigious visible sign: the head of the statue moved and bowed slightly before him.
It was as if to say: “Yes I will give you all the strength you need.””
This wasn’t a one time event either:
During the night of Christmas, 1299 at the Oxford Convent, Bl. John, immersed in his contemplation of the adorable mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, was rapt in ecstasy.
The Blessed Mother appeared to him and placed on his arms the Child Jesus who kissed and embraced him fondly.
This was perhaps the occasion which inspired Bl. John to write so profoundly and fluently on the absolute primacy of Christ and the reason for the Incarnation.
Christ’s Incarnation, which is decreed from all eternity even apart from the Redemption, is the supreme created manifestation of God’s love.
I wanted to set these miracles as the backdrop for the intellectual and theological arguments Scotus made in defense of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in order to make it clear that as with all Church teaching, God’s hand was behind it all the way.
Scotus didn’t just come up with the doctrine of the primacy of Christ on his own, but instead, through his close relationships with God and Mary, discovered these profound truths with their help. It was God who used Blessed John Duns Scotus to reveal these truths about Himself and His Mother to mankind, not the other way around.
That being said, Scotus wasn’t the first Doctor of the Church to defend this dogma, although he was the first to do so in revolutionary way. St Augustine defended Mary’s Immaculate Conception by using a metaphor of a man falling into a pit, which I’ll paraphrase here:
Suppose a man falls into a deep pit, and someone reaches down to pull him out.
That man has been “saved” from the pit.
Now imagine a woman walking along, and she too is about to trip and fall into a pit she never sees, but at the very moment she’s about to fall in, someone holds her back and prevents her from falling in.
She too has been saved from the pit, but in an even better way:
She was not simply taken out of the pit, she was prevented from getting stained by the mud in the first place.
This is the illustration Christians had used for a thousand years to explain how Mary was redeemed and saved by Christ.
By receiving Christ’s grace at her conception, she had His grace applied to her before she was able to become mired in Original Sin and its stain.
Why should we be surprised by this?
If she was to bear God Himself in her womb, then would God allow Himself to come into contact with an imperfect being?
God is perfect, which means He does everything in a perfect way.
The birth of His own Son was no different.
We know from many verses in the Old Testament that imperfect beings can’t be in God’s presence and live, so how much more so would this be true of a woman who not only was in His presence, but carried Him in her body?
The early Church Fathers wrote about how Mary was not only the New Eve, but the new Ark of the Covenant.
We know from the Old Testament that the Ark contained God’s presence, and couldn’t be touched unless it was by the sons of Kohath, who were ordained by God for that role, and who were made clean first.
In fact, we’re told that a man named Uzzah touched the Ark simply to make sure it didn’t fall off of the cart it was on, and he was immediately struck dead because he was unclean.
If he couldn’t even touch the Ark, which only contained some of God’s presence, how on Earth could Mary contain God’s own Son within her, unless she was pure and sinless?
www.shamelesspopery.com/mary-the-ark-of-the-new-covenant/
Blessed John Duns Scotus argued that since Jesus is perfect, that means He had to be a perfect mediator between God and man for at least one person.
But He couldn’t mediate grace perfectly between Himself and any ordinary person directly because such a person is sinful, and their sins get in the way.
That one person had to be the person who brought Him into the world to fulfill His mission to redeem us and become one of us, thus uniting humanity to God by elevating it to the highest possible level through the Incarnation.
Since Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces, she had to be the one person through whom Jesus made a perfect mediation for all sin for all of mankind,
That’s why Catholic traditions has always portrayed Mary as the New Eve, or the spiritual mother of all mankind.
She was sinless, and thus there was no impediment to God’s grace flowing through her and making the union of God and man possible in the Incarnation.
Another reason the dogma of the Immaculate Conception became controversial in the Church is because in the 13th century, St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to a group of churches in England, telling them to stop celebrating the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
(Part 2)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
Part 2: The theological origins and rationale of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception:
This dogma first became controversial when theologians in the 13th century rejected the idea that Mary was conceived without sin on the basis that Mary was a creature just like the rest of us, therefore she would’ve had to inherit Original Sin in order for Jesus’s death to merit her salvation.
It should be noted, however, that they still believed she was born without sin, because they believed that it was sometime between conception and birth that God created a person’s soul and placed it in their body.
Back then, they believed that the soul wasn’t created at conception, as we now believe it is, but rather at “the quickening”, which happened at the third month of pregnancy when the baby started moving in the mother’s womb.
They believed that since Original Sin was transmitted through the body, which began to be formed at conception, then that’s also when every human being contracted Original Sin, including Mary.
Thus she couldn’t have been preserved from Original Sin because if God sanctified her soul with an abundance of grace, it would’ve happened after she contracted Original Sin since the body was infused with the soul at some point after conception.
Or so the argument went.
The other main argument these theologians made was that if Mary was born without Original Sin, then she wouldn’t have needed a redeemer, since there was nothing to redeem.
That would’ve made her different than all other humans in that regard, which seemed to contradict Romans 3: 23, which says :
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.
Blessed John Duns Scotus, the Franciscan priest and theologian I mentioned earlier, who was known as “The Subtle Doctor” for his profound theological insights, answered every objection these theologians made.
He masterfully answered both of these objections in one fell swoop.
He said Mary needed a redeemer even more than the rest of us because she was the person God chose to bring His Son into the world.
Therefore, she needed to be spotless from both actual sin and the effects of Original Sin in order to bear the perfect Redeemer Himself into the world.
The theologians’ argument was based on a human understanding of how God works.
They tried to imagine God’s redemptive action through human eyes rather than through God’s eyes.
Scotus showed them that because God exists outside of time and space, He wasn’t confined to those restraints when it came to redeeming Mary.
He saw from before time began that she needed to be free of Original Sin, so He applied the grace of His Son’s future death to her soul as soon as it was created.
She was redeemed just like the rest of us, just preservatively redeemed.
Before I go on to explain Scotus’s defense of this dogma in more depth, I want to point out that this was no easy task, because he was in the minority at the time at the University of Paris, and was asked by his superiors there to publicly defend the statements he was making in defense of his idea of the Immaculate Conception.
So he prepared as much as possible, and the day of the defense, a miracle happened:
www.ewtn.com/library/mary/scotus.htm
“When the fixed day of the dispute arrived, on leaving the convent, he passed before a statue of Our Lady and with suppliant voice entreated her:
“Allow me to praise You, O Most Holy Virgin; give me strength against your enemies.”
Our Lady responded with a prodigious visible sign: the head of the statue moved and bowed slightly before him.
It was as if to say: “Yes I will give you all the strength you need.””
This wasn’t a one time event either:
During the night of Christmas, 1299 at the Oxford Convent, Bl. John, immersed in his contemplation of the adorable mystery of the Incarnation of the Word, was rapt in ecstasy.
The Blessed Mother appeared to him and placed on his arms the Child Jesus who kissed and embraced him fondly.
This was perhaps the occasion which inspired Bl. John to write so profoundly and fluently on the absolute primacy of Christ and the reason for the Incarnation.
Christ’s Incarnation, which is decreed from all eternity even apart from the Redemption, is the supreme created manifestation of God’s love.
I wanted to set these miracles as the backdrop for the intellectual and theological arguments Scotus made in defense of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in order to make it clear that as with all Church teaching, God’s hand was behind it all the way.
Scotus didn’t just come up with the doctrine of the primacy of Christ on his own, but instead, through his close relationships with God and Mary, discovered these profound truths with their help. It was God who used Blessed John Duns Scotus to reveal these truths about Himself and His Mother to mankind, not the other way around.
That being said, Scotus wasn’t the first Doctor of the Church to defend this dogma, although he was the first to do so in revolutionary way. St Augustine defended Mary’s Immaculate Conception by using a metaphor of a man falling into a pit, which I’ll paraphrase here:
Suppose a man falls into a deep pit, and someone reaches down to pull him out.
That man has been “saved” from the pit.
Now imagine a woman walking along, and she too is about to trip and fall into a pit she never sees, but at the very moment she’s about to fall in, someone holds her back and prevents her from falling in.
She too has been saved from the pit, but in an even better way:
She was not simply taken out of the pit, she was prevented from getting stained by the mud in the first place.
This is the illustration Christians had used for a thousand years to explain how Mary was redeemed and saved by Christ.
By receiving Christ’s grace at her conception, she had His grace applied to her before she was able to become mired in Original Sin and its stain.
Why should we be surprised by this?
If she was to bear God Himself in her womb, then would God allow Himself to come into contact with an imperfect being?
God is perfect, which means He does everything in a perfect way.
The birth of His own Son was no different.
We know from many verses in the Old Testament that imperfect beings can’t be in God’s presence and live, so how much more so would this be true of a woman who not only was in His presence, but carried Him in her body?
The early Church Fathers wrote about how Mary was not only the New Eve, but the new Ark of the Covenant.
We know from the Old Testament that the Ark contained God’s presence, and couldn’t be touched unless it was by the sons of Kohath, who were ordained by God for that role, and who were made clean first.
In fact, we’re told that a man named Uzzah touched the Ark simply to make sure it didn’t fall off of the cart it was on, and he was immediately struck dead because he was unclean.
If he couldn’t even touch the Ark, which only contained some of God’s presence, how on Earth could Mary contain God’s own Son within her, unless she was pure and sinless?
www.shamelesspopery.com/mary-the-ark-of-the-new-covenant/
Blessed John Duns Scotus argued that since Jesus is perfect, that means He had to be a perfect mediator between God and man for at least one person.
But He couldn’t mediate grace perfectly between Himself and any ordinary person directly because such a person is sinful, and their sins get in the way.
That one person had to be the person who brought Him into the world to fulfill His mission to redeem us and become one of us, thus uniting humanity to God by elevating it to the highest possible level through the Incarnation.
Since Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces, she had to be the one person through whom Jesus made a perfect mediation for all sin for all of mankind,
That’s why Catholic traditions has always portrayed Mary as the New Eve, or the spiritual mother of all mankind.
She was sinless, and thus there was no impediment to God’s grace flowing through her and making the union of God and man possible in the Incarnation.
Another reason the dogma of the Immaculate Conception became controversial in the Church is because in the 13th century, St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to a group of churches in England, telling them to stop celebrating the feast of the Immaculate Conception.
(Part 2)
Oct 12, 2018 17:07:13 #
04/04/18 Why did it take so long for the Catholic Church to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary? (Part 3)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
His primary objection to it was the following:
He believed what most theologians throughout history, including ones like Sts Augustine and Thomas Aquinas believed about Original Sin, which is that it was transmitted from Eve to her offspring and from mother to child since then.
They also believed that the soul was united with the body much later in pregnancy, as opposed to at conception, as I previously mentioned.
If these theologians understood that life begins at conception, as we do now, they most likely wouldn’t have had any issues with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. I
t was only because they separated conception from the beginning of human life that they were confused about how Mary could’ve been conceived without sin.
Blessed John Duns Scotus made this confusion irrelevant by completely sidestepping that debate and showing that Mary could’ve been preservatively redeemed, or pre-redeemed by Jesus so that He never let Original Sin touch her body or soul.
By this logic, it didn’t matter when her soul and body were united, since neither would’ve contracted the stain of sin.
But Scotus went far beyond this argument.
He not only showed how St Thomas Aquinas and St Bernard’s concept of Original Sin was wrong, but went on to completely redefine the concept. Original Sin isn’t transmitted by an infected body transmitting it to an infected soul.
Rather, it’s a privation of sanctifying grace to the soul from God at the moment of conception.
In other words, Original Sin isn’t like a virus that’s been passed down from one generation to the next to infect each new human’s soul. It was a one time event that caused God to subsequently create each human without sanctifying grace when He infuses their soul into their body at the moment of conception.
This is because Adam and Eve had original justice, and by sinning, they required God, in His infinite justice, to take away the gift of sanctifying grace from the rest of us.
The Church has always described it as something that Adam and Eve passed down to us as their legacy, but that’s just because it’s easier to understand that way.
In reality, it’s simply God punishing all of mankind for Adam and Eve’s sin by not giving us the grace they had when they were perfect in the garden before the fall.
That might seem unfair, but it’s not, because Adam and Eve represented us and could’ve chosen to obey God, but didn’t. That’s why Jesus died on the Cross for us, to remove the guilt from that sin for us, which is manifested in Baptism when the Holy Spirit imparts God’s sanctifying grace to our souls.
But we still were deprived of that perfect grace at birth, and thus still suffer from the effects
www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson5.htm
(see question 259 and the following questions in this link) that deprivation caused to our human natures.
Technically, we don’t inherit Original Sin, we inherit the effects of it, which is the deprivation of grace at birth and the effects that deprivation causes to our minds and bodies (concupiscence, darkening of understanding, having a weak will, etc).
Once Scotus showed what the true nature of Original Sin was, he could then show how easy it would be for Mary to be born without it.
There was no “it” to begin with, since it was a deprivation of a good thing rather than the transmission of a bad thing.
Thus, Mary wasn’t infected with Original Sin because there was nothing to be infected with.
Instead, Mary was infused with a super-abundance of grace at the moment of her conception, unlike the rest of mankind, because she was the one whom God chose to give birth to His Son, and there could be no defects in a vessel that bore a perfect being.
It would’ve been like a vase that had holes in it and then was filled with water. Our sins are like the holes in our bodies, which are supposed to be vessels of the Holy Spirit.
Such a defective vessel couldn’t have contained the water and thus couldn’t serve the purpose God created it to serve in the first place.
That’s why the angel Gabriel called her “Full of Grace”.
He could’ve said “Hail, woman of grace”, but he said “full of grace” to indicate that she received an abundance of grace at her conception that was the same abundance of grace that God gave Adam and Eve when they were perfectly created.
Indeed, Mary owes Jesus more than we do, because she was given more unearned grace than us and redeemed in a more exalted fashion than us.
That’s why she’s always pointing us to Him.
She wouldn’t dare try to steal any of His glory because she knows she owes Him more than any other human does.
The core of Blessed John Duns Scotus’s defense of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was his radical new understanding of the purpose of the Incarnation.
Up til then, most theologians taught that the primary reason God sent His only Son to Earth to become one of us was because Adam and Eve sinned.
This was the anthropocentric view of the Incarnation that great doctors of the Church like St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas taught.
It’s an orthodox view, and is theologically correct. But Scotus taught that there’s another view that explains the Incarnation in an even deeper and more accurate way.
That’s the Christocentric view.
This view holds that God had planned on sending His son to the Earth to become man all along, regardless of what Adam and Eve chose to do in the garden.
This is because He knew all along they’d sin.
That’s why He allowed the enemy to tempt them in the garden.
He anticipated their sin, because He knew it would lead to their need to be redeemed by His Son.
But more importantly, He knew it would lead to Jesus’ birth and the creation of His human and divine natures, which were united in what is known as the hypostatic union.
In other words, Christ came to redeem man from his sin, but that wasn’t the primary reason He came.
The primary reason He came was to unite us with Himself and thus elevate our imperfect humanity to His divinity.
As St Athanasius said, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God”.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/are-we-gods
God allowed us to fall because He knew that by doing so, He could give us, and thus Himself greater glory.
So instead of the Incarnation being the result of creation’s fall, it’s the other way around.
The creation of Adam and Eve was God’s preparation for the coming of His Son. This doctrine is known as the primacy of Christ in creation.
I’ve written several longer articles about this doctrine in depth so I don’t want to add much more to that here, since it’s not the main purpose of this article.
a. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/the-doctrine-of-the-primacy-of-christ-in-creation-unlocks-all-of-the-secrets-in-the-bible-c5a4780336d4
b. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/how-understanding-the-primacy-of-christ-in-gods-creation-illuminated-the-bible-for-me-4580a529ef48
However, it is necessary to at least briefly explain it and why it serves as the cornerstone of Scotus’s brilliant argument in defense of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
It can be summed up this way:
‘God always existed, and so there was no moment when He decided to create us.
We always existed in His mind, as I’ve written about here and here.
a. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/my-eureka-moment-about-the-holy-trinity-3f398b6bfd68
b. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/a-better-understanding-of-the-trinity-93f4924931fc
All of creation is a product of His infinite love, which couldn’t be contained within Himself, but overflowed into the creation of the universe, which resulted in the creation of time and space.
St Thomas Aquinas wrote about how there was an order of creation in God’s mind based on His divine will and intention.
If we study the Bible closely enough, we can see that it shows that Jesus’s human nature was the first thing God intended to create because it was the only thing that perfectly reflected Himself.
Thus, His Incarnation was the center of creation, and everything else in the created world revolved around it.
www.absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/rom-829/
Everything that was created before Jesus’s human nature pointed the way to Him and was preparing the world for His birth.
Mary was second in the hierarchy of God’s creation because she was human and thus one step below Jesus, but sinless, and thus one step above all other humans.
(End Part 3)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
His primary objection to it was the following:
He believed what most theologians throughout history, including ones like Sts Augustine and Thomas Aquinas believed about Original Sin, which is that it was transmitted from Eve to her offspring and from mother to child since then.
They also believed that the soul was united with the body much later in pregnancy, as opposed to at conception, as I previously mentioned.
If these theologians understood that life begins at conception, as we do now, they most likely wouldn’t have had any issues with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. I
t was only because they separated conception from the beginning of human life that they were confused about how Mary could’ve been conceived without sin.
Blessed John Duns Scotus made this confusion irrelevant by completely sidestepping that debate and showing that Mary could’ve been preservatively redeemed, or pre-redeemed by Jesus so that He never let Original Sin touch her body or soul.
By this logic, it didn’t matter when her soul and body were united, since neither would’ve contracted the stain of sin.
But Scotus went far beyond this argument.
He not only showed how St Thomas Aquinas and St Bernard’s concept of Original Sin was wrong, but went on to completely redefine the concept. Original Sin isn’t transmitted by an infected body transmitting it to an infected soul.
Rather, it’s a privation of sanctifying grace to the soul from God at the moment of conception.
In other words, Original Sin isn’t like a virus that’s been passed down from one generation to the next to infect each new human’s soul. It was a one time event that caused God to subsequently create each human without sanctifying grace when He infuses their soul into their body at the moment of conception.
This is because Adam and Eve had original justice, and by sinning, they required God, in His infinite justice, to take away the gift of sanctifying grace from the rest of us.
The Church has always described it as something that Adam and Eve passed down to us as their legacy, but that’s just because it’s easier to understand that way.
In reality, it’s simply God punishing all of mankind for Adam and Eve’s sin by not giving us the grace they had when they were perfect in the garden before the fall.
That might seem unfair, but it’s not, because Adam and Eve represented us and could’ve chosen to obey God, but didn’t. That’s why Jesus died on the Cross for us, to remove the guilt from that sin for us, which is manifested in Baptism when the Holy Spirit imparts God’s sanctifying grace to our souls.
But we still were deprived of that perfect grace at birth, and thus still suffer from the effects
www.baltimore-catechism.com/lesson5.htm
(see question 259 and the following questions in this link) that deprivation caused to our human natures.
Technically, we don’t inherit Original Sin, we inherit the effects of it, which is the deprivation of grace at birth and the effects that deprivation causes to our minds and bodies (concupiscence, darkening of understanding, having a weak will, etc).
Once Scotus showed what the true nature of Original Sin was, he could then show how easy it would be for Mary to be born without it.
There was no “it” to begin with, since it was a deprivation of a good thing rather than the transmission of a bad thing.
Thus, Mary wasn’t infected with Original Sin because there was nothing to be infected with.
Instead, Mary was infused with a super-abundance of grace at the moment of her conception, unlike the rest of mankind, because she was the one whom God chose to give birth to His Son, and there could be no defects in a vessel that bore a perfect being.
It would’ve been like a vase that had holes in it and then was filled with water. Our sins are like the holes in our bodies, which are supposed to be vessels of the Holy Spirit.
Such a defective vessel couldn’t have contained the water and thus couldn’t serve the purpose God created it to serve in the first place.
That’s why the angel Gabriel called her “Full of Grace”.
He could’ve said “Hail, woman of grace”, but he said “full of grace” to indicate that she received an abundance of grace at her conception that was the same abundance of grace that God gave Adam and Eve when they were perfectly created.
Indeed, Mary owes Jesus more than we do, because she was given more unearned grace than us and redeemed in a more exalted fashion than us.
That’s why she’s always pointing us to Him.
She wouldn’t dare try to steal any of His glory because she knows she owes Him more than any other human does.
The core of Blessed John Duns Scotus’s defense of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was his radical new understanding of the purpose of the Incarnation.
Up til then, most theologians taught that the primary reason God sent His only Son to Earth to become one of us was because Adam and Eve sinned.
This was the anthropocentric view of the Incarnation that great doctors of the Church like St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas taught.
It’s an orthodox view, and is theologically correct. But Scotus taught that there’s another view that explains the Incarnation in an even deeper and more accurate way.
That’s the Christocentric view.
This view holds that God had planned on sending His son to the Earth to become man all along, regardless of what Adam and Eve chose to do in the garden.
This is because He knew all along they’d sin.
That’s why He allowed the enemy to tempt them in the garden.
He anticipated their sin, because He knew it would lead to their need to be redeemed by His Son.
But more importantly, He knew it would lead to Jesus’ birth and the creation of His human and divine natures, which were united in what is known as the hypostatic union.
In other words, Christ came to redeem man from his sin, but that wasn’t the primary reason He came.
The primary reason He came was to unite us with Himself and thus elevate our imperfect humanity to His divinity.
As St Athanasius said, “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God”.
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/are-we-gods
God allowed us to fall because He knew that by doing so, He could give us, and thus Himself greater glory.
So instead of the Incarnation being the result of creation’s fall, it’s the other way around.
The creation of Adam and Eve was God’s preparation for the coming of His Son. This doctrine is known as the primacy of Christ in creation.
I’ve written several longer articles about this doctrine in depth so I don’t want to add much more to that here, since it’s not the main purpose of this article.
a. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/the-doctrine-of-the-primacy-of-christ-in-creation-unlocks-all-of-the-secrets-in-the-bible-c5a4780336d4
b. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/how-understanding-the-primacy-of-christ-in-gods-creation-illuminated-the-bible-for-me-4580a529ef48
However, it is necessary to at least briefly explain it and why it serves as the cornerstone of Scotus’s brilliant argument in defense of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.
It can be summed up this way:
‘God always existed, and so there was no moment when He decided to create us.
We always existed in His mind, as I’ve written about here and here.
a. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/my-eureka-moment-about-the-holy-trinity-3f398b6bfd68
b. https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/a-better-understanding-of-the-trinity-93f4924931fc
All of creation is a product of His infinite love, which couldn’t be contained within Himself, but overflowed into the creation of the universe, which resulted in the creation of time and space.
St Thomas Aquinas wrote about how there was an order of creation in God’s mind based on His divine will and intention.
If we study the Bible closely enough, we can see that it shows that Jesus’s human nature was the first thing God intended to create because it was the only thing that perfectly reflected Himself.
Thus, His Incarnation was the center of creation, and everything else in the created world revolved around it.
www.absoluteprimacyofchrist.org/rom-829/
Everything that was created before Jesus’s human nature pointed the way to Him and was preparing the world for His birth.
Mary was second in the hierarchy of God’s creation because she was human and thus one step below Jesus, but sinless, and thus one step above all other humans.
(End Part 3)
Oct 12, 2018 17:09:16 #
04/04/18 Why did it take so long for the Catholic Church to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary? (Part 4)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
Once we understand this hierarchy of creation in God’s mind, we can then more easily understand the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
St Thomas Aquinas, and then Blessed John Duns Scotus referred to Aristotle to remind us that “What is first in intention is last in execution”.
Just as an architect creates a blueprint first, and then the construction crew builds the foundation of the building before building the pinnacle of it, so too did God design the Incarnation first and then created Adam and Eve to prepare the way for it.
But the means by which the Incarnation was made possible was Mary, and thus she had to be immaculate in the mind of God before she was even born in order to perfectly execute His plan of salvation.
I would like to address one last objection Protestants make to this dogma, and to our love of Mary in general.
They say she’s hardly mentioned in the Bible, and that should be seen as proof that God didn’t think too highly of her, certainly not highly enough to create her without original sin.
This is wrong for several reasons:
Mary’s sinless nature and perfect obedience to God are
throughout the Old Testament.
www.motherofallpeoples.com/2009/07/the-woman-of-the-promise-the-co-redemptrix-foreshadowed-in-the-old-testament/
If everything in the Old Testament was meant to point to Jesus, then it logically follows that there must be people and events in the Old Testament that also prefigure Mary, since Jesus’s birth wasn’t possible without her.
2. Just because someone isn’t talked about much, doesn’t mean they aren’t important.
St Joseph’s words aren’t recorded at all in the New Testament, and yet we know from private revelations and the writings of various saints that he also was made sinless by God, only after his conception, and that he has great glory in Heaven.
www.taylormarshall.com/2011/03/sinlessness-and-assumption-of-joseph.html
Also, when Mary is mentioned, she’s greeted in a way that signifies royalty, and later is inspired to say that “all generations shall call me blessed”.
The Holy Spirit wouldn’t have inspired her to say that if God wanted us to believe she was just an ordinary woman that God wanted nothing to do with after she bore His Son.
3. We know from Mary’s apparitions to various saints and mystics why much wasn’t written about her in the gospels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boZ4Eyq9WeM&t=1s
It was because she was perfectly humble and out of her overflowing love for her Son, asked God to keep her hidden so that Jesus could receive all of the glory He rightly deserved.
God honored this request of hers, with the intention that He would reveal her to mankind later in human history and give her a share in His glory that she deserved for living her life in perfect obedience to Him.
It was also because mankind was still fairly primitive, and the Jews and Gentiles alike had a very limited idea of who God was at that time.
If Mary’s full glory and the superabundance of graces God gave her were revealed then, people would’ve thought she was divine and worshiped her as part of the Trinity.
Indeed, some women, known as Collyridians, did do that in the early centuries, and they were condemned as heretics by the Church.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/COLLYRID.TXT
God had to allow the Church to uncover the truth He revealed about Himself through His Son first, so that the theological foundation could be built to prepare the way for Him to reveal the truth about His Mother to us later.
Part 3:
Why Pope Pius IX chose to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1854:
In this last section, I want to add some historical context to explain why the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was pronounced by Pope Pius IX at the time in history he pronounced it.
Some critics of the Church have said that Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 because he was trying to prove the truth of a dogma the Church made up.
Other critics have said he was doing it as a way to reestablish the authority of the papacy during a time of political upheaval when it was being challenged.
There’s some truth to this second criticism, but what these critics don’t understand is that Pope Pius IX used the dogma of the Immaculate Conception precisely to show the world that the papacy had the authority and guidance of the Holy Spirit behind it.
This didn’t prove that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was made up.
If anything, it proved the legitimacy of it, because the Pope wouldn’t have tied the authority and legitimacy of the papacy to a dogma that wasn’t believed to be true by the entire Church and without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We shouldn’t be focused on asking why a dogma is defined at a certain time, but on whether or not it’s true.
Either it’s true or it’s not, so the timing of it is of secondary importance.
We determine if any given doctrine or dogma is true by using our intellect and reasoning ability to uncover the truth behind the dogma as its been revealed through scripture, tradition, and private revelations from God and Mary.
But this can’t give us perfect certainty because we’re fallible and our reasoning abilities are limited.
That’s why Jesus gave us the Church, to be our infallible guide on these matters and take us the rest of the way to the fullness of truth as its been revealed to us by God.
Some Protestants think Pope Pius IX came up with the idea to make this proclamation completely on his own, but that’s simply not true.
There were many forces at work behind the scenes that influenced him to make this decision, God being the primary one.
In fact he wasn’t even sure sure about doing it, which is why he sent out a survey to all of the bishops of the Church asking them if he should make this dogma an official dogma of the Church.
They responded overwhelmingly in agreement that it should be made official.
The political climate of the time is key to understanding the factors Pope Pius IX had to take into account when making this decision.
First of all, he was already in exile because he was driven out of the Papal States by Freemasons and other revolutionaries whose goal was to destroy the papacy and replace it with a secular government.
This was at a time when Italian nationalism was in full force, as many Italians wanted to overthrow the Austrian government that ruled over them.
This was also taking place during the beginning of the naturalism movement, starting with the French Revolution and gaining steam with the publishing of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.
The Protestant Reformation along with these secular movements were causing many Catholics to leave the Church, or at least become skeptical of her divine authority.
The Reformation did this by claiming that the pope had no divine authority, and that anyone can learn the truth about God on his own just by picking up a Bible and reading it.
Naturalism, on the other hand, said that God doesn’t exist, and that the universe and everything in it is all there is.
Naturalists thus claim that there’s no such thing as objective or transcendent truth, and that everything in the universe can become known through the use of science and logic.
These were the new intellectual and cultural forces that were chipping away at the authority and legitimacy of the Church.
So the Church needed to reassert it’s authority and make it clear that it still contains the fullness of truth, and that it has the final say about what is true when it comes to faith and morals, not scientists or secular intellectuals.
God used this moment in time to do just that through the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which put things back into their proper order by claiming that Jesus’s Incarnation is the center of creation, and that it was made possible by Mary’s Immaculate Conception.
A cardinal who spent time with Pope Pius IX made this point to him, and was said to have influenced him to make the final decision:
“However, French historian and professor Louis Baunard said that while gazing upon the Mediterranean from the city, “the Pope mediated on remarks made to him by Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini:
Holy Father, you will not be able to heal the world unless you proclaim the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Only this dogmatic definition will reestablish the meaning of the Christian truths and bring minds back from the paths of naturalism upon which they have become lost.”
According to Guglietta, naturalism, which rejected all supernatural truth, could be considered the “backdrop” for the Pope’s proclamation of the dogma.
(End Part 4)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
Once we understand this hierarchy of creation in God’s mind, we can then more easily understand the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
St Thomas Aquinas, and then Blessed John Duns Scotus referred to Aristotle to remind us that “What is first in intention is last in execution”.
Just as an architect creates a blueprint first, and then the construction crew builds the foundation of the building before building the pinnacle of it, so too did God design the Incarnation first and then created Adam and Eve to prepare the way for it.
But the means by which the Incarnation was made possible was Mary, and thus she had to be immaculate in the mind of God before she was even born in order to perfectly execute His plan of salvation.
I would like to address one last objection Protestants make to this dogma, and to our love of Mary in general.
They say she’s hardly mentioned in the Bible, and that should be seen as proof that God didn’t think too highly of her, certainly not highly enough to create her without original sin.
This is wrong for several reasons:
Mary’s sinless nature and perfect obedience to God are
throughout the Old Testament.
www.motherofallpeoples.com/2009/07/the-woman-of-the-promise-the-co-redemptrix-foreshadowed-in-the-old-testament/
If everything in the Old Testament was meant to point to Jesus, then it logically follows that there must be people and events in the Old Testament that also prefigure Mary, since Jesus’s birth wasn’t possible without her.
2. Just because someone isn’t talked about much, doesn’t mean they aren’t important.
St Joseph’s words aren’t recorded at all in the New Testament, and yet we know from private revelations and the writings of various saints that he also was made sinless by God, only after his conception, and that he has great glory in Heaven.
www.taylormarshall.com/2011/03/sinlessness-and-assumption-of-joseph.html
Also, when Mary is mentioned, she’s greeted in a way that signifies royalty, and later is inspired to say that “all generations shall call me blessed”.
The Holy Spirit wouldn’t have inspired her to say that if God wanted us to believe she was just an ordinary woman that God wanted nothing to do with after she bore His Son.
3. We know from Mary’s apparitions to various saints and mystics why much wasn’t written about her in the gospels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boZ4Eyq9WeM&t=1s
It was because she was perfectly humble and out of her overflowing love for her Son, asked God to keep her hidden so that Jesus could receive all of the glory He rightly deserved.
God honored this request of hers, with the intention that He would reveal her to mankind later in human history and give her a share in His glory that she deserved for living her life in perfect obedience to Him.
It was also because mankind was still fairly primitive, and the Jews and Gentiles alike had a very limited idea of who God was at that time.
If Mary’s full glory and the superabundance of graces God gave her were revealed then, people would’ve thought she was divine and worshiped her as part of the Trinity.
Indeed, some women, known as Collyridians, did do that in the early centuries, and they were condemned as heretics by the Church.
https://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/COLLYRID.TXT
God had to allow the Church to uncover the truth He revealed about Himself through His Son first, so that the theological foundation could be built to prepare the way for Him to reveal the truth about His Mother to us later.
Part 3:
Why Pope Pius IX chose to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary in 1854:
In this last section, I want to add some historical context to explain why the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was pronounced by Pope Pius IX at the time in history he pronounced it.
Some critics of the Church have said that Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 because he was trying to prove the truth of a dogma the Church made up.
Other critics have said he was doing it as a way to reestablish the authority of the papacy during a time of political upheaval when it was being challenged.
There’s some truth to this second criticism, but what these critics don’t understand is that Pope Pius IX used the dogma of the Immaculate Conception precisely to show the world that the papacy had the authority and guidance of the Holy Spirit behind it.
This didn’t prove that the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was made up.
If anything, it proved the legitimacy of it, because the Pope wouldn’t have tied the authority and legitimacy of the papacy to a dogma that wasn’t believed to be true by the entire Church and without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We shouldn’t be focused on asking why a dogma is defined at a certain time, but on whether or not it’s true.
Either it’s true or it’s not, so the timing of it is of secondary importance.
We determine if any given doctrine or dogma is true by using our intellect and reasoning ability to uncover the truth behind the dogma as its been revealed through scripture, tradition, and private revelations from God and Mary.
But this can’t give us perfect certainty because we’re fallible and our reasoning abilities are limited.
That’s why Jesus gave us the Church, to be our infallible guide on these matters and take us the rest of the way to the fullness of truth as its been revealed to us by God.
Some Protestants think Pope Pius IX came up with the idea to make this proclamation completely on his own, but that’s simply not true.
There were many forces at work behind the scenes that influenced him to make this decision, God being the primary one.
In fact he wasn’t even sure sure about doing it, which is why he sent out a survey to all of the bishops of the Church asking them if he should make this dogma an official dogma of the Church.
They responded overwhelmingly in agreement that it should be made official.
The political climate of the time is key to understanding the factors Pope Pius IX had to take into account when making this decision.
First of all, he was already in exile because he was driven out of the Papal States by Freemasons and other revolutionaries whose goal was to destroy the papacy and replace it with a secular government.
This was at a time when Italian nationalism was in full force, as many Italians wanted to overthrow the Austrian government that ruled over them.
This was also taking place during the beginning of the naturalism movement, starting with the French Revolution and gaining steam with the publishing of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” in 1859.
The Protestant Reformation along with these secular movements were causing many Catholics to leave the Church, or at least become skeptical of her divine authority.
The Reformation did this by claiming that the pope had no divine authority, and that anyone can learn the truth about God on his own just by picking up a Bible and reading it.
Naturalism, on the other hand, said that God doesn’t exist, and that the universe and everything in it is all there is.
Naturalists thus claim that there’s no such thing as objective or transcendent truth, and that everything in the universe can become known through the use of science and logic.
These were the new intellectual and cultural forces that were chipping away at the authority and legitimacy of the Church.
So the Church needed to reassert it’s authority and make it clear that it still contains the fullness of truth, and that it has the final say about what is true when it comes to faith and morals, not scientists or secular intellectuals.
God used this moment in time to do just that through the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which put things back into their proper order by claiming that Jesus’s Incarnation is the center of creation, and that it was made possible by Mary’s Immaculate Conception.
A cardinal who spent time with Pope Pius IX made this point to him, and was said to have influenced him to make the final decision:
“However, French historian and professor Louis Baunard said that while gazing upon the Mediterranean from the city, “the Pope mediated on remarks made to him by Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini:
Holy Father, you will not be able to heal the world unless you proclaim the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Only this dogmatic definition will reestablish the meaning of the Christian truths and bring minds back from the paths of naturalism upon which they have become lost.”
According to Guglietta, naturalism, which rejected all supernatural truth, could be considered the “backdrop” for the Pope’s proclamation of the dogma.
(End Part 4)
Oct 12, 2018 17:10:34 #
04/04/18 Why did it take so long for the Catholic Church to officially define the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary? (Part 5)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
“The affirmation of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin laid a strong foundation for affirming and strengthening the certainty of the primacy of grace and the work of Providence in the lives of men.””
Furthermore, I don’t think it was a coincidence that less than a few decades later in 1870 at the First Vatican Council, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the definition of papal infallibility.
This dogma made it clear that when the pope makes an official statement about faith and morals Ex Cathedra, it is infallible, and thus can’t be changed, no matter what liberals inside or outside the Church believed about it.
As this lecture explains, it was clear that God’s invisible hand was all over the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception because it laid the foundation for Pope Pius IX to reassert the authority of the papacy.
It goes without saying that God wouldn’t use a dogma for this purpose if it wasn’t also true, since nothing that comes from God is false.
When Pope Pius IX had to flee the Vatican in 1848, Italian papers were saying it was the end of the Church and of the papacy.
Catholics around the world were in doubt about the role of the Church in the world, and whether or not they should still follow it.
As it turns out, not long after this proclamation was made, Pope Pius IX was able to return to the Vatican and take up his rightful place in the seat of Peter again.
It was as if God was using the honoring of His Mother to make it clear to the world that only the Catholic Church, through the power of the papacy, had the power to define what is truth and what isn’t, and that it’s through her alone that salvation can be found.
Likewise, in another miraculous event that couldn’t be coincidental, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous four years later on the Feast of the Annunciation in Lourdes, France, and declared to her “I am the Immaculate Conception”.
In fact, it was just a few decades earlier in 1930 that Mary appeared to St Catherine Laboure in a suburb of Paris and gave her the image of the Miraculous Medal, which is an image of her as the Immaculate Conception with the words “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee”.
This was a private revelation, but it had such an impact on the Church that Pope Pius IX gave it a papal statement of approval, which is rare, especially so soon after a revelation.
So we can see from these Marian apparitions that God used Mary to guide and then confirm the development of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
It was as if Jesus wanted to show the world that He wanted the Church to honor His Mother after allowing her to remain hidden for so long, and He was pleased when the Church followed the guidance of the Holy Spirit to do this.
I hope I’ve honored the Blessed Virgin Mary through this article by making it clear that there is much evidence from the Bible, tradition, and private revelation to support the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Likewise, there are many reasons why it took so long for this dogma to be developed.
If we look at it with the eyes of faith, we can clearly see that the timing of its development was part of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind.
We know that these latter years in human history are a time when God will let the enemy loose to wreak havoc on the world, so it would only make sense that God would also make His Mother more fully known to the world in order to crush that serpent’s head with her foot, as it says in Genesis.
God’s sons and daughters will need all the help we can get in our battle with the forces of evil, and Mary is willing and able to help us, as long as we turn to her for assistance.
She’ll guide us to her Son, and give us the graces we need to overcome all of the attacks and temptations of the enemy.
Rather than being a hindrance to our belief in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, it’s slow but steady development over many centuries reveals the order and infinite wisdom of God’s plan for the salvation of all people.
Just as we don’t expect God to reveal everything we need to know to become saints all at once in the earlier years of our lives, we shouldn’t have expected Him to reveal everything about His Mother in the infancy of human history, when mankind wouldn’t have been ready to understand it.
We can take comfort in knowing that like Mary, we might not receive much praise or glory in this life, but if we humble ourselves before God and spend our lives in simple obedience to His will, we’ll receive a reward in the next life that surpasses our understanding.
With the Blessed Virgin Mary as our model, we have to be perfectly willing to allow God to use us and reveal things in His time and in His way.
In order to do that, we need to ask God for the perfect faith, hope, and love that Mary had, because when you love God with all of your being, time no longer constrains you since you’re willing to wait an unlimited amount of time for God to do His will in and through you.
Let us be grateful for this dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which reminds us that there are no limits to what God can do with us if we give Him our “fiat.”
As Mary did, and unite our wills completely to His.
References for part 1:
Sensum fidelium
I found this wonderful article on SF by Father Bloom when I was debating the birth control issue before, and as I am…
www.mydomesticchurch.com
SENSUS FIDELIUM, WHAT IS IT? AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO THE CHURCH NOW?
WHAT IS THIS THING SENSUS FIDELIUM THAT I KEEP REFERRING TO ON THIS BLOG? Sensus fidelium From Wikipedia, the free…
abyssum.org
Library : John Duns Scotus: Champion of the Immaculate Conception
John Duns Scotus: Champion of the Immaculate Conception A Marianist brother explains the two theological breakthroughs…
www.catholicculture.org
http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/mary_in_the_early_church.php
https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya2.htm
http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/theology-and-candles-original-sin-and-immaculate-conception
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-VB4O4v-3k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyoorpS554U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-fbjUcSOE
http://taylormarshall.com/2012/12/was-there-marian-devotion-in-first.html
http://shamelesspopery.com/sub-tuum/
http://www.earlychristians.org/index.php/origins/item/678-the-devotion-to-the-virgin-mary-in-the-early-church/678-the-devotion-to-the-virgin-mary-in-the-early-church
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/06/the-quest-for-the-historical-mary
http://www.piercedhearts.org/hearts_jesus_mary/heart_mary/mary_early_church_miravalle.htm
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Immaculate Conception
In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December, 1854, Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary…
www.newadvent.org
References for part 2:
https://stpeterslist.com/4-biblical-reasons-mary-is-the-new-ark-of-the-covenant
http://shamelesspopery.com/mary-the-ark-of-the-new-covenant/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJsPEfcJ93c&t=3985s)
http://www.faith.org.uk/article/january-february-2008-the-primacy-of-christ-in-john-duns-scotus-an-assessment
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20100707.html
http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/marian/scotus&immac.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm
http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/mary_in_the_early_church.php
https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya2.htm
http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/theology-and-candles-original-sin-and-immaculate-conception
(End Part 5)
Chris Antenucci
https://medium.com/@chrisantenucci/why-did-it-take-so-long-for-the-catholic-church-to-officially-define-the-dogma-of-the-immaculate-d62859c9a65e
“The affirmation of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin laid a strong foundation for affirming and strengthening the certainty of the primacy of grace and the work of Providence in the lives of men.””
Furthermore, I don’t think it was a coincidence that less than a few decades later in 1870 at the First Vatican Council, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the definition of papal infallibility.
This dogma made it clear that when the pope makes an official statement about faith and morals Ex Cathedra, it is infallible, and thus can’t be changed, no matter what liberals inside or outside the Church believed about it.
As this lecture explains, it was clear that God’s invisible hand was all over the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception because it laid the foundation for Pope Pius IX to reassert the authority of the papacy.
It goes without saying that God wouldn’t use a dogma for this purpose if it wasn’t also true, since nothing that comes from God is false.
When Pope Pius IX had to flee the Vatican in 1848, Italian papers were saying it was the end of the Church and of the papacy.
Catholics around the world were in doubt about the role of the Church in the world, and whether or not they should still follow it.
As it turns out, not long after this proclamation was made, Pope Pius IX was able to return to the Vatican and take up his rightful place in the seat of Peter again.
It was as if God was using the honoring of His Mother to make it clear to the world that only the Catholic Church, through the power of the papacy, had the power to define what is truth and what isn’t, and that it’s through her alone that salvation can be found.
Likewise, in another miraculous event that couldn’t be coincidental, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette Soubirous four years later on the Feast of the Annunciation in Lourdes, France, and declared to her “I am the Immaculate Conception”.
In fact, it was just a few decades earlier in 1930 that Mary appeared to St Catherine Laboure in a suburb of Paris and gave her the image of the Miraculous Medal, which is an image of her as the Immaculate Conception with the words “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee”.
This was a private revelation, but it had such an impact on the Church that Pope Pius IX gave it a papal statement of approval, which is rare, especially so soon after a revelation.
So we can see from these Marian apparitions that God used Mary to guide and then confirm the development of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
It was as if Jesus wanted to show the world that He wanted the Church to honor His Mother after allowing her to remain hidden for so long, and He was pleased when the Church followed the guidance of the Holy Spirit to do this.
I hope I’ve honored the Blessed Virgin Mary through this article by making it clear that there is much evidence from the Bible, tradition, and private revelation to support the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Likewise, there are many reasons why it took so long for this dogma to be developed.
If we look at it with the eyes of faith, we can clearly see that the timing of its development was part of God’s plan for the salvation of mankind.
We know that these latter years in human history are a time when God will let the enemy loose to wreak havoc on the world, so it would only make sense that God would also make His Mother more fully known to the world in order to crush that serpent’s head with her foot, as it says in Genesis.
God’s sons and daughters will need all the help we can get in our battle with the forces of evil, and Mary is willing and able to help us, as long as we turn to her for assistance.
She’ll guide us to her Son, and give us the graces we need to overcome all of the attacks and temptations of the enemy.
Rather than being a hindrance to our belief in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, it’s slow but steady development over many centuries reveals the order and infinite wisdom of God’s plan for the salvation of all people.
Just as we don’t expect God to reveal everything we need to know to become saints all at once in the earlier years of our lives, we shouldn’t have expected Him to reveal everything about His Mother in the infancy of human history, when mankind wouldn’t have been ready to understand it.
We can take comfort in knowing that like Mary, we might not receive much praise or glory in this life, but if we humble ourselves before God and spend our lives in simple obedience to His will, we’ll receive a reward in the next life that surpasses our understanding.
With the Blessed Virgin Mary as our model, we have to be perfectly willing to allow God to use us and reveal things in His time and in His way.
In order to do that, we need to ask God for the perfect faith, hope, and love that Mary had, because when you love God with all of your being, time no longer constrains you since you’re willing to wait an unlimited amount of time for God to do His will in and through you.
Let us be grateful for this dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which reminds us that there are no limits to what God can do with us if we give Him our “fiat.”
As Mary did, and unite our wills completely to His.
References for part 1:
Sensum fidelium
I found this wonderful article on SF by Father Bloom when I was debating the birth control issue before, and as I am…
www.mydomesticchurch.com
SENSUS FIDELIUM, WHAT IS IT? AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO THE CHURCH NOW?
WHAT IS THIS THING SENSUS FIDELIUM THAT I KEEP REFERRING TO ON THIS BLOG? Sensus fidelium From Wikipedia, the free…
abyssum.org
Library : John Duns Scotus: Champion of the Immaculate Conception
John Duns Scotus: Champion of the Immaculate Conception A Marianist brother explains the two theological breakthroughs…
www.catholicculture.org
http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/mary_in_the_early_church.php
https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya2.htm
http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/theology-and-candles-original-sin-and-immaculate-conception
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-VB4O4v-3k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyoorpS554U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-fbjUcSOE
http://taylormarshall.com/2012/12/was-there-marian-devotion-in-first.html
http://shamelesspopery.com/sub-tuum/
http://www.earlychristians.org/index.php/origins/item/678-the-devotion-to-the-virgin-mary-in-the-early-church/678-the-devotion-to-the-virgin-mary-in-the-early-church
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/06/the-quest-for-the-historical-mary
http://www.piercedhearts.org/hearts_jesus_mary/heart_mary/mary_early_church_miravalle.htm
CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Immaculate Conception
In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December, 1854, Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary…
www.newadvent.org
References for part 2:
https://stpeterslist.com/4-biblical-reasons-mary-is-the-new-ark-of-the-covenant
http://shamelesspopery.com/mary-the-ark-of-the-new-covenant/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJsPEfcJ93c&t=3985s)
http://www.faith.org.uk/article/january-february-2008-the-primacy-of-christ-in-john-duns-scotus-an-assessment
http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/audiences/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20100707.html
http://www.christendom-awake.org/pages/marian/scotus&immac.htm
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07674d.htm
http://catholicbridge.com/catholic/mary_in_the_early_church.php
https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/marya2.htm
http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/theology-and-candles-original-sin-and-immaculate-conception
(End Part 5)
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