WHAT U NEED KNOW ON THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION Protestants and Catholics differ across a range of issues, but never more obviously than over the doctrine that the mother of Jesus was immaculately conceived, meaning that from her conception she was free from sin, from the stain of original sin (immaculate = without stain). This grace given to Mary is above all the premier example of the grace of meritless predestination . This absence of merit on Mary’s part is obviously though not merely a concession to the Protestant stress on sola gratia, it is required by the very meaning of the words immaculate and conception. Since this grace became operative at the very inception of her being and not by any merit of her own good work. But by Gods choice it had to come to her prior to any deeds she might later perform namely Motherhood of Gods Son. Furthermore, the doctrine explicitly states that the grace of the Immaculate Conception was given to Mary in view of the merits of Christ. As Pope Pius IX in his encyclical solemnly defining the doctrine, Ineffabilis Deus , declared To the glory of the holy and undivided Trinity, to the honor and renown of the Virgin, . . . the most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in view of the merits of Christ Jesus the Savior of the human race, preserved and immuned from all stain of original sin. He also makes clear that this grace was not given to Mary purely for her own glorification but to effect a turning point in salvation history: I will put enmity between you and the woman. (Gen 3:15) In these words the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was announced to our first parents. It was to be the reversal of the friendship with the serpent contracted by Eve, when she listened to his voice and fell under his power. The second Eve was never to be under the power of the devil; the enmity between them was to admit of no possible exception. That is having nothing in relation to Satan (i.e.no trace of sin). This involved the grace of being conceived immaculate . Mary’s Immaculate Conception was the foundation of all her graces. The absence of any stain or spot of sin distinguished her from all the rest of mankind. It distinguished her from the holiest of the Saints, since they, one and all, were once sinners. Her perfect sinlessness was the source of all her glory and all her majesty; it was this which opened the door to the unlimited grace that she received from God and qualified her for her divine maternity and raised her to the throne as Queen of heaven. In other words, Mary is the perfect example of sola gratia at work: Everything she later did and was given came from this first grace of predestination, won for her purely and entirely by the merits of Christ, not her own; and even those merits she earned came from the graces given her aboriginally, in view of her predestined status as the chosen Mother of the Savior. As Pius IX clearly asserts, by a venerable exegetical tradition dating from patristic times, she was predestined to be sinless when God spoke thus to the Serpent in the Garden of Eden after our first parents sinned: I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed. He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel (Gen 3:15). By placing the promise of Mary’s sinlessness in the Garden, Pius definitively altered the usual perspective on what predestination means. Unlike both Protestant and Catholic views of predestination in the Augustinian tradition (which tends to see predestination in terms of the fate of the individual soul at the end of time), recent Catholic mariological thought picks up on Pius IX’s salvation-historical perspective by interpreting Mary’s predestined status to be the mother of the Lord as part of God’s wider intentions for the world . For example, in his essay The Sign of the Woman, located in his book Mary: The Church at the Source (coauthored with Hans Urs von Balthasar), Cardinal Ratzinger speaks this way: The Fathers saw God’s words of punishment to the serpent after the Fall as a first promise of the Redeemer¯an allusion to the Descendent [Seed, Offspring] that bruises the serpent’s head. There has never been a moment in history without a gospel. At the very moment of the Fall, the promise also begins. The Fathers also attached importance to the fact that Christology and Mariology are inseparably interwoven already from this primordial beginning. The first promise of Christ, which stands in a chiaroscuro and which only the light to come finally deciphers, is a promise to and through the woman. In other words, Mary is wholly enclosed within the biblical narrative of God’s dispensation to his people, an insight deftly caught by Dante when he places on the lips of St. Bernard of Clairvaux this address to Mary: Virgin Mother, daughter of your Son (Paradiso ), a coinage that forms a nice chiasmus to another of her titles, Mother of God. The juxtaposition of these two titles points to an important feature of all authentic Mariology, one already touched on by Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus : the circularity of cause and effect in the dispensation of salvation. By that I mean, Mary could not be kept free from sin except by the merits of Christ won on the cross; but of course Christ could not have entered history to save us by dying on the cross except by the free consent of the woman Mary whose free assent to the angel was a truly graced assent vouchsafed by the future death of her Son. The implications of this circularity can be dizzying, but they are helpfully elucidated by Hans Urs von Balthasar in this passage in the third volume of Theo-Drama : In the course of unfolding these implications, two difficulties were encountered that have occupied theology right up to medieval and modern times. The first arose from the realization that God’s action in reconciling the world to himself in the Cross of Christ is exclusively his initiative; there is no original collaboration between God and the creature. But as we have already said, the creature’s femininity possesses an original, God-given, active fruitfulness; it was essential, therefore, if God’s Word willed to become incarnate in the womb of a woman, to elicit the latter’s agreement and obedient consent . . . .God could not violate his creature’s freedom. But where did the grace that made this consent possible come from a consent that is adequate and therefore genuinely unlimited if not from the work of reconciliation itself, that is, from the Cross? (And the Cross is rendered possible by d same consent. Suggestions abound therefore that ecumenical discussion of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception begin with a recognition of this important circularity of cause/effect surrounding the Incarnation. For a better understanding and consensus among protestants and Catholics. This Solemnity should therefore lead us to a more Holiness of life before God dat we be worthy ministers of his graces through Christ our Lord.
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 05:44:25 +0000
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