“Holy Mary conceived without sin, pray for us.”
Roman Catholicism’s Mary isn’t the Mary of the Bible in any way shape or form.
The Mary of the Bible was a person with a beautiful faith and trust in God who humbled herself and submitted to God. She was an observant Jew who was married to Joseph. Mary and Joseph had a valid marriage within the laws of Judeism because Joseph and Mary consumated their marriage by having sexual maritial relations after the birth of Jesus. No relations, no marriage, period, that’s the law of Moses! Mary honored her husband by giving him multiple children, girls and boys. Mary looked to Jesus as her savior because she also need a savior. Mary was a good Jewish mom who loved her son and had to watch Him die on the cross. Mary also knew that her son had been raised from the dead, defeating the grave. She went to live with one of Jesus’ deciples. She then disappears from scripture. She lived the life God gave her and passed away with her hope in her savior Jesus. She is now with him not as some hyper spiritual creature with mystical powers to lead the lost to Jesus and intercede but just as any other spirit who had died in faith looking to Christ alone for their salvation. She is awaiting the resurection of the dead where she will be raised from the dead and joined with her eternal body, meeting Jesus in the air.
The ONLY way Mary leads people to Jesus is written in scripture alone just like any other person who’s faith and trust in God is written in His word.
If Miriam wife of Joseph the Nasarene could respond to the doctrines of Romanism, she wouldn’t be happy. She would see her image and not recognize it as anything other than an idol. Just imagine the observant Jewish mother of Jesus who had lived through His entire life as a witness to His truth and mission giving herself over to such nonsense, never. Just the story of Lasarus and the rich man alone would rule out communion with the dead to anyone who believed Jesus.
The Roman Catholic doctrines of Mariolgy are pure mythic nonsense built from nothing. They are there to take the eye off of Jesus. Jesus is the way, truth and life, NO ONE comes to the Father by any other way. Not by ritual, not by Mary, not by religion, not by emotional conviction, not by submission to priests. One way, one narrow gate that FEW will find. ONE! One means one, Greek , English, Hebrew, Latin, all the same. One!
The idea that Mary ascended to Heaven, “Rapture-like”, was not dreamed up by the Vatican until the 1950s.
Often in Marian “visions” the demon impersonating Mary refers to herself as “The Immaculate Conception”. The RCC refers to Mary as “perpetually virgin” which is obviously wrong, since Mary had more children after Jesus. Many in the RCC view Mary as “Coredemptrix”, meaning they believe she has equal power, along with Jesus, to redeem a sinner from his sin. The scripture teaches that there is only one Redeemer, and one intercessor between God and man: that man Christ Jesus.
Give it a rest.
Your post is quite accurate. It’s the biggest heresy perpetuated by Catholicism that somehow Mary, the mother of Jesus, is on even spiritual ground with the Son of God Himself. Thank you sir.
For criminy’s sake. Couldn’t you have sent that via Freepmail, instead of posting it here?
......Often in Marian “visions” the demon impersonating Mary refers to herself as “The Immaculate Conception”. ....
and this same demon encourages prayer ?
and you don’t think there’s one thing wrong with a demon encouraging prayer to the Almighty ?
how would this be possible ?
Well you are exactly correct. Your post was relevant because the person posting this article felt compelled to bring up the RCC theology of Mary for some reason. Why would someone pray to Mary when you can pray to Jesus?
You obviously don’t know very much about what Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe about the Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary. You probably don’t even know the difference between the “Immaculate Conception” and the “Virgin Birth”. I’m not going to waste any more of my breath arguing theology with you, but why do you suppose one of Jesus’ disciples took care of Mary after the Crucifiction instead of her own supposed children, if as you say, she had any?
I would observe that the Holy Scriptures only speak of Mary, the Mother of God (want to quarrel about that? Jesus is God. Mary is His mother. The Third Ecumenical Council settled that long before the Sixth finally, definitively fixed the canon of Scripture by giving the canons of the Council of Carthage ecumenical force) as Joseph's betrothed wife. As you think that you must reconstruct everything from the Scriptures, having no access to the recollection of the Church of her own history (what we call Tradition -- a category that includes the Scriptures at its core, not something distinct from them), you may be forgiven for not knowing that the point of the betrothal of the aged widower Joseph (not the strapping young fellow intent on a life of continence depicted in Latin religious art) to the Virgin Mary was to allow her to keep a vow of perpetual virginity after she could no longer live in the Temple at Jerusalem, not to consummate a marriage. Our Lord's brothers and sisters were Joseph's children by his first wife, Salome.
If you ever see an Orthodox icon of the Flight to Egypt, the Holy Family has four members -- the infant Jesus, Mary, Joesph, and a young man, St. James, later the first Bishop of Jerusalem, who presided over the Apostolic Council recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. St. James is titled "Brother of the Lord" in Orthodox hagiography because alone among Jesus' legal foster-brothers, he was willing to accept Christ as his brother and share their inheritance from Joseph.
As to Mary's life after her Son, Our Lord's Resurrection. You will recall that on the Cross, Our Lord gave her into the care of "the disciple whom He loved" (the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John's circumlocution for himself), which command St. John briefly under the same circumlocution reports obeying. Now if Mary had had other children with Joseph, it would have been their duty under the Law to take care of her. How then does Our Lord give her into the care of St. John? Again, you have no access to the fact that the house where St. John lived with the Virgin Mary in his care in Ephesus is a site of pilgrimage to this day. The Fifth Ecumenical Council (again, from the Orthodox point of view, prior to the fixing of the canon of Scripture and by like authority to that by which the Church fixed the canon of Scripture) very clearly stated the Church's recollection that Mary indeed remained a virgin all her life, when this fact had been called into question the first time in the sixth Christian century. (I would note that even many of the "reformers" had no quarrel with the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, John Calvin springing most readily to mind as one who defended the notion, despite generally rejecting the teachings of the Latin church, having no apparent familiarity with the Orthodox teachings on the matter, and using the shortened canon of Scripture you favor as his starting point.)
Now, you are quite right to object to the picture of a rapture-like translation of the Blessed Virgin into heaven. The Virgin Mary died. The Church commemorates her Dormition, though the Church has always remembered, and therefore always taught, that her body was assumed into heaven after her death. But even the Latin church does not teach a rapture-like translation. Their dogmatization of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was defective in that it failed to condemn as heretical the view that Mary was assumed bodily into Heaven without undergoing death (a view popular in some segments of the Latin church at that time and to this day), but the Latin church does not teach that heresy, rather its dogma was worded ambiguously as to whether her bodily assumption into Heaven took place without her undergoing death (heresy) or after her death (the truth of the matter). Nor do the Latins actually teach that Mary is our "Coredeptrix", though again I will join you if you want to complain that they have been insufficiently forceful in denouncing such a notion, which has become popular in some quarters of their communion.
As to "conceived without sin", we Orthodox have always taught that Mary did not sin (Some don't qualify that, meaning she didn't sin, period. I hold by the school that adds the adjective "voluntarily", for we Orthodox Christian recognized there are involuntary sins, and not sinning at all is hard to square with "no man (anthropos) liveth and sinneth not, and Thou only art beyond sin"). The Latins, taking Blessed Augustine's view of "Original Sin" were rather stuck, and tried to fix the mismatch, not by returning to the broader patristic understanding of the Fall ("Ancestral Sin"), but by promulgating a doctrine that seems to me more of an engineering kludge than a heresy, the "Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary".
That said, I would point out that it was bizarre and ungracious of you to object to a pious Latin Christian asking the intercessions of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a ward against the depravity of our culture, one instance of which is the point of this thread.
"Most Holy Theotokos save us!" as we say in the East is an appropriate reaction to such depravity as is reported emanating from the NEA. (I have written too long already, so I will not unpack fully why and how the prayers of the Theotokos and the saints, who are not dead, but alive in Christ, are one of the means by which Christ's grace flows to us and saves us, not from our sins -- from which we are indeed saved by His Death and Glorious Resurrection -- but from and in the trials and temptations of this life.)
Wishing your a blessed Lent, whether you keep the season or not.
And if I have offended, forgive me, a sinner.