Catholics, Protestants, and Immaculate Mary

Do Catholics worship Mary? This question is as old as the Protestant Reformation itself, and it rests, like other disputed doctrinal points, on a false premise that has been turned into a wedge: the veneration of Mary detracts from the worship of Christ.

This seeming opposition between Mary and Christ is symptomatic of the Protestant tendency, begun by Luther, to view the entirety of Christian life through a dialectical lens – a lens of conflict and division. With the Reformation the integrity of Christianity is broken and its formerly coherent elements are now set in opposition. The Gospel versus the Law. Faith versus Works. Scripture versus Tradition. Authority versus Individuality. Faith versus Reason. Christ versus Mary.

The Catholic tradition rightly sees the mutual complementarity of these elements of the faith, as they all contribute to our ultimate end – living with God now and in eternity. To choose any one of these is to choose them all.

By contrast, to assert that Catholics worship Mary along with or in place of Christ, or that praying to Mary somehow impedes Christ’s role as “the one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5) is to create a false dichotomy between the Word made flesh and the woman who gave the Word his flesh. No such opposition exists. The one Mediator entrusted his mediation to the will and womb of Mary. She does not impede his mediation – she helps to make it possible.

Within this context we see the ancillary role that the ancilla Domini plays in her divine Son’s mission. Mary’s is not a surrogate womb rented and then forgotten in God’s plan. She is physically connected to Christ and his life, and because of this she is even more deeply connected to him in the order of grace. She is, in fact, “full of grace,” as only one who is redeemed by Christ could be.

The feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception celebrates the very first act of salvation by Christ in the world. Redemption is made possible for all by his precious blood shed on the cross. Yet Mary’s role in the Savior’s life and mission is so critical and so unique that God saw it necessary to wash her in the blood of the Lamb in advance, at the first moment of her conception.

This reality could not be more Biblical: the angel greets Mary as “full of grace” (Luke 1:28), which is literally rendered as “already graced” (kecharitōmenē). Following Mary, the Church has “pondered what sort of greeting this might be” for centuries. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception, ultimately defined in 1854, is nothing other than a rational expression of the angel’s greeting contained in Scripture: Mary is “already graced” with Christ’s redemption at the very moment of her creation.

Because God called Mary to the unique vocation of serving as the Mother of God, it is not just her soul that is graced, as is the case for us when we receive the sacraments. Mary’s entire being, body and soul, is full of grace so that she may be a worthy ark for the New Covenant. And just as the ark of the old covenant was adorned with gold to be a worthy house for God’s word, Mary is conceived without original sin to be the living and holy house for God’s Word.

Thus Mary is not only conceived immaculately, that is, without stain of sin. She also is the Immaculate Conception. Her entire being was specifically created by God with unique privilege so that she could fulfill her role in God’s plan of salvation. “Free from sin,” both original and personal, is the necessary consequence of being “full of grace.”

Protestants claim that veneration of Mary as it is practiced by Catholics is not biblical. St. Paul encouraged the Corinthians to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). Paul is not holding himself up as the end goal, but as a means to Christ, the true end. And if a person is imitated, he is simultaneously venerated.

If we should imitate Paul, how much more should we imitate Mary, who fulfilled God’s will to the greatest degree a human being could. Throughout her life she humbled herself so that God could be exalted, and because of this, Christ has fulfilled his promise by exalting his lowly mother to the seat closest to him in God’s kingdom.

Mary is the model of humility, charity, and openness to the will of God. She allows a sword to pierce her heart for the sake of the world’s salvation. She shows us the greatness to which we are called: a life free from sin and filled with God’s grace that leads to union with God in Heaven. She is the model disciple, and therefore worthy of imitation and veneration, not as an end in herself, but as the means to the very purpose of her – and our – existence: Christ himself.

Christ’s Church will win out in the end. Did you get that message? The serpent’s head will be crushed.

But it will not be the woman that crushes the serpent's head under her own heel, but was written to be the seed of the woman (which is chiefly Christ?) that shall bruise the serpents head, and the serpent bruise his heel.

http://bible.cc/genesis/3-15.htm

Check all the other versions there. The Douay Rheims has a slight problem...it stands lonely in it's choice of gender in this crucial passage, which so much has been attributed to;

The gentle RC apologist Jimmy Akin, notes;

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”

and, here skipping a paragraph, he shares further;

The reason for the difference in the renderings is a manuscript difference. Modern translations follow what the original Hebrew of the passage says. The Douay-Rheims, however, is following a manuscript variant found in many early Fathers and some editions of the Vulgate (but not the original; Jerome followed the Hebrew text in his edition of the Vulgate). The variant probably originated as a copyist error when a scribe failed to take note that the subject of the verse had shifted from the woman to the seed of the woman.

As far as another modern RCC approved version, this from United States Conference of Catholic Bishops;

15I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head, while you strike at their heel.

I don't know that there is true scholarly support for it anywhere, (outside of the RCC)

Why the persistence of the "copy mistake"? (or as here above, a sly change). Because so much of the past-times infallibly declared liturgy is dependent upon that one mistake!

Here's a calm discussion which makes some note of the old error, but more speaks of what can be wider seen of this verse. http://www.blueletterbible.org/faq/don_stewart/stewart.cfm?id=756 though he skips over the "woman" can indeed be Mary, even as he makes it plain that Mary herself cannot be the seed herself, while it is also plain that it not precisely be her own foot doing the crushing. The silly art work spoken of previous is misleading. The old problems of mistaken identification I have been attempting to speak of here on this site for the last handful of days, once again coming to the forefront...

We can see the church triumphing, but not Mary's or any other particular singular woman's alone "heel" bruising the serpents head. It's just not there, for the seed of the woman in the verse, is a HE, not a she. Ask the Jews, they should know. It's THEIR language.

Here, from "Complete Jewish Bible" English translation now available online at http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+3&version=CJB the passage;

15 I will put animosity between you and the woman, and between your descendant and her descendant; he will bruise your head, and you will bruise his heel.”

Truly enough Mary can indeed be the woman, even as she herself is at the same time part of the bigger overall picture, (descended from the tribe of Levi), but to translate the text *Genesis 3:15* and change not just gender, but wider sense QUITE LITERALLY in that one passage for reason that the "seed" can refer to many or a line of descendants, is still translation by reasoning into the text itself both the word and concept "they". It can be argued, it is what one (the RCC in particular) needs desperately to find --- or proved cover for, to give wiggle room for the prior claims to infallibility in regards to various aspects of Mariology.

The gentle Akin again, offering solace in his conclusion;

Thus Jesus crushed the serpent directly and was directly struck by the serpent; Mary, through her cooperation in the incarnation and her witnessing the sufferings and death of her Son, indirectly crushed the serpent and was indirectly struck by the serpent.
This has long been recognized by Catholics. The footnotes provided a couple of hundred years ago by Bishop Challoner in his revision of the Douay state, “The sense [of these two readings] is the same: for it is by her seed, Jesus Christ, that the woman crushes the serpent’s head.”

That verges on double-speak, as line of reasoning. Which sort-of underwhelms me, in light of the approach you yourself and some other Catholics here & elsewhere otherwise take...which seem so often if not go straight to Mary with her foot directly on the serpent, personally, her own self, then it protects the idea of that by whatever twist and turns can be brought through reasoning and argumentation/apologia, fortifying all the rest of the adoration/veneration which fairly well gallops towards being worship. Some go quite overboard with it.

What of the Jews? What of her linage? What of the promises given directly to them through the prophets? This is important too. Who was this sweet, innocent maiden named Mary? Though she was of Levi, she was no priestess, for she could not be formally a priest, at all. What was she but what that people, two thousand years removed from Abraham, produced from their own lives, their hope, perseverance & faith, not of the Law foremost, but of the Promise, the very promise the Lord Himself swore to keep.

He raised her up, saw her from far off, even as Moses, and then David, saw Christ from afar. She herself born more of that promise than the law (though again, of the tribe of the temple priests, who did what? -- prepared the sacrifice!), that plan, that intent, at that particular time & place, through the Spirit & Promise before the law, like a gentle lamb, or tender ewe herself, brought forth (for she was worthy) the Lamb Himself, she as vessel chosen by the most High.

That does not make her into later being or becoming "Queen of heaven", for she herself, like Adam, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, all the rest, were and are merely created beings, not eternal God, not the Creator.

As Christ told the woman at the well, "Ye worship ye know not what: we know what we worship: for salvation is of the Jews".

If we are to stay within the Judeo-Christian construct, let's not forget the Judeo part. Stick with the original plan, eh?

Mary’s consent was given, as was that Moses, Peters, etc. after their protests, and she could have refused, yet the issue is that this does not render her the saint on steroids Catholics make her to be as compared to those whom the Holy Spirit testified far more of (even in the gospels Mary is quite marginal).

Mary is an example of a holy and surrendered vessel of God in carrying and caring for the Word made flesh, and blessed by being so chosen, but which did not require her to be sinless anymore than it was necessary for those to be who brought forth the wholly inspired Words of God, or the nation of Israel, “of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came.” (Rm. 9:5)

And the error is in exalting Mary “above that which is written,” (cf. 1Cor. 4:6)

Mary is not shown and laboring day and night for years in the care of all the churches, and suffering great persecution as she did so, or constantly feeding the church with her words, or even being a worker of many miracles and being an instrument of healing for many.

Instead, the most preeminent example of this, after the Lord Jesus, is the apostle Paul, who is relatively marginalized by Rome behind Mary and others.

Considering the unwarranted excess of attributions given to Mary by Catholics wresting Scripture, one can only imagine what more they would do if even 10% of the manifestations of the above attributes was given to Mary.

I don’t see any specific saint called out for veneration in those quotes

There isn't any. The saints are venerated as an outpouring of love for them from the bosom of the flock. It is initially spontaneous. The Early Church considered friendship with Christ during his ministry on earth, or martyrdom for the faith sufficient proof of sainthood. Later, more formal methods came into use recognizing saints. but none of that had any specific form during the Apostolic times, and therefore the principles of venerating saints did not make it into scripture.

Individual acts of veneration can be seen in the scripture here and there. In Luke 11:27-28 someone venerates Mary, but does it with such a physiological focus "Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck" that Christ directs her attention to "all who hear the word of God, and keep it" Christ doesn't, however, repudiate the veneration of His mother in this episode. Similarly, in Acts 19:12 we read of veneration of the relics of the Apostles; at another time, the excessive veneration of the living apostles earns a rebuke when it crosses into worship (Acts 14:10, 13-14).

We also explicit endorsement of intercessory prayer in 1 Timothy 2:1, and we see Mary's advocacy before Christ and work on leading men to the faith in Christ in John 2:3,5. Of course, the general idea that saints are a part of our lives is simply in the knowledge that those who die in repentance and in faith have life everlasting, -- and again see Hebrews 11:39-40, 12:1-2.

If it's idolatry to use the word "prayer" as it's been defined for centuries, then everyone who is Christian had better stay out of courts based on English common law. Either that or stop the stupid pretense that the word “prayer” means what they want it to mean and nothing else. A prayer is something wished for or requested of another, you can pray for the judge to continue your judgment, pray for a specific redress, and so on, the same way you can call a barrister in England “your worship” and not be worshiping that individual as God or a god.

Your defense against the accusation that Catholics pray to and worship Mary seems to employ a nuanced usage of "prayer" and "worship" such that Catholics ARE praying and worshiping, but just not in the accused sense. Partial admission only leaves room for partial denial.

Folks who make up their own religion, though, like to start out by redefining terms to suit their own twisting of Scripture. Due to that fact they often can't understand a simple word like "prayer" because they've accepted the twisted definition their own personal religion finds useful in furthering their lies and their slanders of others.

Examples of redefined terms used in this thread would include "worship" and "veneration" and "imitate" such that veneration is a world away from worship whereas imitation is (according to the author of the cited article) IS veneration.

Likewise, such followers of false religions cannot meet and accept Christ because they refuse to accept Christ as He is and insist that their version of Christ conform to their own personal religion so they can go along to get along in a pagan society.

I didn't realize that Christ's own nature had become the issue. Are you about to admit that Catholic dogma is that salvation depends upon accepting a particular belief about Mary?

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