The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception

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"... Hail [Mary] full of grace....blessed are you among women." (Luke 1:28)

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This excerpt is from First Things.

Delivered From All Stain

by David Mills
Dec 6, 2010

“Yeah, right” is the way the more irenic of my Evangelical friends react to the Immaculate Conception...

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“It says that Mary doesn't need to be saved,” Evangelical friends with doctorates in theology from elite universities have told me, which is, you know, and I do hate to say this, kind of dumb. I can easily understand their believing the dogma made up out of thin air, but even then they should realize that what is made up is a statement about the way Jesus saved his own mother.

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The word “Immaculate” doesn’t simply mean “perfectly clean,” as we tend to think from its use in real estate ads, but “unstained.” The doctrine emphasizes Mary’s freedom from moral corruption—not, and this is the crucial point, what she is in herself but what she is by the grace of God. Issued by Pope Pius IX in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deuson[*] December 8, 1854, the definition declares that

the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.

She is, he wrote, “far above all the angels and all the saints so wondrously did God endow her with the abundance of all heavenly gifts poured from the treasury of his divinity.” Because God did this for her—because God did it—Mary, “ever absolutely free of all stain of sin, all fair and perfect, would possess that fullness of holy innocence and sanctity.”

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Read the full article here.
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 [*] Pope Pius IX's Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deuson of December 8, 1854 can be read in its entirety at:

EWTN
CatholicCulture.org
New Advent
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