Is Roman Catholic Doctrine Biblical? The Immaculate Conception

Now this is a very interesting doctrine. The Immaculate Conception of Mary.

To assist the Roman Catholic Church with their quest to deify Mary as the Queen of Heaven, it was deemed necessary, over the course of time, to assign to her the attribute of a sinless and perfect life, which meant there was a need to accredit her with, what they have termed, an immacualte conception; that is, a completely sinless nature from the very womb of her own mother.

This could have led to several complications, of course, because, how far back do you go? If Jesus’ mother was sinless, under the Roman Catholic doctrine of original sin, how could she have been born in the sin of her own mother? Would there have been a need to also attribute sinlessness and immaculacy to Mary’s mother, and so on.

So, to illustrate the Roman Catholic desire to elevate Mary as venerated as the Queen of Heaven, which is the name of a blasphemous goddess, I present from the very Vatican site, AD CAELI REGINAM, which begins with the following astonishing statement:

From the earliest ages of the catholic church a Christian people, whether in time of triumph or more especially in time of crisis, has addressed prayers of petition and hymns of praise and veneration to the Queen of Heaven. And never has that hope wavered which they placed in the Mother of the Divine King, Jesus Christ; nor has that faith ever failed by which we are taught that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, reigns with a mother’s solicitude over the entire world, just as she is crowned in heavenly blessedness with the glory of a Queen.

So here we have still pronounced the Queen of Heaven and the Virgin Mother of God. Of course, there is no mother of God. He is the Eternal Pre-existant One, without mother or father. Jesus, in fact, is the Eternal Word who is God made flesh. He existed as the Word long before Mary. She is the mother of Jesus, the Word made flesh, but not of God. Neither is she any longer a virgin. She was a virgin, as prophesied, when she was visited by the Holy Spirit and conceived Christ, but subsequently gave birth to children by her husband, Joseph, the brothers and sister of Jesus.

However, in the spirit of cleverness and doctrinal sleight of hand, the various papal agencies eventually came up with a set of beliefs, based, not on scripture, but on a philosophically pragmatic, humanly conceived desire to place Mary on a par with similar female goddess figures represented in the idolatry of most pagan cultures, and culminating in a declaration of her immaculacy for all time, since Popes are, by definition, infallible, and therefore, once a papal decree is issued it is, apparently, gospel, although whose gospel is up for scrutiny.

From About Catholicism some of the doctrine is revealed.

What Is the Immaculate Conception?

Development of the Doctrine:

Because of the doctrine of Original Sin, some in the West began to believe that Mary could not have been sinless unless she had been saved from Original Sin at the moment of her conception (thus making the conception “immaculate”). Others, however, including St. Thomas Aquinas, argued that Mary could not have been redeemed if she had not been subject to sin—at least, to Original Sin.

The answer to St. Thomas Aquinas’s objection, as Blessed John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) showed, was that God had sanctified Mary at the moment of her conception in His foreknowledge that the Blessed Virgin would consent to bear Christ. In other words, she too had been redeemed—her redemption had simply been accomplished at the moment of her conception, rather than (as with all other Christians) in Baptism.

Spread of the Feast in the West:

After Duns Scotus’s defense of the Immaculate Conception, the feast spread throughout the West, though it was still often celebrated at the Feast of the Conception of Saint Anne. On February 28, 1476, however, Pope Sixtus IV extended the feast to the entire Western Church, and in 1483 threatened with excommunication those who opposed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. By the middle of the 17th century, all opposition to the doctrine had died out in the Catholic Church.

Promulgation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception:

On December 8, 1854, Pope Pius IX officially declared the Immaculate Conception a dogma of the Church, which means that all Christians are bound to accept it as true. As the Holy Father wrote in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds 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.”

So, as late as 1854, this doctrine, which had been lavishly taught for centuries before in the Roman Catholic Church, became an official dogma. Apparently, now, all Christians are bound to accept it as true. But on what grounds? On what scriptural basis? From the New Advent Catholic Encyclopaedia:

No direct or categorical and stringent proof of the dogmacan be brought forward from Scripture. But the firstscriptural passage which contains the promise of theredemption, mentions also the Mother of the Redeemer. The sentence against the first parents was accompanied by the Earliest Gospel (Proto-evangelium), which put enmity between the serpent and the woman: “and I will put enmity between thee and the woman and her seed; she (he) shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for her (his) heel” (Genesis 3:15). The translation “she” of the Vulgate is interpretative; it originated after the fourth century, and cannot be defended critically. The conqueror from the seed of the woman, who should crush the serpent’s head, is Christ; the woman at enmity with the serpent is Mary. God puts enmity between her and Satan in the same manner and measure, as there is enmity between Christ and the seed of the serpent. Mary was ever to be in that exalted state of soul which the serpent had destroyed in man, i.e. in sanctifying grace. Only the continual union of Mary with grace explains sufficiently the enmity between her and Satan. The Proto-evangelium, therefore, in the original text contains a direct promise of the Redeemer, and in conjunction therewith the manifestation of the masterpiece of HisRedemption, the perfect preservation of His virginal Mother from original sin.

So now, because there is no actual scripture to demonstrate the immaculate conception of Mary, by a simple twist of the true meaning of a verse suggested in the Latin Vulgate, it is not Christ, the Seed of the woman (which refers to the Eve, in fact, and not directly to Mary) who crushes the head of the serpent, but the woman herself, who, it is now claimed, is Mary, and, somehow out of this we have the interpretation that Mary is preserved from original sin. This is quite astonishing violation of scriptural truth to produce a heresy. A simple study of related verses would have solved this error, but it was separated out as a convenient way of introducing a heresy.

As they correctly say, this interpretation cannot be defended critically. Yet it has, astonishingly, been declared so by a papal bull, and that is, for Catholics, an end of it. So here we have the doctrine explained for us in its full glory.

In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December, 1854,Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary “in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin.”

“The Blessed Virgin Mary…”

The subject of this immunity from original sin is the person of Mary at the moment of the creation of her souland its infusion into her body.

“…in the first instance of her conception…”

The term conception does not mean the active orgenerative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents. Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body. Mary was preserved exempt from all stain oforiginal sin at the first moment of her animation, andsanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.

“…was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin…”

The formal active essence of original sin was not removed from her soul, as it is removed from others bybaptism; it was excluded, it never was in her soul. Simultaneously with the exclusion of sin. The state of original sanctity, innocence, and justice, as opposed tooriginal sin, was conferred upon her, by which gift every stain and fault, all depraved emotions, passions, and debilities, essentially pertaining to original sin, were excluded. But she was not made exempt from the temporal penalties of Adam — from sorrow, bodily infirmities, and death.

“…by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race.”

The immunity from original sin was given to Mary by a singular exemption from a universal law through the same merits of Christ, by which other men are cleansed from sin by baptism. Mary needed the redeeming Saviour to obtain this exemption, and to be delivered from the universal necessity and debt (debitum) of being subject to original sin. The person of Mary, in consequence of her origin from Adam, should have been subject to sin, but, being the new Eve who was to be the mother of the new Adam, she was, by the eternal counsel of God and by the merits of Christ, withdrawn from the general law of original sin. Her redemption was the very masterpiece ofChrist’s redeeming wisdom. He is a greater redeemer who pays the debt that it may not be incurred than he who pays after it has fallen on the debtor.

Such is the meaning of the term “Immaculate Conception.

So there we have it. Mary is called Queen of Heaven, a name which angered God, “The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven; and they pour out drink offerings to other gods, that they may provoke Me to anger” Jeremiah 7:18. She is called the Mother of God, which is impossible. She is made sinless from birth to death by virtue of an immaculate conception for which there is no evidence in scripture.

All of this so that Roman Catholics, from Popes to paupers, can pray to her as a goddess and as a mediatrix, called by Pius XII Queen of Creation, who also says, in 1954,

…if Mary, in taking an active part in the work of salvation, was, by God’s design, associated with Jesus Christ, the source of salvation itself, in a manner comparable to that in which Eve was associated with Adam, the source of death, so that it may be stated that the work of our salvation was accomplished by a kind of “recapitulation,” in which a virgin was instrumental in the salvation of the human race, just as a virgin had been closely associated with its death; if, moreover, it can likewise be stated that this glorious Lady had been chosen Mother of Christ “in order that she might become a partner in the redemption of the human race”.

Do you see this? The gradual replacement of Christ with the Queen of Heaven. So in the Vatican’s official doctrine:

“Finally the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things, so that she might be the more fully conformed to her Son, the Lord of lords and conqueror of sin and death.”The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin is a singular participation in her Son’s Resurrection and an anticipation of the resurrection of other Christians:

In giving birth you kept your virginity; in your Dormition you did not leave the world, O Mother of God, but were joined to the source of Life. You conceived the living God and, by your prayers, will deliver our souls from death.

. . . she is our Mother in the order of grace.”

What do you think? Is this the doctrine of a sound church? Has this gospel of the elevation of Mary to almost equal redemptive status with Christ anything to do with the true gospel? 

Posted by Steve