While he
would often mirror his father’s opposition to Rome’s theology about Mary, at the
same time, Joseph Fielding McConkie rightly understood a balanced view of the
mother of Jesus and her important role in salvation history, notwithstanding
the man-made dogmas and practices built around her. As he wrote in a book on
the witnesses to Christ’s birth:
Mary Blessed Among Women
(Luke 1:28)
And the
angel came in unto her, and said, hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord
is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
In the councils of heaven when all the spirit
children of our Eternal Father assembled together, Mary stood prominent among
all female spirits. She whom Gabriel called “highly favoured” of God had by
virtue of the purity of her soul and her loyalty to principles of truth found a
place, like unto him who would be her firstborn son, “in the bosom of the
Father” (see D&C 76:25). Her place in history was foreordained. She was the
one the Father had chosen to nurture his only child to be born in the flesh.
There was no greater honor that the Father of us all could bestow upon any
woman. Only Eve, who had been chosen to be the mother of all living and who
stood as the prototype of womanhood, could approach her in greatness. Of those
born in the flesh there is no woman whom the Saints hold in greater esteem than
Mary.
She is honored most perfectly in the virtue
and purity of motherhood and in that desire natural to the hearts of women to
do the will of God. (Joseph Fielding McConkie, Witnesses of The Birth of Christ [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1998],
61-62)
Elsewhere,
we read:
Mary
There would be no more perfect mortal witness
of Christ’s divine sonship than his mother, Mary. From Gabriel she received the
promise that she would conceive in her womb “the Son of the Highest” (Luke
1:32). Following that marvelous event, she testified, saying, “He that is
mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name” (Luke 1:49).
Nephi gave us a perfect scriptural account of
this most sacred event. “And it came to pass,” he wrote, “that I beheld that
she was carried away in the Spirit; and after she had been carried away in the
Spirit for the space of a time the angel spake unto e, saying: Look! And I looked
and beheld the virgin again, bearing a child in her arms. And the angel said
unto me: Behold the Lamb of God, yea even the Son of the Eternal Father!” (1
Nephi 11:19-21.)
Truly Mary was, as Gabriel told her, “highly favoured”
and “blessed . . . among women” to have witnessed these miracles and to have
given birth to the Savior (Luke 1:28). (Ibid., 111)
For more on
the topic of Mariology, see my book: