Tomorrow marks the 164th anniversary of the dogmatising of the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX in the bull Ineffabilis Deus. As I have said many times on this blog, the Marian dogmas the greatest disproof of Roman Catholicism’s claims to be Christ’s only true Church. In the case of the Immaculate Conception, Rome has elevated to the position, not simply of pious belief or doctrine, but dogma (something that is definitional of the faith and must be believed de fide under pain of anathema) a belief that is explicitly contradicted by the earliest Christians (e.g., Irenaeus and other early Christian writers believed Mary was guilty of personal sin) and without any biblical support, too (eisegesis-driven appeals to Luke 1:28 and purported Marian typology in Luke notwithstanding).
For a blog post discussing the patristic evidence against the Immaculate Conception, see:
For a fuller discussion of Mariology, see my book:
To help understand why these Marian issues matter, consider the following from a book by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) about Go To Heaven (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1960):
The Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth were to the beginning of a new humanity something like what a lock is to a canal, the former in a special way. If a ship is sailing on a polluted canal and wishes to transfer itself to clear waters on a higher level, it must pass through a device which locks out the polluted waters and raises the ship to the higher position. Then the other gate of the lock is lifted, and the ship rides on the new, clear waters, taking none of the polluted waters with it. Mary’s Immaculate Conception was like that lock, inasmuch as, through her, humanity passed from the lower level of the sons of Adam to the higher level of the sons of God. (31)
One cannot go to a statue of a mother holding a babe, hack away the mother, and expect to have the babe. Touch her and you spoil Him. All other world religions are lost in myth and legend except Christianity. Christ is cut off from all the gods of paganism because He is tied to woman and to history. “Born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius Pilate.” Coventry Patmore rightly calls Mary: “Our only savior from an abstract Christ.” It is easier to understand the meek and humble heart of Christ by looking at His Mother. She holds all the great truths of Christianity together, as a piece of wood holds a kite. Children wrap the string of a kite around a stick and release the string as the kite climbs to the heavens. Mary is like that piece of wood. Around her we wrap all the precious strings of the great truths of our holy faith—for example, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, the Church. No matter how far we get above the earth, as the kite may, we always have need of Mary to hold the doctrines of the Creed together. If we threw away the stick, we would no longer have the kite; if we threw away Mary, we would never have Our Lord. He would be lost in the heavens, like our runaway kite, and that would be terrible, indeed, for us on earth. (184)
God, Who mad the sun, also made the moon. The moon does not take away from the brilliance of the sun. The moon would be only a burnt-out cinder floating in the immensity of space, were it not for the sun. All its light is reflected from the sun. The Blessed Mother reflects her Divine Son; without Him, she is nothing. With Him, she is the mother of men. On dark nights we are grateful for the moon; when we see it shining, we know there must be a sun. So in this dark night of the world when men turn their backs on Him Who is the light of the world, we look to Mary to guide their feet while we await the sunrise. (185)
There is actually, only one person in all humanity of whom God has one picture, and in whom there is a perfect conformity between what H wanted her to be and what she is, and that is His own mother. Most of us are a minus sign, in the sense that we do not fulfill the high hopes the heavenly Father has for us. But Mary is the equal sign. The ideal that God had of her, that she is, and in the flesh. The model and the copy are perfect; she is all that was foreseen, planned, and dreamed. The melody of her life is played just as it was written. Mary was thought, conceived, and planned as the equal sign between ideal and history, thought and reality, hope and realization.
That is why, through the centuries, Christian liturgy has applied to her the words of the Book of Proverbs. Because she is what God wanted us all to be, she speaks of herself as the eternal blueprint in the mind of God, the one whom God loved before she was a creature. She is even pictured as being with Him not only at creation, but before creation. She existed in the divine mind as an eternal thought before there were any mothers. She is the Mother of mothers—She is the world’s first love. (187-88)
Since woman today has failed to retrain man, we must look to The Woman to restore purity. The Church proclaims two dogmas of purity for The Woman: one, the purity of soul in the Immaculate Conception, the other the purity of body in the Assumption. (190)
