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I.
The Four Marian Dogmas
1.
Her Immaculate Conception
SCRIPTURE
does not long delay her introduction to the reader. She receives mention
early. She comes into the story about the Fall, as the woman whom Satan
cannot degrade, as the inevitable mother he cannot prevent. As such, she
invites recurrent attention.
Isaiah predicts her. Judith prefigures her.
The Messianic Psalms imply her. The evangelists describe her. The
Acts of the apostles has her praying with them at the cenacle. An
Epistle in a burst of typical candor reminds the Galatians that "God sent
his Son, made of a woman." To the end, the Blessed Mother remains a
scriptural favorite. The "woman" of Genesis becomes in
Revelation, only a few pages from its very last one, "a woman clothed
with the sun."
In that first mention of the mother-to-be, her
Child of many prophecies is naturally included. Unnaturally, Satan shares
it with them. The vilest of the vile doesn't belong in such company, but
the ugly serpent has insinuated his malice into the story of creation, and
there he is with the holiest of the holy in the same sentence. He is
there to his embarrassment.
He is being forewarned of a crushing
humiliation. Insufferable to his pride as it is, his angelic intelligence
cannot but accept the prediction, knowing that God does not lie. Satan
doesn't need to wait until the event to believe in the immaculate
conception. There is nothing slow-witted about him. He quickly suspects
the meaning. "I will put enmity between you and the woman," makes it
quite clear to him, "and between your seed and her seed" (Gen. 3:15).
That enmity pervades Scripture. The "ancient
serpent" of its first book, identified as Satan in its last, reappears
there as a dragon. No chronicler of the truth could better show the
dragon's animosity than St. John does in his visionary report of the
monster's lying in wait "before the mother who was about to bear a child,
that he might devour her child." He of course did not succeed, for "she
brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations" (Rev.
12:4-5). But the dragon's failure did not come from a lack of desire.
The enmity has not been resolved. It cannot be.
Satan hasn't the decency in him to stop hating
the Child who defeated his scheme to cheat the human race out of its happy
destiny. It irritates his ugly disposition that he could not strike dumb
the Angel of the Annunciation, or that he could not at least inject waves
of raucous static into that clear greeting: "Hail, full of grace!" If the
devil could lose his mind, the rich implication in those words would drive
him out of it. But he must go on remembering them while taking whatever
satisfaction he can from perverting as many yielding souls as he can. It
shall remain his eternal frustration that the human soul he craved above
all others to contaminate, escaped him.
More than even St. Michael, Mary is to Satan's
ego a holy terror. A creature as surely as he, and in the hierarchy of
creation an inferior creature to him, she has nevertheless given him
nothing to gloat over. Not only did she escape the taint of original sin
he had planned for her, she now in heaven enjoys a glory greater than his
own had once been, a superangelic eminence among the blessed. There never
has been, or will be, a worst damned fool than Satan. And the "woman
clothed with the sun" is of all the blessed in heaven his most humiliating
reminder of the fact.
To the holy and so much wiser angels, she is a
consummate delight. They know a work perfection when they see one, as
well as Satan does, but they are too happy to be envious. Their beatitude
consists of being in love with and doing honor to their All-Beautiful God,
and one who surpasses them in this delights them. They praise her Creator
for such an accomplishment as their queen, not forgetting her complete
cooperation. Not a single actual grace did she reject, did she even
misuse. Conceived free of sin by the gratuitous courtesy of the Holy
Spirit, she maintained an inviolate purity of soul into eternity. She
came into the world, lived in the world, went out of the world, innocent
of sin. How could the sinless angels do else than welcome into their
midst a queen whose greater beauty takes after theirs? They feel honored.
Her immaculate conception has had the best of
advocates. God Almighty foretold it. The angel Gabriel implicitly
declared it. And centuries later, in 1830, Mary herself appeared out of
heaven to remind a negligent world of it. Her reminder took an ingenious
form. In a second vision to Catherine Labouré, again in the convent
chapel, Our Lady stood on a globe, with streams of light falling upon it
from her open hands, while framing her erect figure like a triumphal arch
shone the words in brilliant gold: "O Mary, conceived without sin, pray
for us who have recourse to you."
The inscription did not fascinate the visionary
more than the living voice, which explained it, overjoyed her. She was
being instructed by the Immaculate Mother of God herself to have a medal
struck in exactly that design, with prayer and all, and then to have the
medal circulated in large quantities. The enraptured novice, a little
saint in the making, felt in every fibre of her being a fervent urge to
carry out the instructions promptly. But the spiritual adviser to whom
she had recourse, and the proper authorities to whom he in turn appealed,
proceeded cautiously. They took their time, using up all of two years in
what they considered a prudent delay and what Catherine must have found a
strain on her patience. At last, to her great relief, a first supply of
the Immaculate Conception Medal (which people then called it) was
distributed around under the full approval of the Church.
The results exceeded all expectations. Our
Lady had promised unlikely cures, unlikely conversions. She brought about
both. Her double prediction, coming true day after day, in this place and
that, first in France, then in other countries, soon created in the
open-minded a disposition to take the medal seriously. Wearing it had
become in a short time a respectable fashion.
One instance out of many, not because of its
debatable superiority over the others, but because of its impact on Rome,
the centre of the Universal Church, will be cited. A Jew of international
renown stopped off in the city on a routine visit which was to turn his
life around. In the course of the day he accepted a strange little gift
from a well-wisher. It was a medal, no larger than a coin, attached to a
chain. Alphonse Ratisbonne, simply to please the donor, put it on, as a
necklace. This medal of the nobly beautiful woman standing on the earth,
surrounded by an odd description, what could a man of the world lose by
wearing it?
He did not wear it for long when he felt a
change coming over him. He felt a growing desire to become better
acquainted with this heavenly figure framed in words, which only told him
that the woman it represented had the name Mary and that she was conceived
without sin. Then on January 20, 1842, when again in Rome and in St.
Andrea's church simply to while away the time, it happened. The church
went dark and in a blaze of glory Our Lady showed herself to him,
beckoning him to kneel down, and then without uttering a word infused into
his soul an intense longing for the Faith. Feasting his eyes on the
apparition, the French Jew suddenly felt a greater elation than any
explorer coming upon a new continent. He discovered the obvious, as if a
blindfold had dropped from his mind, that this resplendent woman of a
beauty indescribable was of his kind and that her Son Jesus Christ was in
truth the Messiah, the fulfillment of the prophets.
Cardinal Patrizi baptized the visionary the
next day. With an eloquence not to be denied he had convinced the vicar
of Pope Gregory XVI of his sincerity. The convert left the font with a
new middle name. He had asked for it. There was no argument. And from
that day on, he took pride in signing himself Alphonse Maria Ratisbonne.
The convert did not keep his joy, and the cause
of his joy, a secret. He wanted others to know of the Immaculate Virgin
Mary. He spoke out, in his travels, with the zeal of an apostle. The
Vatican had to be interested. It ordered an official study of the case.
Alphonse Ratisbonne freely consented. What had he to fear? Nothing
whatever, the outcome proved. Cardinal Patrizi, with all the evidence in,
declared the apparition a genuine reality.
Duly impressed, the Holy Father had an
additional reason for thinking that heaven wanted action from him.
Requests from the faithful had begun coming in, urging him to define the
doctrine. They kept on coming in. They were but deepening his own
personal conviction that act he should. He never did. He died before he
could.
Heaven reserved the opportunity for another who
made quick use of it. Ascending the papal throne in 1846, Pius IX was to
have the longest pontificate since St. Peter. But at its very outset the
Immaculate Conception received from the new pontiff a priority over his
other interests. He authorized a special Mass, a special Office, for the
feast. He appointed a committee of experts to study the feasibility of
his raising the doctrine to the dignity of a dogma, which required no
great effort, since Duns Scotus had long ago removed every trace of a
theological difficulty. The committee came to the easy conclusion that no
obstacle stood in the way of an ex cathedra pronouncement.
Yet, considerate of the international college
of bishops under his supremacy, the Holy Father would not proceed
independently of them. He addressed to them an encyclical, bearing the
date of February 2, 1849; it invited them to tell him, their primate, what
they thought and how they felt about the definability of the doctrine.
Did they favor its definition? Did they object to it? Or was it their
mind to let well enough alone? The supreme pontiff awaited their replies
from around the world with patient hope. He was not disappointed. The
nearly unanimous majority answered in favor, and with an emphasis that had
in it something of an explicit sigh of relief: "It's about time!" And of
the minority, 57 out of 603, only five rejected the proposal; one of them
hesitantly at that; while the rest turned it down, not from hostility to
it per se, but only because of its possible inopportunity at the
time.
With the joy of knowing he was nearing the
cherished objective, the Vicar of Christ now commissioned a group of
writers and theologians to put into precise wording the statement of the
dogma and to explain at length the arguments for it from Scripture and
tradition and sacred philosophy. It required better than a year before
the finished product could be shown around to the hierarchy for their
final approval, which again delayed its proclamation. But the Pope of the
Immaculate Conception could afford to bide his time. He had so much of
his long pontificate left to him. Nothing, for all the intricacies, was
going to prevent the fulfillment of his desire. Heaven remained in full
command of the proceedings.
The hour came at last, on December 8, 1854. It
was the golden hour of a lifetime. Pope Pius IX, with his signature
affixed to the majestic Ineffabilis Deus, read it off ex
cathedra to a crowded assembly of cardinals and patriarchs and
bishops. And in reading it to them he was just as truly proclaiming it to
the world; that Mary, the Mother of Christ, our God and Savior, was for
that reason conceived in the state of sanctifying grace and not under the
dominion of Satan. The blemish of original sin, he went on to explain,
did not have to be removed from her soul, as it is removed from other
souls at baptism; no, with Mary, it was never there. It had simply, by a
choice of the Divine Will, been excluded.
Here are the precise words of the dogma, the
answer to centuries of waiting, from God's chosen vicar: "We, by the
authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, and of the Blessed Apostles, Peter and
Paul, and by Our Own, declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine
which holds that the Blessed Virgin Mary at the first moment of her
conception was preserved immune from all stain of original sin by a
singular grace and privilege of almighty God in view of the merits of
Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race." This truth, the proclamation
continued, "has been revealed by God, and therefore must be firmly and
unalterably believed by all the faithful."
It would be worth exchanging any of the world's
choice albums of songs, if that were possible, for a recording of just one
strain of the angelic response in heaven to that clear pronouncement at
St. Peter's. The dogma came as no surprise to the heavenly choirs; nor
for that matter to the faithful on earth who had been believing it right
along; but it made the angels feel good over the honor thus conferred upon
their queen and over the blessed evidence that our slower mentality had
finally caught up with theirs in a full recognition of the truth. There
was no such jubilee in hell, though the devil recognized the truth of the
dogma as well as St. Michael. It stung him to fury. And by this we may
know that it infuriated him: the way his spokesmen on earth, without their
realizing it, began to mouth his criticism of the Immaculate Conception,
his ridicule of it, his hatred of it.
Pope Pius IX stood the brunt of the attack. He
never flinched. He never wavered. He had spoken the truth; he was proud
of it; he would sooner die than recant. He had voiced the sentiments of
heaven, and he knew it.
Nor did heaven desert him in his need. While
the barbs continued to be directed at him well on into the fourth year of
such abuse, the same glorified figure who had appeared to Catherine
Labouré was now repeatedly showing herself to young Bernadette Soubirous
in southern France. Before the year was out, the whole world would know
of the apparitions at the cavernous Rock of Massabielle. Bernadette had a
story to tell, more sensational than fiction would dare to be, which would
overjoy the faithful but confound the skeptic. She told it with candor,
even at her own expense, for in identifying her heavenly visitant of the
grotto she only repeated the name by which the glorious Lady herself chose
to be known, though the embarrassed little visionary admitted that she had
no idea what the words could mean. It was a test of her absolute honesty.
So was this: the outbreak of miracles, which
have not stopped happening at Lourdes, and which from the start brought
the evident sanction of the Almighty upon what Bernadette insisted that
her glorious Lady had said of herself, which a few years earlier the vicar
of her divine Son had said of her. Just an accidental coincidence?
Nothing more? The miracles belie such a hollow interpretation.
Witnesses, from even the ranks of the agnostic, would laugh it to scorn.
For none of these, who went on record, could hear Bernadette pronounce
those identifying words without being overawed at a quality in her voice
which it did not by nature have, and at the look of angel on her face, as
she remembered the holy words form the lips of her vision and with her own
enunciated them ever so carefully in a sublime mimicry not of this world:
I am the Immaculate Conception.
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