Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier Lesson 7: Mary (Part 1)

There are three reasons why we as Catholics would pursue a devotion to Our Lady, and in these three reasons we can find encapsulized the entire teaching regarding our Blessed Mother. The first of the reasons is that she is the Mother of the Redeemer. She is the mother of Christ; therefore, she obviously has a very special place. Secondly, she leads us to Christ. She is a mom and her task is to lead us to heaven, so the only thing she is interested in is uniting us with her Son.

And she will do that in thousands of different ways, just like a mom. Her task is to lead us to Christ. Thirdly, she imitated Jesus most perfectly; therefore, she is the model of all Christians and she is the exemplar of the Church.

Fundamentals of Catholicism by Father Robert Altier

Lesson 7: Mary (Part 1)

[Class begins with a greeting by Father and the recitation of the Hail Mary.]

Now we get to talk about one of my favorite of all topics, and that is the Blessed Virgin Mary, the most wonderful lady to ever have lived. It is certainly well known to most people that Catholics foster a deep devotion to our Blessed Lady, but most people do not really understand that devotion very well. To have at least some Marian devotion is part and parcel of every single Catholic. In the very least, we have to believe in what the Church teaches regarding our Blessed Lady. There are three reasons why we as Catholics would pursue a devotion to Our Lady, and in these three reasons we can find encapsulized the entire teaching regarding our Blessed Mother. The first of the reasons is that she is the Mother of the Redeemer. She is the mother of Christ; therefore, she obviously has a very special place. Secondly, she leads us to Christ. She is a mom and her task is to lead us to heaven, so the only thing she is interested in is uniting us with her Son. And she will do that in thousands of different ways, just like a mom. Her task is to lead us to Christ. Thirdly, she imitated Jesus most perfectly; therefore, she is the model of all Christians and she is the exemplar of the Church.

When you think about it, there is that passage in Saint Luke’s Gospel when the woman cries out to Jesus: Blessed are the breasts that you sucked and the womb that bore you, and He said, Blessed rather is the one who hears the word of God and keeps it. There are many people who would say, “See, Jesus is putting His mother down.” There could be nothing further from the truth because if you look back a few chapters you will find Saint Elizabeth, whom we are told was inspired by the Holy Spirit, crying out in a loud voice and saying: Blessed is she who believed that the Lord’s words to her would be fulfilled. Our Lady, more than anybody who has ever lived, heard the Word of God and kept it. In fact, one of the things I like to ponder is the idea that she was so perfectly conformed to the Word of God that The Word of God, Jesus Christ, became incarnate in her womb. A child is made in the image and likeness of his parents, and we, of course, are made in the image and likeness of God. Well, if Jesus, Who is God, would be conformed to the image of His mother, that means His mother had to be perfectly conformed to the image of God first before God could take human flesh in her womb. There is no one who heard the Word of God and kept it more perfectly than our Blessed Lady. So she is the exemplar for all of us. She is a human person just like us. She is not a goddess. We will make that point a few times in this lesson because that is one of the misconceptions a lot of people have. Earlier, we saw that Jesus is not a human person. Jesus is a divine person. Our Lady is not a divine person. She is a human person. She is just like us; except there are a few differences, such as she never sinned. We will talk about that as we go along in the lesson. We can say, then, that knowledge of Mary is knowledge of Christ. She is the closest and most perfect disciple of Jesus Christ. Again, if you go back to those words of Our Lord: Blessed is the one who hears the word of God and keeps it, then you can say that Mary is more blessed in her discipleship than she is in her maternity. As we will see, she is the Mother of God. When Jesus asked, Who are My mother and My brothers and My sisters, He said, The one who hears the Word of God and keeps it. Who is it that kept the Word of God most perfectly, but Our Lady? If we are blessed in our discipleship, she is more so. But she is more blessed because of her union with Christ spiritually than she is being the mother of Christ, which is obviously the greatest gift anybody could ever be given.

Since all of these things that we can say about Mary are ultimately gifts from God, the ultimate purpose for devotion to Our Lady is to glorify God. We said that everything God does outside of Himself is for His own glory. For us, then, the ultimate purpose of Marian devotion is to give greater glory to God. It is to lead us to commit ourselves to a life which is in absolute conformity to the Will of God; in other words, to go to the one human person who lived her life in absolute perfect conformity to the Will of God and imitate it. That is the easiest thing to do. All you have to do is look at it and say, “You know what, God chose her. Who am I to reject what God has chosen?” That is something we can ponder. Why would we not have a devotion to Our Lady when Jesus did and still does? If we want to say that we are true followers of Jesus Christ, it means we have to imitate Christ in all things, and Jesus had a perfect devotion to His mother. Just think about the commandments. The Fourth Commandment says: Honor your mother and your father. If we translated it truly, what it really says is Glorify your mother and your father. Jesus never sinned. That means He glorified His mother perfectly. We are to imitate Christ in all things, so we are to glorify our mother perfectly. We glorify God in heaven, and we also give glory and honor to our Blessed Lady. That is just part and parcel of what it is to be a Christian person.

We start now with one of the more difficult questions for us to face, that is, does God love some people more than He loves others? The answer is “yes.” When we love, it is in response to someone or to something. God’s love, however, is not a response. God is the Author of love, and God is the cause of goodness. So God’s love causes goodness. In other words, there is going to be found more holiness or more goodness where there is more of God’s love. All of the gifts that God gave to Our Lady were given simply because He loved her more. The reason for this greater love is the vocation to which He had called her. She was specially chosen by God from all eternity to be the Mother of His Son. The reason for all the graces she received was to be able to fulfill her role in salvation history, to be the Mother of the Son of God.

We need to make a few distinctions in this to look at what exactly is stated. If God loves some people more, how does that work? God’s love is infinite, and He loves all of us infinitely. The problem is that we are finite, so we cannot receive the infinitude of God’s love. We all have this capacity to be able to love that needs to be expanded. The one who loves more is the one who can receive more of God’s love, the one who has expanded that capacity. Suppose we take a 55-gallon drum and a child’s beach pail, and we submerge both of them in the river. They both fill up with water, but the water overflows both of them. Which one is more full? Neither. They both are as full as they possibly can be, but the river continually flows over the top. If you think of the river as an infinity of love (the river is not infinite, but think of it in the sense of a love that just continues to flow), it fills both of those containers to overflowing and continues to flow over both of them. So both of them are completely full. But which one can hold more? Obviously, the 55-gallon drum. If the 55-gallon drum can hold more, then more of God’s love can fit there, or God can love that person more. He will love all of us as fully as we possibly can accept. He will love each of us to the fullness of our capacity. So if I have a thimble’s worth of ability to love, and you have a 55-gallong drum’s worth of ability to love, God is going to fill them both completely full and He is going to overflow them both. But you can obtain more than I can, and so you will be holier, if that is the case. There will be more holiness and more goodness because there is more of God’s love there. If I continue to work on it, I can hopefully expand my ability up to the pail’s size, and maybe eventually up to the 55-gallon drum’s size. But the simple fact is that we have this capacity to be able to love and God will love all of us as much as we can possibly be loved. In the one who can receive more of God’s love (that is, the one with the greater capacity), more of God’s love resides there; therefore, God can love that person more. That is exactly what He did with our Blessed Lady: He loved her more. It makes sense. She was His mom. Ask any male here: Who do you love the most? Your mom. If you are married, hopefully that has switched, but nonetheless, mom has a very special place in your heart. Jesus is a human male and He did not get married, so who did He love the most? His mom – and He still does. That is never going to change. The simple reality is that He gave her a greater capacity; He loved her more than anybody. It only makes perfect sense.

We know from our faith that the coming of Christ is intimately connected with the fall of our first parents. This means that God decreed from all eternity that His Son would become a man. God knew that humanity was going to fall. Therefore, right from the very beginning, before God even created anything, He had decreed that His Son would be a man. In that decree from all eternity, God decreed that His Son would have a mother. He needed a mother, not due to necessity, but due to divine decree. Adam did not need a mother; God simply created him. Eve, obviously, did not either. And so God did not have to have His Son be born of a woman. But that was the decree of God from the very beginning. In fact, you will see it in what is known as the protoevangelium, which is Genesis 3:15. Protoevangelium means “the first gospel.” It is the first proclamation of the Redeemer: There will be enmity between you and the woman. There is a woman right there in the first proclamation of the Gospel. It is not talking about Eve and all of her children; it is talking about one woman and one male offspring who will come in the future. When you look throughout the Old Testament, you are going to find a number of other places where there are prefigurations, such as in Judah, Esther, Deborah, and a number of other places where holy women are prefigurations of the victory that is going to be Our Lady’s. You have passages like Isaiah 7:14: A virgin will be with child and bear a son. There are a number of places where it is very clearly laid out that a woman is going to be intimately involved in the work of redemption.

It only makes sense. Saint Paul tells us that Jesus is the new Adam. If Jesus is the new Adam, there has to be a new Eve. Adam was not all by himself in the Garden, and he did not sin all by himself. There was a woman who was involved with the sin, so there would be a woman who would be involved in the redemption from sin. And that is exactly what we have. The Fathers of the Church would say of Our Lady that she untied the knot which Eve tied. Well, how do you untie a knot? You have to do it exactly in reverse. That is what Our Lady did. You look at Our Lady and you look at Eve, and you see that they are exactly the opposite in what they did. Right down the line, you see the way all that works. God decreed that His Son would need a mother. In Mary, God created a suitable dwelling place for the beginning and growth of His Son. That is what He made Our Lady for.

We say that Mary is full of grace. It is the angel Gabriel who tells us that. In fact, it is a wonderful little passage in Saint Luke where he says simply, Chaire kekaritomine in Greek, which means “Hail, full of grace.” Now the important thing is that he did not say, “Chaire Maria kekaritomine,” but he said just simply, Chaire kekaritomine. He left her name out. In the Hail Mary, we put her name in there: “Hail, Mary, full of grace.” But that is not in Scripture. The Scripture simply says, Hail, full of grace. Pope John Paul II commented on that in a very insightful point he made that the angel addresses her as though this is her proper title. He did not call her by her name because “full of grace” said more about who this person is than her name did. So he refers to her as “full of grace” as though that is her name. That is a pretty wonderful thing, a very powerful point. He did not say, “Hail, you who have a lot of grace.” He said, “Hail, you who are full of grace.”

Is Our Lady full of grace by her own doing? Or is this purely a gift from God? It is a gratuitous gift from God. This is from the very beginning. If she is full of grace, it means there was never any sin. This is the Scriptural foundation for the teaching of the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception is a point that Catholics get confused about. If you take a poll of most Catholics on the 8th of December and ask them, “What feast are we celebrating today,” they would say, “Oh, the Immaculate Conception. That’s the day Jesus was conceived in the womb of Mary.” Wait a minute. When is the birth of Jesus? The 25th of December. It is either a very long gestation that Our Lady had, a year and a month, or it is a very short gestation of only 3 weeks. Our Lady’s birthday is on the 8th of September, nine months after the 8th of December when she was conceived in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne. The word immaculate means “without stain.” It means without the stain of original sin. The conception of Jesus is called the Virginal Conception, a virgin conceived. Our Lady’s conception is called the Immaculate Conception.

Our Lady was given fullness of grace because of her predestined vocation to be the Mother of God and so that she would be able to fulfill the divine Will. You must understand that Mary was not forced by God in any way to be His mother. She had free will just like all of us do. Consequently, she had to make the free choice. The angel did not come down and announce to Mary that she was going to be the Mother of God. He came down and asked Our Lady if she would be the Mother of God, and he had to wait until she gave her consent. If any of you have the Breviary, that is the prayer of the Church, my favorite reading of the entire year in the Breviary is the Office of Readings from December 20. It is from a sermon of Saint Bernard on the Annunciation. It is just the most beautiful thing. The way he sets it up is magnificent. You can almost get the feel of the angels up in heaven sitting on the edge of their seats (if an angel could sit on the edge of a seat!) and waiting in anticipation. This is the moment they have been waiting for since the time they were created. It is time for the Redeemer to be conceived, and they all know it. The angel Gabriel is sent down to Our Lady, and they are waiting for the answer. Saint Bernard sets it up and goes on and on about all these things. You already know what the answer is because you have read it hundreds of times. Yet he just has you drawn into this. It is the most beautiful reading. If you can get a hold of it, it is December 20 in the Office of Readings in the 4-volume Breviary. It is the most wonderful thing of the year. There are lots of beautiful things in there, but that is my favorite. Anyway, Our Lady was not forced to be the Mother of God. She had to make the free choice to be the Mother of God.

Now we ask the question: Why Mary? Why did God choose to make Mary His mother? We do not know. He could have chosen any woman at any time. From all eternity, He chose that He would create our Blessed Lady for that specific purpose, but it could have been any woman here. He chose to create her at that time in history, but it could have been at any time. That was by God’s free choice. We do not know why it was Our Lady, but that was who God chose to create as His mother.

Sin, of course, is in complete opposition to God, and since the purpose of the Redeemer was to free us from sin, it is certainly most proper and fitting that He would not be directly associated with sin in any personal way. So in His providence, God took care of this by allowing our Blessed Lady to be conceived without original sin. As I mentioned earlier, Our Lord loves His mother more than anyone else. You can ask yourself about your own mother. What would you do for her? Well, the best you can say is “If I could, I would. I will do anything for my mother that I am able to do.” Then why would we suggest anything different about Our Lord? He is God. He is able to do it and He did, that is, He created her without sin. Think about the relationship of males and their mothers. Females and their fathers have the same kind of thing, but males and their mothers is always a very interesting thing. I remember when I used to watch football on TV. You see these great big men on the TV, 6’8” and 400 pounds, or whatever they weigh these days. They wave at the camera and what do they say? “Hi, Mom.” I never, ever saw one that said, “Hi, Dad.” Never. For every last one of them it was “Hi, Mom.” There is that relationship that boys have with their mothers. That also brings us to the point of saying that you would never want to mess with the mom of somebody who has the ability to judge you. Think about that. Our Lord is a Jewish male and His mother is exceedingly important to Him. If we disrespect Our Lady, we are going to have to face her Son one day and explain to Him why we thought we were okay in disrespecting His mother. It will not be a happy day. So we are to do with His mother as He did, that is, to love her and to cherish her and hold her in the highest regard.

With regard to Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, she was conceived through the normal sexual union of her parents, Saint Anne and Saint Joachim. She was conceived through the normal marital relations of her parents, and in no way was she different in that than us. It is just that by a singular grace which God gave to her, He kept her free from original sin. Some people have asked whether it is possible that even for a split second or some short amount of time Mary was subject to the power of Satan, that she might have been conceived with sin and then it was removed. The answer is “no” because Our Lady’s victory over Satan would not have been perfect as it is foreshadowed in Genesis 3:15. There is one person who was conceived with original sin and then was born without it. That is Saint John the Baptist. At the time of the Visitation when Saint John the Baptist leapt in his mother’s womb, at that moment original sin was removed from his soul. He was conceived with original sin, but he was born without original sin. Our Lord, of course, is not a human person and He never had original sin. Original sin, by the way, is passed on by the father. The Holy Spirit is the “father” of Jesus, that is, He was conceived through the power of the Holy Spirit, so there is no original sin there. But Our Lady did not have original sin either. She is the only human person conceived without original sin. This is purely a gift from God. She is a child of Adam, just like all of us, so by nature she should have had original sin. But she was given this singular grace which excluded any possibility of sin in the light of her call to be the Mother of God. As I mentioned earlier, we see this in the angel’s greeting to Our Lady as full of grace.

It is important to keep in mind that this was a singular grace given to our Blessed Mother. In no other way was she different from us than her sinlessness. That is a huge difference, but the fact of the matter is that unlike Jesus who does not have sin – He is God – Our Lady is one of us, pure and simple. She is merely and purely a human creature. Jesus is God, Who took a human nature to Himself. Our Lady is human.

As a daughter of Adam, she also needed to be redeemed. Some people say, “But if Mary was conceived without original sin then she didn’t have to be redeemed.” That is not true. Our Lady needed to be redeemed. Her freedom from sin was to be the Mother of God, not to receive all of the privileges that Adam and Eve had. In the Garden before they fell, Adam and Eve did not have to be redeemed. But Our Lady did not receive all of the privileges of Adam and Eve, and one of those privileges was not needing a redeemer. Our Lady needed a redeemer. For this reason, we can say that she was kept free from sin in light of the redemptive death of Christ on the Cross. God is eternal and He sees everything happening in the present. Everything is a permanent “now” when we talk about eternity. If we think about that, then Our Lady received the grace that Jesus won for us on the Cross, even though He would not be going to the Cross for another fifty years at the point of her Immaculate Conception. But because God sees everything in the present, that grace was applied to Our Lady. The grace of redemption was applied to her at the moment of her conception. That is why she was without sin. This is not by her own doing; it is a purely gratuitous grace on the part of God.

When we look at that and remember that there is no time in God, the difference between us and the people who lived before Christ is that we know we are redeemed. They did not. They were looking forward to the Redeemer in time, but they are saved only by the death of Christ on the Cross. The redemption of Christ had to be applied to the people of the Old Testament times. The difference between them and us is that we know we are redeemed and we know who the Redeemer is. They did not, yet they were redeemed in the exact same way. They were all redeemed through the death of Christ on the Cross.

Was Mary ever subject to an evil desire? In other words, did she even have the desire to do something that was wrong? The answer is “no.” God spared her all the difficulties of concupiscence in order to fulfill her role in salvation history. The word concupiscence refers to the various bodily passions, our desires to eat and drink and the pleasures of the body, whether that is the comforts or the sexual pleasures; all the pleasures of the flesh is basically what that means. The word concupiscence comes from two Latin words which mean “with seizing.” You know how hunger pangs just seize you all of a sudden. That is the whole thing of concupiscence – they are passions that seize us. Concupiscence is an effect of original sin, so Our Lady was free of that. But, as I mentioned earlier, she was not free of everything that came along with original sin. Suffering and death are also part of the effect of original sin. Was Our Lady free of those? She was free of concupiscence, but was she free of suffering and death? The answer is “no.” The reason is that to be free of these was not necessary for her role as the Mother of God. In fact, they became very important to her role (that is, the ability to suffer and die) as spiritual mother of all believers. We will talk more about her spiritual maternity later. She was kept free of some of the effects of original sin, but not all.

We have seen that Mary was free of original sin from the moment of her conception, but the Church also teaches that Our Lady never sinned even once during her entire lifetime. The reason she did not sin, and in fact that she was unable to sin, was, first of all, her constant awareness of God and living always in His presence, and secondly, from her reception of special and extraordinary graces from God. Where Adam and Eve did not have sin and they fell (in fact, they fell pretty easily as it appears), so Our Lady received extraordinary graces from God and always lived in His presence so that her will was always conformed to His. The thing to understand with this point of Our Lady is that because of the graces God gave her she did not have the capacity to sin. Thanks be to God, there was one of us who actually did it right! How grateful we need to be to Our Lord for the graces He gave to Our Lady, but how grateful we need to be to our Blessed Mother for cooperating with those graces so that we can hold up at least one among humanity.

To see Mary as simply being sinless is the negative way of looking at this. From the positive side, what we can say is that Mary is the holiest person with the exception of her Son to have ever lived. She is the holiest person ever. To be holy means to be God-like. So she is the most God-like human person to have ever walked the face of the earth. This also translates into eternal life where she is higher than the angels. That simply means that she loves more than they do. It also shows that she received more actual graces and possessed the proportionate perfection. You have to remember that there are different levels in heaven. The person who loves the most is the one who has the highest position in heaven. Our Lady loves more than the angels do. In fact, the saints tell us that Our Lady loves more than all of the angels and saints and all of us combined, which makes sense if you think about it. From the moment of her conception, she is without sin and she is filled with extraordinary graces to be able to love God and conform herself perfectly to His Will. At every single instant of her life, she loved God more. That capacity to love just continued to grow and to grow. If you just think of it doubling over on itself, it is nearly infinite. Obviously, she is not infinite; she is finite. And so we can say that her ability to love is as close to infinite as a finite creature is able to do. She always loved more. At every single instant of her existence, she loved God more. Therefore, she has the highest place in heaven.

Remember when I challenged you and said you could be second. In no place do we hear about who is second. We could talk about Saint John the Baptist, or we could talk about Saint Joseph, but nowhere does it say that they absolutely have it wrapped up. We know Our Lady has first place in heaven, but there is no reason in the world why you could not have second. All you have to do is love more than everyone else. It is just that simple. Now it is not a competition of arrogance, because that goes exactly the opposite of love. Along with love comes humility, and the height of charity is equal to the depth of humility. Our Lady is the most humble person ever to have lived; therefore, she is the one who loved the most. If we are arrogantly going to think that we are going to love more than somebody else, we are actually going to go the opposite direction. We simply need to strive for humility and charity. I can guarantee that if you can continue to grow in love for God, you will be able to surpass your guardian angel. And there is nobody who will be happier about that than your guardian angel. Imagine when he stands before God and says, “Look at the one you gave me! Guess what? This one loves more than me!” The angel will be extraordinarily happy if you can love more than he does. So go for it.

I always tell people that there is somebody I know who once said to me, “You know, Father, all I want is the bottom rung in Purgatory.” I said, “That’s not a very good idea.” “Yes, but once you get to Purgatory, you’re guaranteed to go to heaven. So I just want the bottom rung in Purgatory.” Well, here is my way of looking at it. Aim high. Go for second place. If you do not make it and you catch the bottom rung in Purgatory, you are going to be just fine. However, if you aim for the bottom rung in Purgatory and you miss, you are lost forever. So do not aim for as little as you possibly can because that is to say “How little can I love God for the rest of eternity?” It is the wrong attitude to have. Why do you want to love God as little as you possibly can when you could love Him more? Remember, in heaven you are going to be loved to the fullness of your capacity. Why do you want to be loved as little as you can possibly be loved? Granted, all of us can say, “If I can just get the back corner in heaven, I’ll be fine.” True. As long as we get there, we will be fine. But do not aim for the back corner. Aim for the front corner. Aim for front and center. If you get the back corner, praise God, but do not aim low – aim high. To do that simply means to love. That is what it is all about. That is what Jesus commanded us to do.

It is a sad thing that He has to come and command us to do the very thing He created us to do, isn’t it? It tells us how badly we have been messed up by original sin when God has to become one of us and give us a commandment to do the very thing He made us to do. It is what should be the most natural thing in the world to us – to love – and God has to command us to do it because we cannot. And we still do not understand it. Just go out and look around the world. There are very, very few people who really have a capacity to love. There are a lot of selfish people, but love is the opposite of selfishness. When we see all the self-centeredness that is in our society, we realize that not very many people really can love. And when we see somebody who does, it just astounds us all because it is so beautiful.

We can do the same; the problem is that we do not want to because we like being selfish and we are afraid to give up the things that stand in the way. We like all of our junk. Why? What good is it? We have been convinced by the advertising people that we need all of this stuff. For what? What do you need it all for? It drags you down. Get rid of the garbage and you will be happy. I guarantee it. There is nothing more wonderful than freedom from all of the anchors that you have holding you down! How can you soar like an eagle when you have all this junk attached to you? You can’t. God wants us to love, so we need to be able to lift ourselves up instead of being dragged down. That means we have to have our hearts free. It is not that difficult to do; it is just that we are afraid of it because we will be different from everybody else. People will think we are weird. Thanks be to God! If people in this world think you are weird, you must be doing something right. And if people in this world think you are all right, you better look out. There must be something wrong because if you are just like everyone else, that is not a good sign in this world today. We need to be like Jesus. People two thousand years ago thought He was weird. People today think He is even more weird. So if you are like Jesus, people are going to hate you, people are going to reject you. And that is our problem: We do not want to be rejected, so we want to be like everyone else. Well, if we want to go where everyone else is going, that is not good.

It is like the story Fulton Sheen was telling about this guy who was asking some questions when he was talking about Jonah and the whale. This guy raised his hand and said, “Do you really believe that Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days?” Fulton Sheen said, “Yes, I do.” Then the man said, “Well, how do you know for sure?” Bishop Sheen said, “When I get to heaven, I’ll ask him.” And the man said, “What if Jonah’s not in heaven?” “Then you can ask him.” You can ponder that. If we want to be like everyone else, we are going to go the wrong direction. We need to be heaven-bound, and that is where we need to set our goal.

Back to Our Lady. After her Son, Mary is the pinnacle of God’s creation. I think it is in either Zechariah or Zephaniah where it says that humanity is the crown of God’s creation. A crown has to have a crown jewel, and the crown jewel of God’s creation is Our Lady, the most beautiful and most perfect creature that God made. We looked at the creation and talked about how woman is the highest being that God created. She is the most perfect being God created. There is an order of perfection in creation, and the woman is the last one created. Therefore, she is the most perfect of all God’s creatures. And of all women, who is the one who is most blessed? Our Lady. That is what Saint Elizabeth called her, the most blessed among women. Our Lady is the highest of all women, and women are the highest of God’s creatures, so she is the crown jewel in God’s crown of creation. She is the pinnacle of God’s creation and also with regard to the virtues. The theological virtues (which are faith, hope, and charity), she had those the most. The moral virtues (which are also known as the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude), she had those to a proportionate degree as well because she had a greater capacity for all of these things.

Again, we must always remember that Mary is a creature. Therefore, she always remains finite. She is not infinite; she is not God. Her fullness of grace, therefore, does not compare with the fullness of grace in her Son. Jesus is the source of grace for both Mary and us. He is not able to increase in grace due to His hypostatic union, but Mary was able to increase in grace and she did. As she knew more about her Son’s mission, she was able to grow closer to Him; she was able, therefore, to grow in grace. We can say that Christ was full of grace in an absolute sense. He is God; He is grace itself; He is absolutely full of grace. In Him, there is no room for growth. But Mary is full of grace in a relative sense. In other words, at every moment of her life, Mary was as full of grace as she possibly could have been. Then at every instant, she loved more, which means she received more grace, which means she was able to love more, which means she received more grace again. That is the nature of love. God loves us and we return the love. When we return that love, it opens our hearts to be able to receive more of His love. And when we receive more of His love, it gives us the capacity to love in return even more, which opens us up to love more again. That is what love is all about. Our Lady did that perfectly. At every moment, she always loved more. Therefore, at every moment she was always able to receive more love.

And Mary is the mother of whom? She is, of course, the mother of Jesus. As we saw earlier, Jesus is God. To be a mother means to conceive, to nourish, and to give birth. In the process, a new human being begins to exist. God, however, is eternal and infinite. He has no beginning. Therefore, God has no mother. If a new human being begins to exist at the moment of conception and God has no beginning, how can we say that God has a mother? Well, that was what Nestorius was wondering. We saw his heresy in a previous lesson. For you moms who are here, are you a mother of a person or are you a mother of a nature? Did you ever give birth to a nature? That would be a problem. You gave birth to a person who has a human nature. Mary gave birth to a person also, and that person is God. He is a divine person with a human nature and a divine nature. We said that Jesus is not a human person; He is a divine person. The person to whom Mary gave birth is divine, so Mary gave birth to God. She gave birth to a divine person. We talked about how God died on the Cross because Jesus had the capacity to die. As God, He did not have the capacity to die. But it is a person who dies, not a nature; therefore, the person died on the Cross. Because He had a human nature, He was able to die. He took the human nature in His mother’s womb, and His humanity began to exist at the instant of His conception. So He was able to be born of a mother, but the person who was born was God.

Was Mary free to choose whether or not she wanted to be the Mother of God? I already answered that, and the answer is “yes.” God’s grace enabled her to consent to the offer, but it also enabled her to do so freely. When we talked about Jesus in the Garden, there was a question about His freedom, that if He was not free then we are not saved. The same is true of Our Lady. Perfect freedom is acting in accordance with God’s Will. That is freedom. God only wants what is best for you. God never wants the second best. He only wants what is the very best for you. Therefore, if you choose to do God’s Will, you are using your freedom to choose to do what is the best. That is what Our Lord did in the Garden. That is what Our Lady did at the moment of the conception of Christ. We see that Our Lady is not some poor, passive, little agent in the drama of our redemption, but rather she was highly active. Redemption would not have happened without her. In fact, in a quote that I alluded to earlier, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium said: The Incarnation should be preceded by assent on the part of the predestined mother, so that just as a woman had a share in bringing about death, so also a woman will contribute to life. There is that point of Mary being the new Eve.

After the birth of Jesus, did Mary and Joseph engage in normal marital relations, or did Mary remain a virgin? From the earliest times, the Church has proclaimed the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. It is a dogma, which means an infallible teaching that Mary is a perpetual virgin. This is understood in three parts: before, during, and after childbirth. It is also understood in two ways: virginity in the sense of never having engaged in intercourse, and virginity in the sense of physical integrity. When we are talking about Mary, we are talking about both types of virginity. She never engaged in marital relations, but she also remains fully intact physically. Now the question is: Why would we even have to discuss that? It comes down to the birth of Jesus. In other words, if He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Our Lady was completely physically intact. So then what happened in His birth? We will talk about that later. All Christians believe in the virginal conception of Christ. It is right there and could not be any more clear in Sacred Scripture. We cannot miss that. This is when Mary conceived Christ in her womb by the power of the Holy Spirit outside of the normal means of conception through intercourse. With regard to the birth of Jesus, the idea of virginity here has to do with the bodily integrity of our Blessed Lady. Again, having not had intercourse, the hymen would still be intact. So what the Church is teaching here is that even in the birth of Christ, the physical integrity of our Blessed Lady was not compromised.

What this obviously implies is a miraculous form of childbirth without the normal opening of the womb or the normal pains of birth. The birth of Jesus was a miraculous birth. The Fathers of the Church consider this a privilege of Christ more than as a privilege of Our Lady, and the privilege of Christ was based on the anticipation of His freedom from the material world (which flowed from His resurrection). Like His conception, His birth is miraculous, and both find their explanation in the power of God.

This is seen more as a privilege of Jesus than it is a privilege of Mary. It is a glory of Jesus because it is a sign of the beginning of a recreated human race. The easiest way to say this is that if He got in without the normal opening, He could get out without the normal opening. And He did. How the birth happened, we do not know. We are not told. All we know is that it was miraculous. One moment He was inside, the next moment He was outside without the normal means. It is just like what happened when He rose from the dead: One moment He was in the tomb, the next moment He was out of the tomb. He did not need to have the tomb opened because He could go right through the wall, just as He did with His apostles.

He is God; He can do whatever He wants.

If we hold to the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, how can we explain the passages in Scripture which talk about the brothers and sisters of the Lord? What about in Luke 1:27 where we read that Mary gave birth to her firstborn son, or in Matthew 1:25 where it says that Joseph had no relations with her at any time before she bore a son? I will answer that question in the next lesson.

[End of Lesson 7]

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