Posted on 06/29/2006 5:36:14 PM PDT by NYer
ROME, JUNE 29, 2006 (Zenit.org).- An Egyptian Muslim and deputy director of a prominent Italian newspaper suggested that Mary could be the figure who brings Christians and Muslims together.
Magdi Allam of Il Corriere della Sera spoke to ZENIT about the appeal he launched in the pages of the national daily newspaper to Muslims living in Italy to visit the Marian shrines in their host country.
The journalist said that he is convinced that the Virgin Mary is a meeting point between Christians and Muslims.
"Mary is a figure present in the Koran, which dedicates an entire sura [chapter ed.n.] to her and mentions her some thirty times. In Muslim countries there are Marian shrines that are the object of veneration and pilgrimage by Christian and Muslim faithful," he said.
"Therefore, I believe that if this happens in Muslim countries, why can't it happen in a Christian country, especially in a historical phase in which we need to define symbols, values and figures that unite religions, spiritualities and cultures?" he asked.
In Allam's opinion, "the Marian pilgrimage of Loreto -- Italy's National Shrine -- could represent a moment of meeting and spiritual gathering between Muslims and Catholics, around Mary, a religious figure that is venerated by both religions."
Vittorio Messori, author of book-interviews with Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI), also wrote in Il Corriere della Sera on June 15 in support of Allam.
He said that the dialogue between Christians and Muslims "can begin afresh from Mary."
Where in the Bible does it say" Mother of God" ?
What we obtain through Mary is Jesus. As to the difference between Catholic doctrine and the Scriptures, I find a great deal in the first two chapters of St. Luke. The Holy Spirit works through this girl and by her the Son becomes incarnate. For this reason the Ecumenical councils called her Theotokos, God-bearer. They did this to make perfectly clear that HE was God. The titles assigned her are intended to glorify HIM. The doctrine is sola gratia.
You mean our recently-deceased spiritual leader. The fact that you bring that up, as deplorable as it was, is a big bait-and-switch.
Context, context, context:
So you will ignore everything I posted regarding the excessive praise, etc. of Mary.
It is this kind of response( not actually answering direct questions) that makes discussion and dialog impossible.
"And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" - Luke 1: 43
The emphasis there is the fact that Elizabeth said "mother of my Lord," and when you see "Lord" being used, it can only mean one thing: God.
"And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee". Do you know the basis or background for Chesterton to write these words? In all my 70 years I have never heard a fellow Christian of any denomination expressing hatred toward the mother of Christ.
Nonsense ... I don't bash the Bible and only offer clarification to Protestant misunderstandings. Like our Protestant brethren, Catholics embrace Holy Scripture.
In 1854 the Immaculate Conception of Mary was proclaimed and since then it has been taught that she was without sin.
There is biblical support for the Church’s teaching on the Immaculate Conception. One must understand what the Church means (and doesn’t mean) by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Pope Pius IX, in his constitution Ineffabilis Deus (issued December 8, 1854), taught that Mary, "from the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin." The doctrine includes the assertion that Mary was perpetually free from all actual sin (willful disobedience of God, either venial or mortal).
You and several others have pointed to Luke 1:47, Romans 3:10-12 and Romans 5:12. These verses seem to rule out any possibility that Mary was sinless.
The Immaculate Conception emphasizes four truths: (1) Mary did need a savior; (2) her savior was Jesus Christ; (3) Mary’s salvation was accomplished by Jesus through his work on the Cross; and (4) Mary was saved from sin, but in a different and more glorious way than the rest of us are. Let’s consider the first and easiest of the three objections.
The notion that God is the only being without sin is quite false--and even Protestants think so. Adam and Eve, before the fall, were free from sin, and they weren’t gods, the serpent’s assertions to the contrary notwithstanding. (One must remember that Mary was not the first immaculate human being, even if she was the first to be conceived immaculately.)
The angels in heaven are not gods, but they were created sinless and have remained so ever since. The saints in heaven are not gods, although each of them is now completely sinless (Rev. 14:5; 21:27).
The second and third arguments are related. Mary needed Jesus as her savior. His death on the Cross saved her, as it saves us, but its saving effects were applied to her (unlike to us) at the moment of her conception. (Keep in mind that the Crucifixion is an eternal event and that the appropriation of salvation through Christ’s death isn’t impeded by time or space.)
Medieval theologians developed an analogy to explain how and why Mary needed Jesus as her savior. A man (each of us) is walking along a forest path, unaware of a large pit a few paces directly ahead of him. He falls headlong into the pit and is immersed in the mud (original sin) it contains. He cries out for help, and his rescuer (the Lord Jesus) lowers a rope down to him and hauls him back up to safety. The man says to his rescuer, "Thank you for saving me," recalling the words of the psalmist: The Lord "stooped toward me and heard my cry. He drew me out of the pit of destruction, out of the mud of the swamp; he set my feet upon a crag" (Psalm 40:2-4).
A woman (Mary), approaches the same pit, but as she began to fall into the pit her rescuer reaches out and stops her from falling in. She cries out, "Thank you for saving me" (Luke 1:47). Like this woman, Mary was no less "saved" than any other human being has been saved. She was just saved anticipatorily, before contracting original sin. Each of us is permitted to become dirtied with original sin, but she was not. God hates sin, so this was a far better way.
Paul’s statements in Romans chapters 3 and 5 (no one is righteous; no one seeks God; no one does good; all have sinned) should not be taken in a crassly literal and universal sense--if they are, irreconcilable contradictions will arise. Consider Luke 1:6. Common sense tells us whole groups of people are exempt from Paul’s statement that "all have sinned." Aborted infants cannot sin, nor can young children or severely retarded people. But Paul didn’t mention such obvious exceptions. He was writing to adults in our state of life.
If certain groups are exempt from the "all have sinned" rubric, then these verses can’t be used to argue against Mary’s Immaculate Conception, since hers would be an exceptional case too, one not needing mention given the purpose of Paul’s discussion and his intended audience.
Now let’s consider what the Bible has to say in favor of the Catholic position. It’s important to recognize that neither the words "Immaculate Conception" nor the precise formula adopted by the Church to enunciate this truth are found in the Bible. This doesn’t mean the doctrine isn’t biblical, only that the truth of the Immaculate Conception, like the truths of the Trinity and Jesus’ hypostatic union (that Jesus was incarnated as God and man, possessing completely and simultaneously two natures, divine and human, in one divine person), is mentioned either in other words or only indirectly.
Look first at two passages in Luke 1. In verse 28, the angel Gabriel greets Mary as "kecharitomene" ("full of grace" or "highly favored"). This is a recognition of her sinless state. In verse 42 Elizabeth greets Mary as "blessed among women." The original import of this phrase is lost in English translation. Since neither the Hebrew nor Aramaic languages have superlatives (best, highest, tallest, holiest), a speaker of those languages would have say, "You are tall among men" or "You are wealthy among men" to mean "You are the tallest" or "You are the wealthiest." Elizabeth’s words mean Mary was the holiest of all women.
The Church understands Mary to be the fulfillment of three Old Testament types: the cosmos, Eve, and the ark of the covenant. A type is a person, event, or thing in the Old Testament which foreshadows or symbolizes some future reality God brings to pass. (See these verses for Old Testament types fulfilled in the New Testament: Col. 2:17, Heb. 1:1, 9:9, 9:24, 10:1; 1 Cor. 15:45-49; Gal. 4:24-25.)
Some specific examples of types: Adam was a type of Christ (Rom. 5:14); Noah’s Ark and the Flood were types of the Church and baptism (1 Peter 3:19-21); Moses, who delivered Israel from the bondage of slavery in Egypt, was a type of Christ, who saves us from the bondage of slavery to sin and death; circumcision foreshadowed baptism; the slain passover lamb in Exodus 12: 21-28 was a symbol of Jesus, the Lamb of God, being slain on the Cross to save sinners. The important thing to understand about a type is that its fulfillment is always more glorious, more profound, more "real" than the type itself.
Mary’s Immaculate Conception is foreshadowed in Genesis 1, where God creates the universe in an immaculate state, free from any blemish or stain of sin or imperfection. This is borne out by the repeated mention in Genesis 1 of God beholding his creations and saying they were "very good." Out of pristine matter the Lord created Adam, the first immaculately created human being, forming him from the "womb" of the Earth. The immaculate elements from which the first Adam received his substance foreshadowed the immaculate mother from whom the second Adam (Romans 5:14) took his human substance.
The second foreshadowing of Mary is Eve, the physical mother of our race, just as Mary is our spiritual mother through our membership in the Body of Christ (Rev. 12:17). What Eve spoiled through disobedience and lack of faith (Genesis 3), Mary set aright through faith and obedience (Luke 1:38).
We see a crucial statement in Genesis 3:15: "I will put enmity between you [Satan] and the woman, between your seed and her seed; he will crush your head, and you will strike at his heel." This passage is especially significant in that it refers to the "seed of the woman," a singular usage. The Bible, following normal biology, otherwise only refers to the seed of the man, the seed of the father, but never to the seed of the woman. Who is the woman mentioned here? The only possibility is Mary, the only woman to give birth to a child without the aid of a human father, a fact prophesied in Isaiah 7:14.
If Mary were not completely sinless this prophesy becomes untenable. Why is that? The passage points to Mary’s Immaculate Conception because it mentions a complete enmity between the woman and Satan. Such an enmity would have been impossible if Mary were tainted by sin, original or actual (see 2 Corinthians 6:14). This line of thinking rules out Eve as the woman, since she clearly was under the influence of Satan in Genesis 3.
The third and most compelling type of Mary’s Immaculate Conception is the ark of the covenant. In Exodus 20 Moses is given the Ten Commandments. In chapters 25 through 30 the Lord gives Moses a detailed plan for the construction of the ark, the special container which would carry the Commandments. The surprising thing is that five chapters later, staring in chapter 35 and continuing to chapter 40, Moses repeats word for word each of the details of the ark’s construction.
Why? It was a way of emphasizing how crucial it was for the Lord’s exact specifications to be met (Ex. 25:9, 39:42-43). God wanted the ark to be as perfect and unblemished as humanly possible so it would be worthy of the honor of bearing the written Word of God. How much more so would God want Mary, the ark of the new covenant, to be perfect and unblemished since she would carry within her womb the Word of God in flesh.
When the ark was completed, "the cloud covered the meeting tent and the glory of the Lord filled the dwelling. Moses could not enter the meeting tent, because the cloud settled down upon it and the glory of the Lord filled the dwelling" (Ex. 40:34-38). Compare this with the words of Gabriel to Mary in Luke 1:35.
There’s another striking foreshadowing of Mary as the new ark of the covenant in 2 Samuel 6. The Israelites had lost the ark in a battle with their enemies, the Philistines, and had recently recaptured it. King David sees the ark being brought to him and, in his joy and awe, says "Who am I that the ark of the Lord should come to me?" (1 Sam. 6:9).
Compare this with Elizabeth’s nearly identical words in Luke 1:43. Just as David leapt for joy before the ark when it was brought into Jerusalem (2 Sam. 6:14-16), so John the Baptist leapt for joy in Elizabeth’s womb when Mary, the ark of the new covenant, came into her presence (Luke 1:44). John’s leap was for precisely the same reason as David’s--not primarily because of the ark itself, but because of what the ark contained, the Word of God.
Another parallel may be found in 2 Samuel 6:10-12 where we read that David ordered the ark diverted up into the hill country of Judea to remain with the household of Obededom for three months. This parallels the three-month visit Mary made at Elizabeth’s home in the hill country of Judea (Luke 1:39-45, 65). While the ark remained with Obededom it "blessed his household." This is an Old Testament way of saying the fertility of women, crops, and livestock was increased. Notice that God worked this same miracle for Elizabeth and Zachariah in their old age as a prelude to the greater miracle he would work in Mary.
The Mary/ark imagery appears again in Revelation 11:19 and 12:1-17, where she is called the mother of all "those who keep God’s commandments and bear witness to Jesus" (verse 17). The ark symbolism found in Luke 1 and Revelation 11 and 12 was not lost on the early Christians. They could see the parallels between the Old Testament’s description of the ark and the New Testament’s discussion of Mary’s role.
Granted, none of these verses "proves" Mary’s Immaculate Conception, but they all point to it. After all, the Bible nowhere says Mary committed any sin or languished under original sin. As far as explicit statements are concerned, the Bible is silent on most of the issue, yet all the biblical evidence supports the Catholic teaching.
A last thought. If you could have created your own mother, wouldn’t you have made her the most beautiful, virtuous, perfect woman possible? Jesus, being God, did create his own mother (Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2), and he did just that--he created her immaculate and, in his mercy and generosity, kept her that way.
Source
"If you could have created..."
You do not need to second guess God.
It is beyond my imagination to think that I could work everything out with my tiny mind.
Reeks of hubris to me to insist on what "must be the case logically if such and such".
The reason we have the Bible is to explain that which God chooses to explain. Anything else is just vanity.
Prove it!
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
There ya go. :)
What about coldness? Protestants pay about as much attention to Mary as Muslims do to Jesus.
I think you'd be better served in asking this question of an actual Catholic, rather than of someone who has merely read some Catholic doctrine on the internet ;-)
I'll try to summarize how I understand the difference between the Catholic and Protestant conceptions of the "redemption." For Protestants G-d and man are "joined" only at the person of J*sus and no where else. With Catholics and Orthodox J*sus is like the corner of the paper towel placed in a spill of water . . . contact begins there and then spreads from the corner throughout the towel (the Eastern Orthodox are quite up front about the fact that chr*stianity is not so much about the "redemption" as it is the theosis ("defiication") of man. Put another way, to Protestants the "redemption" of J*sus is vicarious while to Catholics and Orthodox it is participatory. Every human being is a potential participant in the work of J*sus. This is why Catholics "offer up" their own sufferings. They join with those of J*sus. J*sus was the beginning and the point of initial contact but the work of the saints are also redemptive when they are "united" with those of J*sus. Protestantism regards J*sus death on the cross as absolutely and totally vicarious (the Eastern Orthodox, who of course are more "authentic" than the Catholics, don't even accept J*sus crucifixion as an atoning sacrifice for sin).
Similar distinctions apply to what it means to be "saved" in Catholic and Protestant parlance. For the latter an individual becomes "saved" when he "accepts J*sus as his savior" (ie, accepts the absolutely vicarious death of J*sus on the cross on his behalf). For Catholicism/Orthodoxy objective salvation refers to mankind as a while rather than individuals. The human race was redeemed corporately, but the fate of every single individual born into the world is still very much in doubt. This is why they call J*sus their "savior" even as they ask him to "save" them. He is their savior insomuch as they are part of the corporately redeemed human race. Individually, they walk a tightrope over the flames of Hell from the moment they are born until the day they die. Yet they don't understand the appeal of "once saved always saved" Protestantism. They can understand every religion on earth except that of the Bible Belt.
It is because the human race has been redeemed but no individual can be in life that they "preach Protestantism to the Jews but preach Judaism to the Protestants." The Jews are implicitly denying the "redemption of the human race as a unit" by continuing to observe the Torah (which was supposedly a mere "foreshadowing of the gospel), so towards Judaism Catholicism seems to adopt a "J*sus only," "all your works are in vain," "doctrines and commandments of men" attitude. They tell Jews that by observing Biblical commandments that ceased to be relevant at a certain point they are "missing the point." They tell them that observing Biblical commandments and performing Biblical rituals are vain and superfluous and "of none effect." Therefore Catholic preaching aimed at Jews (or, in our days, Catholic apologetics against Judaism) sounds very Protestant. J*sus alone saves and "the Law" is of none effect.
However from the Catholic perspective Protestants have fallen into the "opposite error." Protestants don't recognize that only the human race as a unit was objectively saved and that each human being faces a life of struggle to be individually saved (which will be certain only when life is over). So Catholic preaching or apologetics aimed at Protestantism sounds "Jewish." Protestants are "antinomians," they are "presumptive" in their belief that J*sus has already saved them without any effort on their own part. J*sus established a church and endowed it with the "means of salvation" and Protestants who insist on a direct pipeline from G-d that bypasses this are (as are the Jews who keep "the Old Law") "missing the point." Yes, J*sus has saved the human race. But he saves individuals via lives of fasting, prayer, repentance, good deeds, and chr*stian ritual and ceremonial. This is why Catholicism sounds so "Jewish" to Protestants and why Protestant arguments against Catholicism merely echo Paul's teachings against the Torah, though Catholics who continue to insist on the utter vanity of "the Old Law" never seem able to realize this. (By the way, Eastern Orthodoxy is quite upfront with the idea that J*sus alone does not save an individual, but that it is a cooperative effort of both J*sus and the individual. They call this synergeia).
I wish Catholics would put themselves in the shoes of their Fundamentalist Protestant oppnents for just a moment and try to understand that to them Catholicism seems like utter hypocrisy, insisting on the "fulfillment" and non-necessity of Biblical law and ritual while insisting on the necessity of post-Biblical law and ritual, derived largely from paganism. If Paul (Protestants reason) inveighed against the laws and rituals which were commanded from the very Mouth of G-d to Moses, then how much the more so (`al 'achat kammah vekhammah) must his words apply to post-Biblical laws and rituals which were not spoken by the Mouth of G-d but which were adopted little by little from the pagan cultures being converted?
I realize that my beliefs and my experiences have made me very "anti-Catholic," but Catholics never seem to have the slightest bit of compassion for people who simply cannot understand the cults of Mary and the saints. This is foreign to them; do you understand that? They've been praying to G-d all their lives and have never felt the slightest need to pray to another heavenly being. Is it any wonder they don't understand you? It is considerably harder convincing a person who has been praying to lesser beings that he may also pray to G-d than it is to convince someone who is accustomed to pray to G-d that he may also pray to lesser heavenly beings!
It is very hard for me not to notice that just as Catholicism prefers post-Biblical rituals to Biblical ones, so it also seems to prefer post-Biblical stories to Biblical ones. Have you not the slightest sympathy with someone who is being told that Adam and Noah are "unimportant" or "symbols whose actual existence has been disproved by science) when your own religion is full of illiterate bumpkins (not in America, but elsewhere) who may believe that St. George slew a dragon, St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, Mary appeared to an Aztec peasant, and made the sun dance in Portugal? Can't you see the utter and flaming hypocrisy of such a stand, real or perceived?
I do not intend to advocate for sola scriptura, since I do not subscribe to it myself. But I notice that when Protestants quote Biblical texts to justify beliefs you Catholics and Orthodox seldom if ever quote verses back to justify your positions. Bible quotes are met invariably by such things as "well, it's our Bible!" or "we had it first!" or "you're just a stupid fundie, what do you know?" I have read a zillion times about how your monks preserved the "Protestant" Bible by copying it. Yet the fact remains that you, the co-religionists and spiritual descendants of those monks, are much more likely to doubt the events described by the text and to attack belief in them. Can you imagine what this looks like to sincere Fundamentalists? They get the idea that the minute an Oral Tradition is admitted the Documentary Hypothesis comes loping right in. And who can blame them? The Catholic world is full of apologeticists who see Biblical inerrancy as identical to sola scriptura and who invoke the "errors of the Bible" and its alleged origin in ancient Mesopotamian and Canaanite paganism (allegedly edited and redacted by St. J. St. E, St. P, and St. D) in order to refute sola scriptura and "soul competency." Orthodox Judaism has always had an Oral Tradition, but it has never had to stoop to such arguments! But the fact is that "orthodox" Roman Catholics seem to have adopted the Biblical theories of liberal Protestants in order to justify the existence of the "magisterium" (never mind that liberal Protestants are no friendlier to an authoritative oral tradition than are literalist ones!).
Good grief, people! This time I'm not engaging in name-calling! I'm trying to get you to look at a few things from someone else's perspective! You can do that, right? You can understand "lesbian and gay persons," moslems, and everyone else in the world. Can't you do that with "simple-minded Protestant literalists" or are they less human than everyone else?
One thing Catholicism does seem to have in common with islam and all other ancient (and therefore "respectable") religions is that they seem to be plugged into a pre-factual, pre-literal, pre-rational Jungian/Freudian subsconscious full of archtypes and symbols. Fundamentalist Protestants deal with facts. When anyone other than a Fundamentalist Protestant invokes the sin of Adam, Noah's Ark, or even J*sus on the cross one can never be entirely certain if he is talking about these as facts or as (to quote Frank Sheed, who was an evolutionist and higher critic himself) "events all the truer for never having happened." You seem to gravitate to universal symbols rather than Biblical "facts" (other than on the "real presence," which I know for a fact many Catholics poke fun at when there are no "literalist Protestants" around to infuriate with hypocritical inconsistency). Fundamentalist Protestants mean what they say. Everyone else says "G-d is too big" and make religion so profoundly symbolic that it turns into one big Uncle Remus story.
Wideawake, can I get a witness???
NYer, you constantly invoke the "wisdom of the Eastern churches." Do you think I'm going to ask you if you believe Adam was a real person? I know what you'd say. Easterners are even more plugged into a primal, non-factual Jungian subconscious than "rationalistic" Westerners.
Orthodox Judaism cannot exist without the Oral Torah for reasons even the most literalistic "redneck" can understand. The Written Torah has no vowels or punctuation and the Oral Torah supplies these. The Written Torah could not be copied and kept in existence without the voluminous laws which have existed since Moses but which are written down nowhere in the Torah itself. And I don't know of anyone who claims that he could take a King James Bible and build a Tabernacle and conduct a Biblical sacrifice. (What are the details? What is the incense composed of?) But Catholics and Orthodox chr*stians can't say any of this. Instead they seem to respond to the concerns of Protestants with smgness, superiority, and utter hogwash ("We wrote it, so you should trust us when we tell you not to belive it!")!
DANGIT, y'all! Can you see none of this???
I would not so agree. Sin isn't something we do - it's something we ARE, until regenerated by God's unmerited favor. So, although a child may not be capable of committing sin in the sense of making a conscious, rational decision, the child is still sinful by nature.
Any other belief begs questions that require some serious theological gymnastics to get around.
Historically, certain Christian denominations were not always very subtle in regards to their views on things, and I would think that G.K. Chesterton used "hate" as a stretch to get his point across that many Protestants are/were ardently against praying to Mary, and in many cases, were very nasty about it. (Please note, I am using the word "many", not all).
The battle of Lepanto occurred in 1571, during the Reformation (when things were at their worst), that is perhaps why he used hate, as many Catholic Churches were forcibly taken by state governments, and many statues, such as those of Mary, were smashed.
I can't claim to be an expert on this, but those are my thoughts on why he used such language. I agree with you that no denominations have expressed hatred towards Mary, but certainly there have been individuals within those denominations that have expressed such, that includes heretical Catholics as well.
I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold fast to the traditions, just as I handed them on to you. 1 Corinthians 11:2
"Discuss the issues all you want but do not make it personal" applies to everyone on the Religion Forum.
And when has that ever mattered to those who reject the words of God! LOL!
He didn't preach to any muzlims...And he didn't attend any of the pool parties of the Pharisees...And he didn't go to church of Diana in Ephesus and worship their god
And Paul, the minister of the Gentiles, never ever once mentioned that the common denominator for all religions was Mary, the mother of Jesus...Now how strange is that...
The Apostle to the Gentiles...The recipient of the knowledge of the 'mystery' of the adoption of the Gentile church, and Jesus apparently forgot to mention His mother Mary to Paul...
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