There are a LOT of windmills out there.
One man CANNOT tilt at all of them!
The biblical view of Mary is that she has been specially set apart by God in the order of grace. Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, was one of the first to affirm this when she proclaimed Mary’s blessedness upon her visitation:
And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! (Luke 1: 41-42).
One reason that the Virgin Mary is set apart from all other women is because of the weight of her “yes” to God’s plan—and because of God’s “yes” to her. Following her consent to bear the Christ child in her womb, her flesh was united with the body of Christ in the most literal sense. No other woman will ever experience this kind of union with Christ, this mother-with-child communion. Clearly, by this fact alone, Mary is blessed among women.
Steeped in the writings of the early Church Fathers and drawing from their reflections on Mary, the convert Bl. John Henry Newman fittingly called the mother of Jesus “the daughter of Eve unfallen.” Indeed the earliest Church Fathers hinted at Mary’s sinlessness in their writings when they alluded to Mary, implicitly and explicitly, as the second or new Eve. St. Irenaeus, for example, writes in the second century that “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. What the virgin Eve had bound in unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosed through faith” (Against Heresies 3:22:24).
The later Church Fathers conveyed the blessedness of Mary even more explicitly. Consider the words of St. Ephrem in the fourth century:
You alone and your Mother are more beautiful than any others, for there is no blemish in you nor any stains upon your Mother. Who of my children can compare in beauty to these? (Nisibene Hymns 27:8).
Even Martin Luther believed that Mary had received special graces from God, professing in a 1527 sermon:
It is a sweet and pious belief that the infusion of Mary’s soul was effected without original sin; so that in the very infusion of her soul she was also purified from original sin and adorned with God’s gifts, receiving a pure soul (On the Day of the Conception of the Mother of God).
Of course, this recognition began with the biblically unique greeting of the angel Gabriel: “Hail, full of grace” (Luke 1:28). He greeted Mary with a title—and an angel never speaks anything but exactly what God wants him to speak. This explains why Mary in all her humility “was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be” (Luke 1:29).
At the very least we should remember, as St. Ambrose did in his commentary on holy virginity, that Mary’s life “is like a mirror reflecting the face of chastity and the form of virtue.” We have ample reason to believe that Mary was a perfect model of obedience and humility, and so we can do no better than to reflect on her life, though but for the grace of God she would have been conceived in sin and unfit to be Christ’s mother and ours. Nobody has understood our dependence on God’s grace greater than she whose sweet voice proclaimed in the home of Elizabeth:
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me
blessed (Luke 1:47-48).
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/our-mothers-singular-grace
The CATHOLIC 'view' is orders of undocumented magnitude greater.
So?
Why WOULDN'T a life-long Catholic believe SOMETHING that the Church has pounded into their head for centuries??
There are a LOT of windmills out there.
One man CANNOT tilt at all of them!
No one is denying that she was blessed to carry Jesus. And yes, it is a unique relationship, which only one person in the world could have. It was a great privilege and she was honored by it.
HOWEVER, Mary did NOT *consent* to carry Jesus. The angel told her how it was going to be. She could submit to that or fight God but it wasn't going to change anything.
The time was right and her lineage was right, and it was going to happen.
Mary was not blessed with any grace that other believers don't have.
ALL believers have the same grace that Mary was graced with.
The word grace used in this passage in Luke is used in one other place in the Bible and that is Ephesians 1 where Paul tells us that with this same grace, God has blessed us (believers) in the Beloved. IOW, we all have access to that grace and it has been bestowed on us all.
http://biblehub.com/greek/5487.htm
Luke 1:28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”
Ephesians 1:4-6 In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
Greek word “grace”
charitoó: to make graceful, endow with grace
Original Word: χαριτόω
Part of Speech: Verb
Transliteration: charitoó
Phonetic Spelling: (khar-ee-to'-o)
Short Definition: I favor, bestow freely on
Definition: I favor, bestow freely on.
HELPS Word-studies
Cognate: 5487 xaritóō (from 5486 /xárisma, "grace," see there) – properly, highly-favored because receptive to God's grace. 5487 (xaritóō) is used twice in the NT (Lk 1:28 and Eph 1:6), both times of God extending Himself to freely bestow grace (favor).
Word Origin: from charis
Definition: to make graceful, endow with grace
NASB Translation: favored (1), freely bestowed (1).
It does NOT mean that she was sinless. Being given the grace of God does not mean sinlessness.
On the contrary, grace only kicks in where there was sin. If Mary were without sin, then she could not have been the recipient of God's grace.
Romans 5:20 Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,
My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed (Luke 1:47-48).
"the low estate of his handmaiden"?????
For those who elevate Mary to near Godlike status? For someone the Catholic church teaches is sinless?
SHE didn't think she was anything special.I don't care what Luther believed about Mary. Luther's opinions on things do not factor into what I believe.
I don't follow man, which I realize is a concept beyond what most Catholics can wrap their minds around.