“Pope Martin in 649 AD defined the doctrine that Mary”
I understand that Catholics believe in a semi-divine nature for Mary, and im not insulting that belief. But i will freely question the ability of a man who lived 650 years later to speak authoritatively on the topic.
If i tried to discuss the effects of childbirth on a woman from the year 1350, people would think i was deranged.
And the method of the birth of Christ in no way impacts his message and gift of redemption.
Nope. She's human, but without sin. This whole can of worms sets up blasphemous attacks on Catholic beliefs, but also those of the Eastern Orthodox, who hold the same belief.
You contradict yourself. Catholics do not believe that the Blessed Virgin Mary possesses a "semi-divine nature".
But i will freely question the ability of a man who lived 650 years later to speak authoritatively on the topic.
Then you no doubt feel the same about John Calvin, Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli who also believed in and taught of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary during the 16th century.
Not so. But I see you've been corrected here, so I just want to add that Mary had the same human nature as, say, Eve (and Adam, too, of course) before sin. That is to say, pre-sin, human nature had a certain natural excellence: the human body was not subject to disease, aging, death and decay, the mind was not clouded and weak, the emotions and passions weren't all outta whack. This is the undamaged nature we would have all inherited from our First Parents, Adam and Eve, had they not sinned.
Since the Catholic Church teaches that only one of Jesus' parents was human (the other was Divine), Jesus must have inherited his entire human nature from His mother. Since we believe that Jesus was not a screwed-up individual, but had a Plan A Excellent Eden-type human nature ("True" God and "True" Man), it follows that his mother's human nature must have been preserved from sin and the effects of sin, preveniently, that is, in view of the fact that He would be born from her.
So one question that occurred to people was, "Well, if it weren't for Eve's sin and the Curse and all that, would childbirth have been painful ordeal of blood and struggle and bruising and anguish, as it is now for most of womankind (absent the improvements of modern obstetrics)?"
And the answer is, "No, if it weren't for Eve's sin and the Curse, childbirth wouldn't involve pain and a boody mess and crying out and all the rest."
This line of thinking contributed to the idea that when Jesus was born of Mary, it would have been unmarred by the effects of Original Sin. The significance of Mary being a virgin "in partu" is not that she didn't have intercourse, but that even in childbirth she didn't experience suffering and "corruption", meaning not moral corruption, but the experience of fleshly weakness, fear, travail, and exhaustion which are evidences of our now-damaged human condition. (I'm using "corruption" in the physical sense of "tending toward failure, death and decay".)
This does not indicate that Mary would have been divine or semi-divine. It indicates that, in view of her future motherhood of our Lord, she was given the sheer free gift and grace of being human --- "blessed"-- the way humans were originally meant to be.