Catholics, Protestants, and Immaculate Mary

Do Catholics worship Mary? This question is as old as the Protestant Reformation itself, and it rests, like other disputed doctrinal points, on a false premise that has been turned into a wedge: the veneration of Mary detracts from the worship of Christ.

This seeming opposition between Mary and Christ is symptomatic of the Protestant tendency, begun by Luther, to view the entirety of Christian life through a dialectical lens – a lens of conflict and division. With the Reformation the integrity of Christianity is broken and its formerly coherent elements are now set in opposition. The Gospel versus the Law. Faith versus Works. Scripture versus Tradition. Authority versus Individuality. Faith versus Reason. Christ versus Mary.

The Catholic tradition rightly sees the mutual complementarity of these elements of the faith, as they all contribute to our ultimate end – living with God now and in eternity. To choose any one of these is to choose them all.

By contrast, to assert that Catholics worship Mary along with or in place of Christ, or that praying to Mary somehow impedes Christ’s role as “the one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5) is to create a false dichotomy between the Word made flesh and the woman who gave the Word his flesh. No such opposition exists. The one Mediator entrusted his mediation to the will and womb of Mary. She does not impede his mediation – she helps to make it possible.

Within this context we see the ancillary role that the ancilla Domini plays in her divine Son’s mission. Mary’s is not a surrogate womb rented and then forgotten in God’s plan. She is physically connected to Christ and his life, and because of this she is even more deeply connected to him in the order of grace. She is, in fact, “full of grace,” as only one who is redeemed by Christ could be.

The feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception celebrates the very first act of salvation by Christ in the world. Redemption is made possible for all by his precious blood shed on the cross. Yet Mary’s role in the Savior’s life and mission is so critical and so unique that God saw it necessary to wash her in the blood of the Lamb in advance, at the first moment of her conception.

This reality could not be more Biblical: the angel greets Mary as “full of grace” (Luke 1:28), which is literally rendered as “already graced” (kecharitōmenē). Following Mary, the Church has “pondered what sort of greeting this might be” for centuries. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception, ultimately defined in 1854, is nothing other than a rational expression of the angel’s greeting contained in Scripture: Mary is “already graced” with Christ’s redemption at the very moment of her creation.

Because God called Mary to the unique vocation of serving as the Mother of God, it is not just her soul that is graced, as is the case for us when we receive the sacraments. Mary’s entire being, body and soul, is full of grace so that she may be a worthy ark for the New Covenant. And just as the ark of the old covenant was adorned with gold to be a worthy house for God’s word, Mary is conceived without original sin to be the living and holy house for God’s Word.

Thus Mary is not only conceived immaculately, that is, without stain of sin. She also is the Immaculate Conception. Her entire being was specifically created by God with unique privilege so that she could fulfill her role in God’s plan of salvation. “Free from sin,” both original and personal, is the necessary consequence of being “full of grace.”

Protestants claim that veneration of Mary as it is practiced by Catholics is not biblical. St. Paul encouraged the Corinthians to “be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). Paul is not holding himself up as the end goal, but as a means to Christ, the true end. And if a person is imitated, he is simultaneously venerated.

If we should imitate Paul, how much more should we imitate Mary, who fulfilled God’s will to the greatest degree a human being could. Throughout her life she humbled herself so that God could be exalted, and because of this, Christ has fulfilled his promise by exalting his lowly mother to the seat closest to him in God’s kingdom.

Mary is the model of humility, charity, and openness to the will of God. She allows a sword to pierce her heart for the sake of the world’s salvation. She shows us the greatness to which we are called: a life free from sin and filled with God’s grace that leads to union with God in Heaven. She is the model disciple, and therefore worthy of imitation and veneration, not as an end in herself, but as the means to the very purpose of her – and our – existence: Christ himself.

Saints Intercede for us.

Once you understand this it really does not matter how it’s worded since God knows our hearts

From Scripturecatholic.com...

1 Tim 2:3 - because this subordinate mediation is good and acceptable to God our Savior. Because God is our Father and we are His children, God invites sus to participate in Christ’s role as mediator.

1 Tim. 2:5 - therefore, although Jesus Christ is the sole mediator between God and man, there are many intercessors (subordinate mediators).

1 Cor. 3:9 - God invites us to participate in Christ’s work because we are God’s “fellow workers” and one family in the body of Christ. God wants His children to participate. The phrase used to describe “fellow workers” is “sunergoi,” which literally means synergists, or cooperators with God in salvific matters. Does God need fellow workers? Of course not, but this shows how much He, as Father, loves His children. God wants us to work with Him.

Mark 16:20 - this is another example of how the Lord “worked with them” (”sunergountos”). God cooperates with us. Out of His eternal love, He invites our participation.

Rom. 8:28 - God “works for good with” (the Greek is “sunergei eis agathon”) those who love Him. We work as subordinate mediators.

2 Cor. 6:1 - “working together” (the Greek is “sunergountes”) with him, don’t accept His grace in vain. God allows us to participate in His work, not because He needs our help, but because He loves us and wants to exalt us in His Son. It is like the father who lets his child join him in carrying the groceries in the house. The father does not need help, but he invites the child to assist to raise up the child in dignity and love.

Heb. 12:1 - the “cloud of witnesses” (nephos marturon) that we are surrounded by is a great amphitheatre of witnesses to the earthly race, and they actively participate and cheer us (the runners) on, in our race to salvation.

1 Peter 2:5 - we are a holy priesthood, instructed to offer spiritual sacrifices to God. We are therefore subordinate priests to the Head Priest, but we are still priests who participate in Christ’s work of redemption.

You corrected NOTHING, but merely attempted more moving of the goal posts when faced with the fact that in contrast to the broad use of presbuteros, hiereus (priest) and archiereus (high priest) is ONLY used for priests (collectively over 150 times) and is NEVER used for NT pastors, except spiritually as part of the general priesthood of all believers. And which i had prior established as did RnMomof7 in response to you here. And as shown here

Your attempt to postulate that presbuteros women in 1Tim. 5:2 ("Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren; The elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity." (1 Timothy 5:1-2) was a pastors wife is desperate, while the point remains that while presbuteros can and usually does mean a church pastor, the distinctive word for priest is never distinctively used for any or all of them.

Jewish elders as a body existed before the priesthood, most likely as heads of household or clans, and being an elder did not necessarily make one a Levitical priest, (Ex. 3:16,18, 18:12; 19:7; 24:1; Num. 11:6; Dt. 21:2; 22:5-7; 31:9,28; 32:7; Josh. 23:2; 2Chron. 5:4; Lam. 1:9; cf. Mt. 21:13; 26:47) or a high priest, offering both gifts and sacrifices for sins, (Heb. 5:1)

From the the web site of International Standard Version:

No Greek lexicons or other scholarly sources suggest that "presbyteros" means "priest" instead of "elder". The Greek word is equivalent to the Hebrew ZAQEN, which means "elder", and not priest. You can see the ZAQENIM described in Exodus 18:21-22 using some of the same equivalent Hebrew terms as Paul uses in the GK of 1&2 Timothy and Titus. Note that the ZAQENIM are NOT priests (i.e., from the tribe of Levi) but are rather men of distinctive maturity that qualifies them for ministerial roles among the people.

Therefore the NT equivalent of the ZAQENIM cannot be the Levitical priests. The Greek "presbyteros" (literally, the comparative of the Greek word for "old" and therefore translated as "one who is older") thus describes the character qualities of the "episkopos". The term "elder" would therefore appear to describe the character, while the term "overseer" (for that is the literal rendering of "episkopos") connotes the job description.

To sum up, far from obfuscating the meaning of "presbyteros", our rendering of "elder" most closely associates the original Greek term with its OT counterpart, the ZAQENIM. ...we would also question the fundamental assumption that you bring up in your last observation, i.e., that "the church has always had priests among its ordained clergy". We can find no documentation of that claim. (http://isvbible.com/catacombs/elders.htm)

And unlike hiereus and presbuteros or episkopeō, the latter two titles can be used interchangeably without distinction, as one denotes the position (senior) and the other the function (overseer). Titus was to “set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders [presbuteros] in every city, as I had appointed thee: If any be blameless, the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly. For a bishop [episkopos] must be blameless...” (Titus 1:5-7) Paul also "sent to Ephesus, and called the elders of the church," (Acts 20:17) who are said to be episkopos in v. 28. Elders are also who were ordained in Acts 14:23, and bishops along with deacons are the only two classes of clergy whom Paul addresses in writing to the church in Phil. 1:1.

Note that the argument is not that you cannot call a presbyter a priest, as you can because he does engage in priestly functions, but so do all believers (below), and the contrast is between the priesthood of all believers and formally entitling what the Holy Spirit calls presbuteros and episkopos, as constituting, along with the apostles, the pastors (poimēn=shepherds: Eph. 4:11) over the church.

Making hiereus the formal title for priests (which the DRB inconsistently does, [Acts 20:17; Titus 1:5] versus presbyters — not priests — in the official Roman Catholic Bible for America) is another case of Rome "helping" the Holy Spirit out by doing what He did not do.

Your real argument is that hiereus is justified by functional equivalency under the premise of Eucharistic theology (sacrifice), which use is that of merely using Scripture to support theology, rather than being consistent with it.

Not only did the Holy Spirit not see fit to once use the distinctive word for priest distinctivly for any pastor or to denote them as a distinctive class, that of a separate class of sacerdotal priests, but as regards using it due to functional equivalence (that of the Eucharist being a sacrifice, which taking part in the Lord's supper is to example, but not as an expiatory offering for sin), all believers engage in offering both gifts and sacrifices in response to being forgiven of sins. (1Pt. 2:5; Rm. 12:1; 15:16; Phil. 2:17; 4:18; Heb. 13:15,16; cf. 9:9)

In addition, the idea of presbuteros being a separate sacerdotal class called priests was not that of the NT church., but a latter development.

As Catholic writer Greg Dues in “Catholic Customs & Traditions, a popular guide” states,
"Priesthood as we know it in the Catholic church was unheard of during the first generation of Christianity, because at that time priesthood was still associated with animal sacrifices in both the Jewish and pagan religions."
"When the Eucharist came to be regarded as a sacrifice [after Rome's theology], the role of the bishop took on a priestly dimension. By the third century bishops were considered priests. Presbyters or elders sometimes substituted for the bishop at the Eucharist. By the end of the third century people all over were using the title 'priest' (hierus in Greek and sacerdos in Latin) for whoever presided at the Eucharist."

Yet it is understood that “the Latin word presbyter has no lingual or morphological relationship with the Latin word sacerdos, but only an inherited semantical relationship.” As a result of this change, “presbyter soon lost its primitive meaning of "ancient" and was applied only to the minister of worship and of the sacrifice. “(http://catholicforum.fisheaters.com/index.php?topic=744379.0;wap2z http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12406a.htm)

Likewise Raymond Brown (Sulpician Father and a prominent Biblical scholar): "So far as i know, it was only ca. 200 that the term “priest” started to be applied to the bishop and only still later was it applied to the presbyter. This observation explains why some Protestant churches which insist on using New Testament language alone refuse to call their ministers priests. When in the post-New Testament period the language of priesthood did begin to be applied to the bishops and presbyters, it brought with it a certain Old Testament background of sacrificing Levitical priesthood. The introduction of that language was logically tied in to the development of the language for the eucharist as a sacrifice. (...I think there were sacrificial aspects in the early understanding of the eucharist, but I have no indication that the eucharist was called a sacrifice before the beginning of the second century.) When the eucharist began to be thought of as a sacrifice, the person assigned to preside at the eucharist (bishop and later presbyter) would soon be called a priest, since priests were involved with sacrifice." — Raymond Brown, Q 95 Questions and Answers on the Bible, p. 125, with Imprimatur.

Furthermore, nowhere do we find any in examples or instructions in the epistles that the pastors are engaging in transubstantiation. All we have is one solitary manifest description of the Lord's supper, in which the apostle simply reiterates the Lord's words at its institution, which neither delegates this to pastors or explains this as literal versus figurative, the latter being what the evidence warrants. But which is another thread.

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