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Thank you for the kind reply.

That one word co-operator can be understood (misunderstood?) to suggest including an initiating of the proceedings on her own part as co-initiator sort of thing, while continuing that into perpetuity even though the into perpetuity aspect is rather assumed to be true, as it is also the portion which many find problematic in a theological sense, all the after-the-fact explanations for the central-most assumptions concerning it being not enough to establish that such considerations in regards to Mary having been inclusive of the Gospel as originally preached -- best as that can be reconstructed through both biblical and earliest patristic evidences, these latter needing be examined and sifted for opinion expressed in relative isolation before some of those isolated expressions, in regards to Mary in this instance, later converge over time.

In practice [within Catholicism] what would or could be considered the working of the Holy Spirit within a person is at times attributed to "Mary" when such workings of the Spirit are said to convey something of a feminine aspect in (spiritual?) nature.

There was a link provided on another thread a few days ago now, one which I had seen posted on these pages before -- but could not find it just now when searching through literally hundreds of comments.

The linked-to article (which I now cannot find) mentioned a man who (if memory serves) related while he was yet "Protestant" before later converting to [Roman] Catholicism had experienced the Holy Spirit minister to him tenderly, in such a way as the man sensed or regarded as being feminine.

Shortly after his conversion he related this to a Catholic priest and was told "that was Mary" rather than the Holy Spirit.

Would you know of the account I am speaking of? The [theological] trouble I have with that sort of identification is that Christ, when speaking of the Comforter being sent to us -- this "Comforter" had in the earliest beginnings of the Church been understood to be the Holy Spirit -- not "Mary" or some other identifiable entity.

If it be that now, Mary is fully united with Christ, then so be it. I would wish & hope that that be the case. Yet in that sort of thinking, how to not then to begin considering them all to be of one substance, my using here the term substance (or the alternative "essence") much in the same manner Athanasius pressed for recognition that the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit were all of one substance.

And if of one substance, (now with Mary and countless saints?) then why refer to this substance by multiple names, again separating identities if it as as otherwise also said in apologetic that all the various God-like powers & abilities widely attributed to belonging to Mary, she derives from any selection/combination of the three Persons of the Trinity?

If saints (including Mary) all stay separate enough to remain addressable to we mere earthlings by name -- if those individuals are capable of producing miracles attributable to themselves by name -- how have we not made a return towards polytheism in effect and in truth (returning to a sort of ancestor worship, this one with One Big God (in 3 persons) and a bunch of jr. grade gods (Mary the highest ranking of these in the more modest appraisals) with this all being explained and excused (made excuse for) by numerous rhetorical limiting qualifiers which are forthwith abandoned just about as soon as the critics of these sort of proceedings are out-of-sight, no longer raising objections?

'One could kick them out of the RC Church I suppose -- without needed merely "suppose" for one instance of that is said to have happened in the case of the last person put to death by the Inquisition...

> "The last official Spanish execution for heresy was in 1826, when a schoolmaster was hanged for substituting “Praise be to God” for “Ave Maria” in school prayers. The limpieza de sangre statutes remained valid (though increasingly unenforceable) until 1865.
History of Christianity Paul Johnson p. 308

“History of Christianity Paul Johnson p. 308”

I always liked Paul Johnson, but here his scholarship completely fails him. The teacher in question was executed by the Spanish secular authorities for pushing deism (which he learned after being captured by the French in the Napoleonic Wars) onto students under his charge. His heretical ideals destroyed the faith of a number of students and split families as a result.

Also, he was not tried by the Spanish Inquisition. The Spanish Inquisition had been disbanded by the French and pro-French authorities and had not yet been refounded. Instead the king of Spain, Ferdinand VII, established Juntas de fe in each diocese. They did not follow canon law nor inquisitorial procedure. These commissions were not even recognized by Spanish royal law but were accepted by the civil authorities in practice. The teacher in question was a liberal. His judge was a man who had once been imprisoned by liberals in 1820. Gee, you think he held a grudge? The juntas were a forum for “rightists” to pay back “liberals”. Ferdinand VII’s court began to worry that a new inquisitorial tribunal (remember, one did not exist at that time) would be used by right-wingers against the royal government. His police chief warned him about this as Luis Alonso Tejeda makes clear in his book, Ocaso de la Inquisición en los últimos años del reinado de Fernando VII: Juntas de fé, Juntas Apostólicas, conspiraciones realistas.

Ferdinand VII then cooperated with the papal nuncio, Msgr. Tiberi, to end the juntas and any possible future inquisition. After all the papacy had complained about the Spanish Inquisition and its excesses for centuries. As Stephen Haliczer sums it up in his book, Inquisition and Society in the Kingdom of Valencia, 1478-1834:

“The papacy was not at all reluctant to collaborate in the destruction of inquisitorial jurisdiction in Spain, and in a papal brief of October 5, 1829, Plus VIII granted the nunciatura’s tribunal of the Bota appellate jurisdiction over cases involving religious heresy. This flagrant example of papal interference in Spanish affairs, which would have been bitterly resented only a few decades earlier, perfectly accorded with Ferdinand’s wishes, and he confirmed the papal brief on February 6, 1830.”

If I am not mistaken James Anderson discusses the deist teacher’s case in his book, Daily Life during the Spanish Inquisition.

As Joseph Perez mentions in his book, The Spanish Inquisition, “This unfortunate man was so imprudent as to declare that Jesus was not the Son of God.”