[OLD REGGIE]

God can choose any method He wishes. The question is which method He did choose. I am not quite sure where you stand as to method, by the way, since your approach is so negative. That is: To state (what you think) is Catholic doctrine and then deny it.

Once again I have no idea what you are talking about.

Do you think it possible for you to give a hint, some small clue, a reference perhaps?

[RobbyS]

Slight clue? Let us start with your treatment of Msary'srole in the Incarnation. The basic Catholic doctrine is that Jesus was true man, and Mary was truly his mother. If we start from the premise that Jesus was true man as well as true God,then Mary had to have had some physical relationship with Jesus, but since the event is improbable there is no point in discussing biology. We are left with the question of the dignity of Mary.

So many NCs are driven wild by the assigning of such titles as Queen of Heaven or Queen of Angels to Mary. The title Mother of God is seen as no less than blasphemy. So they go to the other extreme and beyond and reduce Mary to a cipher.

Luke, of course, presents Mary as the model Christian, the humble slave of God, whose sovereign grace is unlimited. Therefore, it seems to some that any attempt to make her more than this, more than a simple wife and mother is somehow to diminish Jesus or to deny that in this instance God's sovereign power was at work. But unless one accepts Luther's virtual denial of free will, his particular notion of Christian liberty, one can acknowledge that Mary played a vital role in God's entry into history in the form of a man.
That role was heroic and in the scale of roles in sacred history greater than that of Noah, Abraham and Moses. The paradox of Christianity that the last shall be first, so that a humble Jewess maid is greater in the eyes of God than
the divine Augustus--not only her but expecially her. She, not he, is truly worthy of divine honors.

But the reason she is worthy of such honors has everything to do with who her son was and nothing to do with any natural virtues. What was exceptionable about her was that she was a daughter of Zion and "full of grace." (Father Knox says " Graced one," which is not less accurate than favored one unless one insists on assigning a Lutheran meaning to the word "grace." Rightly or wrongly I read incredible arrogance in the notion that all the saints MUST be put on a par with Mary, even the self-proclaimed "Saved." It is not Catholics who have given Mary her place but God. It is He who has called her to come to the head of the table.

Now as to the question of whether Catholics "worship" her. More later.