Recommended Article: "Why Heretics Hate Mary and We Should Love Her More"

Amici,

I'd like to recommend this article at OnePeterFive, "Why Heretics Hate Mary and We Should Love Her More", by Timothy Flanders. 

I wrote the following Comment to it. 

Thank you, THANK YOU, Mr. Flanders for this essay and for highlighting: "But it is even more disturbing when we read how the Rhine group at Vatican II successfully suppressed the document on the Mother of God, relegating it, by a narrow vote, to the final section in (against the protests from Eastern Catholic bishops and others)..." and noting Ratzinger's Marian "weakness". ALL those reformers, the hard core (Schillebeeckx, Rahner, Küng) and the milder revolutionaries (de Lubac, Balthasar and Ratzinger), were together weak on her. And thank you for pointing out that "Gay Blade" James Martin ignores her, as well. (True women bring out true men, after all.)

They were weak on her or ignore her because of pride, among a host of reasons, but perhaps mainly because they just didn't get it: that through the young peasant teen's freely-given Fiat, the Jewish girl Miriam's name became known throughout the Catholic world beyond, resonating down two millennia now; an utterly obscure girl from a stunningly obscure time and impossible-to-be-more obscure place became the most famous woman -- indeed, the most famous purely human being -- since Eve; and more famous than Eve, really -- because Miriam is the New Eve, and through her we have Salvation, Salvation Incarnated, which is then, through the Most Holy Eucharist, Incarnated in us.

That's the Catholic Faith, the Incarnation Incarnated in us. It's the Faith of the Historical Church down through the millennia. Protestants reject it, formally rejecting the Real Presence, legalistically denying it in their founding documents: rejecting God's Incarnation in us (and insisting God's grace is only imputed to us, not infused into us), and naturally the Muslims went them one better 1,000 years before Luther was even hatched by rejecting the Incarnation in itself, in its First Instance.

When we participate in the Most Holy Eucharist, as you-all know here, we partake of the Divine Nature of Christ AND His Human Nature; through this Real Presence, we ourselves now have the elevated Incarnated Nature of Christ in us (no matter how small and yet fragile) as well as His Human Nature, which He inherited from His Mother. We literally ARE the Blessed Mother's children. Through Our Lord, we have her DNA. And as all Jews are Jews because they inherit it from their mothers, so now do we inherit the blessings and participation in the Covenants, all through the New Covenant. For to be The People of God (a Vat II favorite phrase) we need to be literally in and of the Body of Christ, and we have that status and true condition through Mary's Fiat.

This should humble us; it should not make us prideful. Well and truly you write, Mr Flanders, that: "True devotion to Mary keeps us safe from the excesses of pride." Amen to that!

Thanks again!

An P