Immaculate Conception

The mother of Mary is not a biblical character.[12] She first appears in the late 2nd-century Protevangelium of James, which names her Anne, probably from Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel. She and her husband, Saint Joachim, are infertile, but God hears their prayers for a child. So is Mary conceived and born, and, like Samuel, taken to spend her childhood in the temple.[13] In the earliest texts, probably representing the original version, the conception occurs without sexual intercourse between Anne and Joachim, but the story does not advance the idea of an immaculate conception.[14]

Original sin is the Christian doctrine that each human being is born in a state of sin inherited from the first man, Adam, who disobeyed God in eating the forbidden fruit (of knowledge of good and evil) and, in consequence, transmitted his sin and guilt by heredity to his descendants.[15] The doctrine was defined by Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD).[16] Engaged in a controversy with the monk Pelagius over the question of whether infants could sin (Pelagius said they could not and therefore would not go to hell if unbaptised), he inserted original sin and the fall from grace into the story of the Garden of Eden and Paul's Letter to the Romans.[17] Augustine identified male semen as the means by which original sin was made heritable, leaving only Jesus Christ, conceived without semen, free of the sin passed down from Adam through the sexual act.[18]

Anselm of Canterbury challenged this identification in the 11th-century, defining original sin as "privation of the righteousness that every man ought to possess". Thomas Aquinas distinguished the supernatural gifts of Adam before the fall from what was merely natural, and said that it was the former that were lost, privileges that enabled man to keep his inferior powers in submission to reason and directed to his supernatural end. Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, identified original sin with the loss of sanctifying grace.

According to Catechism of the Catholic Church,

By yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state. It is a sin which will be transmitted ...by the transmission of a human nature deprived of original holiness and justice. and that is why original sin is called "sin" only in an analogical sense: it is a sin "contracted" and not "committed" - a state and not an act.[19]

Altar of the Immaculata by Joseph Lusenberg, 1876. Saint Antony's Church, Urtijëi, Italy.

Mary's freedom from personal sin was affirmed in the 4th century, but Augustine's argument that original sin was transmitted through sex raised the question of whether she could also be free of the sin of Adam.[9] The English ecclesiastic and scholar Eadmer (c.1060-c.1126) reasoned that it was possible in view of God's omnipotence and appropriate in view of Mary's role as Mother of God: Potuit, decuit, fecit, "it was possible, it was fitting, therefore it was done;"[20] Interpretations of the doctrine of Immaculate Conception were the subject of intensive dispute between Franciscans and Dominicans.[21]

Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), among others, objected that if Mary were free of original sin at her conception then she would have no need of redemption, making Christ superfluous; they were answered by Duns Scotus (1264–1308), who reasoned that

Christ was Mary's Redeemer more perfectly by preservative redemption in shielding her from original sin through anticipating and foreseeing the merits of his passion and death. This pre-redemption indicates a much greater grace and more perfect salvation.[22][23]

Nevertheless, it was not theological theory that initiated discussion of Mary's freedom from mankind's curse, but the celebration of her liturgy in the eleventh century, for the popular feast of her conception brought forth the objection that as normal human conception was sinful, to celebrate Mary's conception was to celebrate a sinful event.[24] Some held that no sin had occurred, for Anne had conceived Mary not through sex but by kissing her husband Joachim, and that Anne's father and mother had likewise been conceived, but St Bridget of Sweden (c.1303–1373) told how Mary herself had revealed to her in a vision that although Anne and Joachim conceived their daughter through sexual union, the act was sinless because it was free of sexual desire.[25]

In 1431 the Council of Basel declared Mary's immaculate conception a "pious opinion" consistent with faith and Scripture; the Council of Trent, held in several sessions in the early 1500s, made no explicit declaration on the subject but exempted her from the universality of original sin; and by 1571 the Pope's Breviary (prayerbook) set out an elaborate celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on 8 December.[26]

In the 16th and especially the 17th centuries there was a proliferation of Immaculatist devotion in Spain, leading the Habsburg monarchs to demand that the papacy elevate the belief to the status of dogma.[27] In France in 1830 Catherine Labouré (May 2, 1806 – December 31, 1876) saw a vision of Mary as the Immaculate Conception standing on a globe while a voice commanded her to have a medal made in imitation of what she saw.[28] Labouré's vision marked the beginning of a great 19th-century Marian revival.[29]

In 1849 with the encyclical Ubi primum (Pius IX, 1849), Pope Pius IX asked the bishops of the church for their views on whether the doctrine should be defined as dogma: ninety percent of those who responded were supportive, and in 1854 the papal bull Ineffabilis Deus was promulgated.[2] Despite the fact that a good deal of the support for the dogma came from France, and that it had been promoted by one his predecessors, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour, Archbishop of Paris thought the Immaculate Conception "could be proved neither from the Scriptures nor from tradition"[30] [31] Nonetheless, despite any reservations, after its promulgation, Sibour published the decree in his diocese. In 1857, the Archbishop was assassinated by an interdicted priest who disagreed with Sibour's support of clerical celibacy and the recently defined dogma.

Ineffabilis Deus found the Immaculate Conception in the Ark of Salvation (Noah's Ark), Jacob's Ladder, the Burning Bush at Sinai, the Enclosed Garden from the Song of Songs, and many more passages.[32] From this wealth of support the pope's advisors singled out Genesis 3:15 as the basis for the Immaculate Conception: "The most glorious Virgin ... was foretold by God when he said to the serpent: 'I will put enmity between you and the woman,'"[33] a prophecy which reached fulfillment in the figure of the Woman in the Revelation of John, crowned with stars and trampling the Dragon underfoot.[34] Luke 1:28, and specifically the phrase "full of grace" by which Gabriel greeted Mary, was another reference to her immaculate conception: "she was never subject to the curse and was, together with her Son, the only partaker of perpetual benediction."[35]

According to Hans J. Hillerbrand, Ineffabilis Deus was one of the pivotal events of the papacy of Pius, pope from 16 June 1846 to his death on 7 February 1878.[3]

Four years later Mary appeared to the young Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, in southern France, to announce that she was the Immaculate Conception.[36]

Eastern Orthodoxy never accepted Augustine's specific ideas on original sin, and in consequence did not become involved in the later developments that took place in the Roman Catholic Church, including the Immaculate Conception.[61][62] The Eastern Orthodox do have a conciliar teaching on the matter, however. The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) in its sixth decree teaches the existence of original sin ("hereditary sin flowed to his [Adam's] posterity; so that everyone who is born after the flesh bears this burden") but explicitly rejected the Augustinian notion of inherited guilt ("[by] this burden we do not understand [actual] sin").The decree continues in stating that "many both of the Forefathers and of the Prophets, and vast numbers of others...especially the Mother of God the Word, the ever-virgin Mary" experienced "only what the Divine Justice inflicted upon man as a punishment for the [original] transgression, such as sweats in labor, afflictions, bodily sicknesses...and lastly, bodily death."[63]

When in 1894 Pope Leo XIII addressed the Eastern church in his encyclical Praeclara gratulationis, Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimos in 1895 replied with an encyclical approved by the Constantinopolitan Synod in which he stigmatised the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and papal infallibility as "Roman novelties" and called on the Roman church to return to the faith of the early centuries.[6] Some Eastern Orthodox have taken a more conciliatory view, an example being one popular ecumenist[64] Eastern Orthodox bishop, Kallistos Ware commenting that "the Latin dogma seems to us not so much erroneous as superfluous."[65]

In the mid-19th century some Catholics who were unable to accept the doctrine of papal infallibility left the Roman Church and formed the Old Catholic Church; their movement rejects the Immaculate Conception.[66][67]

Protestants overwhelmingly condemned the promulgation of Ineffabilis Deus as an exercise in papal power, and the doctrine itself as without foundation in Scripture,[5] for it denied that all had sinned and rested on a translation of Luke 1:28 (the "full of grace" passage) that the original Greek did not support.[68] With the exception of some Lutherans and Anglicans, most Protestants therefore teach that Mary was a sinner saved through grace like all believers.[35]

Martin Luther showed an abiding devotion to Mary, including her sinlessness and sanctity, and Lutherans hold Mary in high esteem,[69] but the Immaculate Conception does not hold the status of a dogma within Lutheranism.[70] The ecumenical Lutheran-Catholic Statement on Saints, Mary, issued in 1990 after seven years of study and discussion, affirmed "that the Catholic teaching about the saints and Mary as set forth in the documents of Vatican II does not promote idolatrous belief or practice and is not opposed to the gospel," but conceded that Lutherans and Catholics remained separated "by differing views on matters such as the invocation of saints, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary."[71]

The final report of the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), created in 1969 to further ecumenical progress between the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion, recorded the disagreement of the Anglicans with the doctrine, although Anglo-Catholics may hold the Immaculate Conception as an optional pious belief.[72]