Mater Populi Fidelis, An Opportune Moment

On 4 November 2025 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith (formerly the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, the Holy Office) promulgated into the ordinary magisterium of the Catholic Church Mater Populi Fidelis, perhaps the dicastery's final word on titles for the Blessed Virgin Mary. In particular, the document, named a "doctrinal note," forcefully discourages the loosely used and problematic Marian titles, "Co-Redemptrix" and "Co-Mediatrix," arguing that only Christ Jesus redeems and mediates humanity, while doing no harm to the honor, the hyperdulia, due the Mother of God. The language of the note is concilatory but firm, and should be a win-win, a win for both Mariology and Christology.

The doctrinal note adds clarity for both those with high and low Mariologies. I imagine the document will comes as something of a disappointment for those who embrace extremely high Mariologies, for example Vox Populi Mariae Mediatrici, a lay group whose intellectual wing resides (or resided) in Steubenville, OH, at the Franciscan University, where theologian and strong advocate for the promulgation of a fifth Marian dogma, Professor Mark Miravalle, indefatigably championed the cause. In no way can Catholics construe Vox Populi as dissenting from Church teaching on the honor and prerogatives of Mary, or as remotely schismatic, or proto-schismatic. The membership in the group understands full well Catholic Christology, and understands the terms co-redemptrix and co-mediatrix in a way that poses no threat to Catholic orthodoxy; but the Dicastery nonetheless determined that those terms, however nuanced, would confuse rather than enlighten those Catholics (and Christians in general) whose catechesis is limited to the essentials and fundamentals of the faith.

The number of Marian dogmas will remain at 4, and the mysteries contained in them offer vast spiritual nourishment for those whose Mariologies run the gamut. These dogmas become intelligible only through the lens of sound Christology. Marian apparitions, the most famous of which move the devotions of many toward the terms now to be avoided when thinking of Mary, should garner reconsideration, not of their recognition, but of their meaning in proper devotion and sound theology.

Hermeneutics and Dogma: Some Odds and Ends

The recent discussion on Mary in Church dogmatics has opened upon the stages of theodicy, the reality of the Incarnation, the Will of God, and the biblical representation of sin. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception (IC) has underscored the difficulty of its own language and its reception in the sensus fidelium. In order to move toward a reasonable synthesis, it would seem that the dogma should be contextualized within Christological, ecclesiological and soteriological themes and grace-theology as well.

1. Sanctifying grace (SG): The grace of holiness, SG maintains the integrity of a properly ordered relationship to God, and it is freely given by God, absolutely gratuitous, and beyond the reach of human merit. It is imparted by God through sacramentals, sacraments (the 7 properly so called and all others) and by direct will of the triune God. It is both cause and effect of the relationship between a human and God. SG is the grace operative in the dogmatic expression of the IC, for in this grace all abuse---sin--- of the relationship with God is impossible.

2. Ultimately, Original Sin (OS), from which Mary is preserved, is unintelligible apart from the representation of evil in the bible, which expresses the lived experience of evil and sin of the inspired authors of the biblical books, and the culture which produced the authors and books. Hence, only a hermeneutic that addresses the biblical representation of the reality of evil and sin can decipher the dogmatic representation of the IC. Any logic that seeks to separate the IC from OS and its representation cannot but fail to go astray in any effort to consider the meaning of the dogma. The Christian self-understanding of sin, Adam, Christ and (by obvious extension) Mary is already established in the Pauline corpus (cf. Rom 5:12ff; 1 Cor. 15:22) during the formation of the Church. For Paul, Adam was a historical figure, not merely a historical 'reality.'

3. The historical and biological uniqueness of the motherhood of Mary provides the facticity of her uniqueness as an individual. In this manner, Mary is forever embedded in Christology, and the uniqueness and facticity of the Christ-event itself.

4. Soteriologically, The Word made flesh, in order to effect salvation, must be of the flesh of Adam, real human flesh. The flesh of Adam was given to the Logos through the biological motherhood of Mary.

5. The sanctity of the vessel of the historical Incarnation of the Logos is a very ancient idea in the Church. How could God enter the world as a human being from a flesh always poised (effect of OS) to breach the relationship with God?

6. Which Adam would provide the flesh for the Word, a prelapsarian Adam, or a postlapsarian Adam? If we are to move to an interpretation of the IC and OS, a hermeneutic ordered to the mythological representation of the human being in proper relation to God is required, and that hermeneutic must be attuned to an Adam on either side of the breach, hence the validity, if not the essentiality of the question.

7. The dogma of the IC would be incoherent if it positioned Mary in a superior relation to sin from the incarnate Word. The Synoptic temptation scenes (Mk. 1; Matt. 3; Lk. 3 etc.) present Jesus being invited to sin by Satan. Though Jesus did not sin, narratologically there was an 'occasion' of sin. This simple concupiscence denied by Jesus cannot therefore be absent from Mary. The sanctifying grace imparted to the human nature of Jesus forecloses any real 'drama' in the moment. It must be something like this for Mary as well, without prejudice to the unique grace of the hypostatic union.

8. The simple concupiscence---the drive to seek the good--- of Adam is not the rejection of sanctifying grace. Such concupiscence is simply the reality of being human in a created environment. The IC implies that Mary did not answer to concupiscence, and this is held by the Tradition, though without de fide status. Mary's concupiscence is bracketed in this discussion (epoche) to allow her to appear on the same horizon as the prelapsarian Adam, both of them being full of grace.

9. OS is itself the mythic representation of the reality of moral evil in the world. In Gen 2: 16-17, God orders the freedom of the human to the special relationship with him, and informed the man that any exercise of freedom apart from that relationship would entail death. In the context of choice, and of seeking the 'good,' the human orders that choice to itself, apart from relation to God: when the fruit was judged 'good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for gaining wisdom' (Gen. 3:6), choice is ordered against the relationship and to the human alone. The inspired author has witnessed the actions of humans apart from their relationship with God: treachery, murder, theft, pride and selfishness, and dislocates this reality to a mythic action in the past.

10. The plain language of the dogma of IC invites theodicy by presenting Mary's single privilege of grace (SG) in a uniqueness that alienates the rest of humanity in its divine exclusivity. By collapsing concupiscence as it has come to be known, Mary appears, with Adam, in the natural attitude of sanctifying grace, which was meant, from the beginning, for all of human-kind. As such, theodicy cannot make an appearance as an event.

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OS is the religious expression of the experience of the universality of moral evil. It is the sitz im Leben, the condition in which we, like the inspired authors of Genesis, find ourselves, and that which is mythologically represented in the biblical narrative of the fall. OS is itself mythos, and a dogmatic interpretation of mythos. It is therefore a mythos that represents an experience on either side of the mythic and dogmatic enterprise of faith. OS unites scripture with its tradition in a metalanguage of dogma.

To be free of OS, one assumes the position of Adam, who walked in graced freedom with God; and this condition is rather like the fullness of grace imparted dogmatically to Mary. Like her ancestor, Mary is immaculately conceived metahistorically with him, inherits his flesh and in turn gives that flesh to her son, Jesus. This much is already understood in the early Church, as Paul declares the relationship to the first and second Adam. Paul does not examine the condition of the portal of sin, but simply asserts a parallelism of grand design, leaving the examination to posterity.

Jesus then is 'born of a woman' of Adamite flesh. That flesh, Mary's flesh, though, is free of sin, of even the possibility of sin. This condition of the [im]possibility of sin cannot be the evil concupiscence that the Tradition identifies as the consequence of OS. This condition must be instead a simple attribute of the human nature. An attribute that is constitutive of the human partner that in and of itself does no injury to the relationship. Human nature, sanctifying grace, the immaculate conception of Adam and Mary are anterior to the fall. How can there be two outcomes from the lived experience of the same grace? How can impossibility and possibility come from the same grace in the same flesh?


"Their eyes were opened" [Gen. 3:7; Luke 24:31].


These identical phrases in Genesis and Luke read each other, the Tradition and dogma.  For the walkers on the road to Emmaus, there was the vision of a saturated phenomenon, the icon of the risen Christ. For the eaters of knowledge,  there was the vision of the saturated phenomenon, the idol of shame that overwhelms their gaze.

The early chapters of Genesis do not know of prophets, so God himself must declare the state of affairs in Eden.


He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard; and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be in some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen, but about to fall. [ James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 188].


And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel." [Genesis 3:15]


Adam on the precipice of a self-determined good, experiencing his lapse before the fact in some instance to come; God prophesying the struggle between good and evil through motherhood of all human offspring, to the motherhood of the savior: this is the protoevangelium.

In the last gasp of the prelapsarian world the Christ-event becomes a reality, as does the conception of Mary in the grace that preserves her from what is about to happen. Mary does not fall with Adam, because the prelapsarian grace has opened her eyes to the icon of Christ through the providence of God which gazes back at her,  redeeming her through the very event Luke has depicted. Adam's eyes were opened, but Mary's eye's were opened wider on the same grace enjoyed by both. Adam could only be bedazzled by overwhelming gaze upon himself through his new knowledge, but Mary's gaze is saturated by a larger view upon grace and she partakes of the grand affirmation of creation itself: the fiat of creation whose reshith (thought of as perhaps 'chaosmic' time, Joyce's time of 'fall, falling, fallen') has ticked a heaven round the stars, becomes her own fiat, her 'yes' whose time ticks to and fro. Poor Adam, he could have hardly known, with all that knowledge, he was saying 'no.' He just couldn't see it, drowning in grace and blinded by the idol. Mary though, bathing in the sea of faith and the same sea of grace, was seen by God in the gaze that looks upon the gazer.


We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. [Ineffabilis Deus]



Though Mary did not fall, she inherits and inhabits the same human condition as all other human beings. She was heir to everything that is human: joy, sorrow, suffering, death. The dogma states that she is graced, without saying how. Because it is also dogmatically stated and therefore de fide that Adam, too, in "the first instance of" his "conception by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God," he is joined by Mary in the relationship with God as it was in the beginning. Unlike Adam, Mary was left behind in prelapsarian grace, even though she was historically born into the postlapsarian world to receive God in her very flesh, the flesh of Adam, who, in the beginning was very like her. Mary's singularity and privilege play out in this fallen world in the historical motherhood of Jesus. As Adam was, for just a moment, falling out of love with God, God loved Adam unconditionally as he fell, and though Adam was fallen and surprised, God  had already declared the coming of Paul's new Adam. In the light of Christ, Paul could see it all coming.

It is therefore not the grace the marks the difference between Adam and Mary, but the gaze. Mary and Adam appear within the same horizon of grace; but for one, eyes open to the idol, and for the other, eyes open to the icon. The events of the fall and the redemption are released in the phenomenality of grace which pulls both Mary and Adam into selfhood. The gaze trumps the theodical attitude on both the Adamic and Marian trajectories toward the saturated phenomena. God has willed only freedom, the gaze upon which is the only determinant in the different outcomes. The rest is history.

The idol and icon present themselves within our experience in their very givenness. How shall we become? How wide shall our eyes open? Shall our souls lapse, or magnify the Lord? What shall appear to us in a disappearance on our own road to Emmaus? 

This is the stuff of grace, of hope, of what is to come. This is Mary-for-us in her givenness, as gift, as the exemplar of human cooperation in the ongoing creation of the world in the relationship with God as it was in the beginning.  This is Mary, mater et magistra, within the Catholic rule of faith: scripture (read, received, alive), Tradition (read, received, alive) and magisterium (read, received, alive). 

BVM: Mary, The Mother of the Lord---Part II

In our discussion on "Haunted," our interlocutor generously provided the key text of the promulgation of the Immaculate Conception (IM):


"We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by almighty God in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of Original Sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful."

—Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus




As I noted in the discussion that ensued,  we must bear in mind that the Marian dogmas are about Mary, not about us. They take nothing from us, and the de fide claims for Mary are not at our expense, our experience of grace or our relationship with Christ and the Catholic Church. We receive the dogmas as gifts, and we accept them as such or at our own theological peril. The IM in particular has far-reaching ramifications for the theology of grace and nature, and it underscores a difference in the economy of grace for Mary and the rest of us. But it is still the same grace, and we, too, in Baptism, become free from Original Sin (OS). Like Mary, we still answer to the effects of OS (i.e., suffering, death) regardless of the sanctifying grace sacramentally given to us, or the unmediated grace given to her.




Mariology is thoroughly christological: none of the Marian dogmas are intelligible or even remotely coherent apart from the Christ-event. All her uniqueness, singularity and privilege derive from her maternal relationship to Jesus. The IM in particular has always been understood in terms of her being the god-bearer, the mother of God,  the mother of the Lord. Only after a strong rooting in the fact of her motherhood of Jesus, can anything about Mary enter theology.

The Church views Mary as singularly different, privileged because she alone carried the Word made flesh inside her very body, her very person. Because the Christ-event itself is unique, so too, is Mary. Jesus could only have one historical mother. Her singularity anchors into that singular historical foundation for her attributes in dogmatic theology. She is full of grace because she bore within in her the very source of grace. Her singular experience of grace is visited upon her own conception in the divine proclamation of the protoevangelium of Genesis 3:15. Her conception in the divine imagination is in direct nexus with graced image and likeness enjoyed by the biblical characters, Adam and Eve: theologically speaking.
 


In is on this basis that most Catholics accept the Marian dogmas. Mary captures the Catholic imagination because she is experienced as a human phenomenon, certainly not the saturated phenomenon of the icon that bedazzles the intuition ducking the aim of intentionality, but perhaps as an idol, saturated by the reflection of the gaze of her fellow humans. This characterization likely explains the ease by which she so easily enters the s. fidei and s. fidelium. She is not divine, and like nature itself, is open to free inquiry and the freedom of the imagination. At every juncture, though, she opens the door to that saturated phenomenon par excellence, Christ; and that is the raison d'etre for her place in Catholic theology. She allows Christ to 'make sense' in the very world, the very history, which all Catholics inhabit. Mary's ''yes'' to God does not merit for her any special grace, for all grace is totally gratuitous and freely given by God alone (not to mention the inherent Pelagianism in such a thought). Rather, Mary's "yes" to God opens for Catholics access to the possibility of the impossible, a "yes" opens upon the horizon of sanctifying grace.


And yet, lest we fall into an unnecessary triumphalism, for those who struggle with the dogmas as Catholics, or for that matter, as atheists buttressing their arguments against the existence of God and the validity of Catholicism in particular and religion in general, we cannot dismiss the problems presented by the gymnastics of the theology of grace at work in the IM, or in the devotional logics of pdf. The trans-, or meta-historical workings of grace require a nuanced approach not always available to Catholics of conscience. The theodical elements of potuit, decuit, ergo fecit, will forever delight or torture thoughtful atheists, because each element challenges every claim made about the theistic God. 


The IM unifies the concept of grace as the totality of God's actus purus. Taken in its pure givenness, the IM enables the ''gifted'' with all humility to participate in the grace of God in a very complete way. Whether through the thorough-going Christology of the Angelus, or the Hallelujah of the Magnificat, Mary the idol, through the porosity of grace, always opens us up to icon of the Logos.

BVM: Mary, The Mother of the Lord---Part I

Chosen by God among all women to bear Jesus, whom she conceived miraculously as a virgin, Mary is honored, alone of all her sex, as one of only two persons (Jesus being the other) born untouched by Satan. She herself is the daughter of Joachim and Anna, and by at least one tradition, grew up in the Temple under the care of Zechariah. Gabriel announced to her that she would bear Jesus, a sign to all the world. Mary questioned the angel about the possibility of a virgin conceiving, and the astonished young maid was reassured that for God nothing is impossible. Because of these things she is remembered forever as an exemplar of faith, worship, and purity, of submission to the will of God, as singularly chosen, exalted mother of Jesus and Queen of all saints.


Such is the record, in the Quran, of Mary in the Islamic Tradition; she is the only woman in the Quran mentioned by name. Interestingly, she is mentioned more times in the Quran than in the entire New Testament. Of course, the Quran does not know of the divinity of Jesus, which would have detracted from the indivisible divinity of God. A divine Jesus is quite impossible in Islam; yet a maximalist Mariology is alive and well in Islam and its system of belief.


Recently in comments to this blog, the Marian dogmas in Catholicism have been cast as the "best" reason against the validity of Catholicism. Really, the "best?" One would think that the standard argument for atheism---theodicy---would have preemptively invalidated Catholicism (or any theistic system) without any further need of invalidation. But one needn't be an atheist to locate difficulties in the received dogmatic theology of Mary in Catholicism.


Putting aside the dogmas of the perpetual virginity and theotokos, the latest dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are pronounced from a thoroughly modern church and papacy. Since the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was the bugaboo in the lengthy discussion in the 'comments' of "Haunted by the Holy Ghost," I would limit the content of this blogpost to that dogma and the gist of the conversation on "Haunted."


First I would point out that the modern Marian dogmas are each punctuated with a warning: any denial of them incurs upon the denier anathematization, and would be tantamount to a denial of the Catholic faith entire and a declaration that one is no longer a member of  the Catholic Church. Putting aside the ridiculous notion that a Catholic could put aside her unconditional preferential option for the Catholic faith by putting her conscience in relation to the dogmas, then the heart of the papal threats of excommunication is laid bare: it is not the content of the Marian dogmas that separates the Catholic from Catholicism, but the denial of papal infallibility. It is very likely that one could present her conscience to the Marian dogmas without fear of excommunication (the angelic doctor did the same regarding the Immaculate Conception (IM) and there is no posthumous excommunication of the author of the Summa), but papal infallibility is another matter entirely.


Interestingly, both the modern Marian declarations and the pronouncement on papal infallibility share the theological arguments that their authority and effectiveness is the Holy Spirit, and therefore their content is free of error in their matter of faith and morals. Since papal infallibility limits itself to faith and morals, so should we, in presenting the IM to our consciences, limit ourselves to the tenets of faith and morals. For, in fact, that is precisely what Pius IX and Pius XII did in promulgating the dogmas.


Quite simply, Pio Nono polled the Catholic world and found unanimity about the doctrine of the IM, which is one of the oldest beliefs about Mary. The early Franciscans citied the terse logic of the Scholastics in validating the celebration of the feast of the IM: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit (He[God] could do it, it was fitting that he do it, therefore he did do it.) The pope merely promulgated as de fide what was already entrenched in  the sensus fidei and sensus fidelium. For all that unanimity, why punctuate with a solemn threat? Was it fear that the polls were inaccurate or fickle? Probably not, since the very ideas of the sensus fidei and s. fidelium precluded such a possibility. Was it that the doctrinal expression of the transhistorical operations of grace was incoherent? Probably not, especially if the essentially devotional logic of pdf were still operational (they must have been). Was it that papal infallibility had entered the magisterium in its hottest configuration (and to be officially promulgated within Pius IX's reign, at Vatican I, 15 years after the IM) and was doing its own presenting to the consciences of the Catholic world? While the other explanations cannot be excluded with absolute certainty, this last reason seems the best explanation, especially in light of the signs of the times, informed by the loss of the papal states and a general state of siege inaugurated by what was perceived as the creep of modernity.