Ave Maria!

This week’s episode of Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, & Advocate, Dr Mark Miravalle talks about Our Lady’s role as the new Eve and mother of the human race, and her special connection with her Son regarding the enmity between the Woman’s seed and the Serpent’s seed.

Our Lady is the new Eve, and Dr. Miravalle explains with the utmost clarity and enthusiasm how she lives up to this title, by her suffering with her Son, as the Mother of Christ. Watch this episode as Dr. Miravalle brings us to a deeper understanding of Our Lady’s sacred act of Coredemption.

Ave Maria!

The post Vid – Mary, New Eve – Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, & Advocate #2 – Miravalle first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Ave Maria!

Working off the foundation he laid last week from the Fathers of the Church and the Old Testament, Dr. Mark now enters the New Testament to outline the biblical basis of Mary’s title, Advocate. He goes over the visitation of Mary to St. Elizabeth, the feast at Cana and Revelation 12, the Woman Clothed with the Sun and so shows that Mary is the New Ark of the Covenant and the New Queen Mother. Come listen to Dr. Miravalle’s impassioned and inspired talk.

Ave Maria!

The post Video – Mary Advocate New Testament – #9 Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, & Advocate – Miravalle first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Marycast #6 ( 07min) Play – After the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve. God intervenes, pre-announcing a “Woman” who with her “Seed” will fight against the serpent, crushing his head. In this episode Dr Mark Miravalle clearly shows that the “Woman” and her “Seed” is none other than Mary and Her Son, Jesus.

Ave Maria!

Audio (MP3)

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Said Judas to Mary, “Now what will you do With your ointment so rich and so rare?”

“I’ll pour it all over the feet of the Lord, And I’ll wipe it away with my hair;’

she said, “I’ll wipe it away with my hair.”

“0 Mary, 0 Mary, 0 think of the poor. This ointment, it could have been sold;

And think of the blankets and think of the bread You could buy with the silver and gold;’

he said, “You could buy with the silver and gold.”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll think of the poor; Tomorrow;’ she said, “not today;

For dearer than all of the poor in the world is my Love who is going away;’

she said, “My Love who is going away?’

Said Jesus to Mary, “Your love is so deep. Today, you may do as you will.

Tomorrow, you say, I am going away, But my body I leave with you still;’

He said, My body I leave with you still.”

We should reflect on Mary’s attitude and the great love she felt for Christ; for though the disciples had left the tomb, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found, and while she sought she wept; burning with the fire of love, she longed for him who she thought had been taken away. And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tell us: “Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.”

from a homily by Pope St. Gregory the Great

Collect for St Mary Magdalene’s day:
Almighty God, whose Son restored Mary Magdalene to health of mind and body and called her to be a witness to his resurrection: forgive us our sins, we beseech thee, and heal us by thy grace, that we may serve thee in the power of his risen life; who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
Amen

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The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.

The fulfillment of this duty has always posed problems to the conscience of married people, but the recent course of human society and the concomitant changes have provoked new questions. The Church cannot ignore these questions, for they concern matters intimately connected with the life and happiness of human beings.

Faithfulness to God’s Design

13. Men rightly observe that a conjugal act imposed on one’s partner without regard to his or her condition or personal and reasonable wishes in the matter, is no true act of love, and therefore offends the moral order in its particular application to the intimate relationship of husband and wife. If they further reflect, they must also recognize that an act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. “Human life is sacred?all men must recognize that fact,” Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. “From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God.”

Consequences of Artificial Methods

17. Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings?and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation?need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.

Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.

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Short Series #21 – Msgr. Calkins on Our Lady of All Nations, the Bible and Marian Coredemption ( 53min) >>> Play

Ave Maria!

Msgr. Arthur Burton Calkins (bio) an internationally renowned Marian Theologian and an official of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei gave a talk titled “Our Lady of All Nations, the Woman of Genesis and the Apocalypse” at our Amsterdam Coredemption Conference on May 31, 2008. In this excellent, scholarly talk Msgr. Calkins connects the Marian apparition on Our Lady of All Nations and many other approved apparitions with that of the woman of the proto-evangelicum in Genesis and of the Apocalypse and so connects a wide spread of Marian private revelation with the entirety of Biblical Revelation all in support of the Coredemption.

For more information on the Amsterdam Coredemption Conference: http://airmaria.com/events/Amsterdam/Amsterdam.htm

The sound is a little poor at first but it improves after the first few minutes so please bear with us.

Ave Maria!

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Father Powell puts his finger on the fear of many Catholics to speak the truth in the face of Protestant objections: “That we would flinch from speaking the truth because some might misunderstand simply means that we fear a negative response from our ecumenical partners.” I find this very true, for example, when discussing the meaning of the term “coredemption.” Many of the Catholic objectors to the dogma say that “coredemption” is an inherently confusing term because of the various ways in which “co-” can be used as a prefix. In English it means generally, as Father Powell points out, “with” and “equal to,” which is not the case in Latin. The point is that, yes, the term needs to be explained, but so what? Why don’t we just explain it?

A very similar problem arises from the use of the term “Mother of God.” Many “Bible Christians” think that the Catholic teaching on this point makes Mary equal to God; however, the problem is not that the term is inherently ambiguous, but that the explanation has either not been heard or has not been accepted, even though the term has been adequately explained by Catholics since the Council of Ephesus in 431. I do not think the fundamental problem here is deeply theological. On the contrary, it is a superficial assumption based on the bias that Catholic doctrine is anti-biblical and man made. Unfortunately, some Catholics seems to share this bias.

Father Powell also points out that Protestants have themselves felt free to unilaterally redefine Christian teaching, as the Anglicans have with respect to contraception and abortion:

The objection that the proposed fifth Marian dogma will damage ecumenical relations seems somewhat dubious in the harsh light of the ecclesial reality dropped into our Catholic laps without our consultation. Why this sudden need for Protestant approval of Catholic teaching?

Father Powell’s reply to this second objection is particularly outstanding where he points out the fear among astute Catholics of being tagged as “theologically unsophisticated”:

My guess is that this objection is really more about a certain sort of generational embarrassment with Marian dogma and devotion in general and rests on the need of some in the Church to please those they feel are more theologically sophisticated. How am I supposed to show my Catholic face at the next meeting of the American Academy of Religion when all of my more enlightened Protestant colleagues from Harvard and Yale know we silly Catholics have infallibly declared that Mary is Co-Redemptrix? How embarrassing! Such individuals are left with the choice of defending what appears to be another exercise of raw papal power and earning the pity of their more progressive betters or rejecting the dogma and winning the accolades of their more enlightened colleagues. Guess which one they choose over and over again.

In my opinion, some of the most basic reasons for Catholic hesitancy to defend Marian coredemption have more to do with cultural and social assumptions than they do to any fundamental theological problems. It seems to me that I have never really heard a “Catholic” reason for not defining the dogma. All the objections are essentially Protestant.

I do think it needs to be pointed out, however, that the contemporary controversy runs deeper than merely arguing over whether the Virgin’s free consent at the Annunciation can be in any way construed to have contributed to our redemption. Protestants and the Catholic objectors generally know that the content of the doctrine connotes more than that. In fact, Father Powell indicates that this is so at the beginning of his post when he defines very simply the meaning of Coredemprix:

. . .[T]he Holy Father is being asked to declare solemnly and infallibly that the Blessed Virgin Mary is a co-worker in the redemption of mankind through her initial assent to be the mother of God and through her suffering with Christ as he dies on the cross. [emphasis mine.]

But when Father Powell goes on to explain how Mary is Coredemptrix with Christ he does not mention how it is that She is His “co-worker . . . through her suffering with Christ as he dies on the cross”:

. . . Assuming Mary’s freedom to accept or reject Gabriel’s call to become the Mother of God, we can see that Mary’s assent made it possible for the second Person of the Blessed Trinity to become man—a step necessary in for the universal efficacy of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Without her consent, the Son would have not been incarnated. You might object here and say that Gabriel could have accepted her no and moved on to another woman with the same invitation. This is purely speculative, of course, but had he done so, any woman who said yes would be our spiritual mother and worthy of the title “Co-Redemptrix.”

The problem here is that no other woman was immaculately conceived or could be called the Immaculate Conception. Even if the objection Father Powell here answers is purely speculative, it needs to be pointed out that no other woman other than Mary was predestined by God to be His Mother. Only one is immaculately conceived, and only one is predestined to cooperate in this unique way in His plan.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, for example, points out that neither Adam, nor Eve, nor anyone else but Mary could be addressed with the title of Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception is a prerogative that belongs to Mary alone by virtue of an eternal predestination.  Both the dogmatic declarations defining the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption refer to the joint predestination of Jesus and Mary in the divine plan. Here are the corresponding passages from the respective apostolic constitutions:

And hence the very words with which the Sacred Scriptures speak of Uncreated Wisdom and set forth his eternal origin, the Church, both in its ecclesiastical offices and in its liturgy, has been wont to apply likewise to the origin of the Blessed Virgin, inasmuch as God, by one and the same decree, had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom (Pope Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus, Apostolic Constitution defining the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, emphasis mine).

Hence the revered Mother of God, from all eternity joined in a hidden way with Jesus Christ in one and the same decree of predestination, immaculate in her conception, a most perfect virgin in her divine motherhood, the noble associate of the divine Redeemer who has won a complete triumph over sin and its consequences . . . (Pope Pius XII, Munifentissimus Deus, Apostolic Constitution defining the dogma of the Assumption, emphasis mine).

So while one might speculate on the great mystery of the Virgin’s perfect freedom and how it was that God made so much contingent upon Her free cooperation, we still must affirm that there is much more unique about this one woman than that She happened to say “yes” as opposed to “no.”

I mention this because understanding it will help us appreciate that the free cooperation of the Virgin in the mystery of our redemption is extended to the foot of the cross. By virtue of Her predestination with Christ, Mary does contribute to our redemption “through her suffering with Christ as he dies on the cross.”

In fact, prior to the Second Vatican Council among theologians and during its sessions among the council fathers, when the question of coredemption was being debated, the doctrine was understood  not only to include, but to primarily refer to Mary’s compassion at the foot of the cross. Our Lady’s suffering was argued to have been coordinated with that of Her Son, not as the sufficient cause of our redemption, but as the predestined coefficient of His work.

In the Franciscan school, the argument for this would be similar to that of Duns Scotus for the Immaculate Conception. Both are based on the joint predestination of Jesus and Mary. Scotus argued that preservative redemption (complete freedom from original sin—Immaculate Conception) not only takes nothing away from the dignity of the Redeemer, but exalts it incomparably more than liberative redemption (the washing away of original sin already contracted). So in the same way, that one should be able to cooperate effectively in the very act of redemption, not only takes nothing away from the merit of the One Mediator, but exalts it incomparably more than would be the case otherwise. This is because Mary’s unique power is based on the fact that She has been redeemed in an incomparably more perfect way than anyone else. She is Coredemptrix because She is the perfect fruit of a perfect redemption.

Whether one buys this argument or not, it should be noted that our Protestant brethren object to the doctrine of the coredemption due of their understanding of the one mediation of Christ. That mediation takes place principally on the cross and it is there that the coredemption is primarily posited.

Again, upon close examination of this question it becomes apparent that the only objections against coredemption are Protestant. They will be the same ones that are used to reject tradition, the sacramental order, the priesthood and good works. Either we can cooperate with Christ or we cannot. And if we can, then it should not be hard to understand how the predestined Mother of God, prepared before hand by her Immaculate Conception, gives God a glory greater than which cannot be conceived by Her free and effective cooperation at the foot of the cross.

I would concur with Father Powell that the Catholic understanding of our own cooperation in the work of redemption reveals a logic consistent with that of the Coredemption.

In all of her titles, Mary is understood to be the perfected form of a human response to God’s invitation to live in union with Him in eternity (CCC 967-70). So, in every sense, we all participate in an imperfect way in all of Mary’s titles. We all mediate God’s grace to others—what are the corporeal works of mercy but our human use of divine gifts for the benefit of others? We all give birth to the Word made flesh—what is Eucharistic communion but the taking in of Christ so that we might become more and more the Word given flesh? We are all “co-operators” (operators with) God’s will for us when we assent to and make good use of His gifts for others (CCC 1996-2000).

What I would further point out is that this logic is consistent with the coredemption because the Mother of God stands in the first place (in primis from the Roman Canon) in the matter of that cooperation which is accomplished at the consummation of the mystery of redemption at the foot of the cross.

The post Insights into the Coredemption first appeared on AirMaria.com.

DEDICATED TO THE WOMAN I LOVE:

The Woman whom even God dreamed of

Before the world was made;

The Woman of whom I was born

At a cost of pain and labor at a Cross;

The Woman who, though no priest,

Could yet on Calvary’s Hill breathe,

“This is my Body; This is my Blood”

For none save her gave Him human life.

The Woman who guides my pen,

Which falters so with words

In telling of the Word.

The Woman who, in a world of Reds,

Shows forth the blue of hope.

Accept these dried grapes of thoughts

From this poor author, who has no wine;

And with Cana’s magic and thy Son’s Power

Work a miracle and save a soul

Forgetting not my own.

The Servant of God: Archbishop Fulton Sheen

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Three months after the Angel’s message-at the end of June,

The Woman who is bright as the sun and fair as the moon

Feels the Heart of her Infant throb beneath hers.

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In the womb of the Virgin Immaculate a new world begins,

The Child who is older than time enters time for our sins,

And with human breathing the First Mover stirs.

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Mary, heavy with child conceived by the Holy Ghost,

Is far fiom the sight of men with her heavenly Host,

Like the dove of the Canticle in the crannied wall.

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She moves not, she speaks not a word, she adores-no more;

Her life is within, her God is within to adore,

Her work and her son, her child, her all.

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The world is at peace, the temple of Janus is shut,

The scepter of David is gone and the prophets are mute,

Lo! darker than Hades, a dawn without light.

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For Satan holds sway and the world gives him incense and gold,

But into his kingdom God comes like a thief, and behold

A daughter of Eve puts the serpent to flight.

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The promised Messiah is come, for whom the world prays,

Men know not the good tidings yet, but, far from their gaze,

The Mother is circled by Cherubim bright.

Paul Claudel

The post One Minute Meditation first appeared on AirMaria.com.

Homily #091026 ( 06min) Play – The woman in today’s Gospel was cured of a crippling decease from an evil spirit. This is symbolic of mankind’s spiritual healing.
Ave Maria! Mass readings

Audio (MP3)

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