Finally answering Izori's other question!

Here it is:

So, when you say that Mary is without sin, does that mean that Jesus actually *wasn't* the only perfect human?

In short, yes. And...where does the Bible say that Jesus wasn't the only perfect human?

Aren't we all perfect and free from sin at the moment of our baptism? (post on Baptism coming soon!)

And Our Lady still needed a Savior, and the Catholic Church doesn't teach that she didn't. But, through God's grace, she was free from sin from the moment of conception while we are cleansed from sin after our birth, through baptism.

Oh and when St. Paul wrote in Romans 3:23:

"ALL HAVE SINNED and are deprived of the glory of God."

He was trying to emphasize how as sinners, both Gentiles and Jews are alike. There are obviously some exceptions to that:

• Before the fall, Adam and Eve were without sin.
• Babies have never sinned.
• Our Lord never sinned.
• Our Lady, preserved from sin from the moment of conception, through God's grace, was also without sin.

And as it is written in Luke 1:37 - "For with God, nothing shall be impossible."

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Please Pray....

...for my friend's (Izori's) dad....he's having surgery tomorrow.

Thank You.

Another Question to Answer

One of my Protestant friends left this comment on this blog:

"Hi. Interesting blog. You're probably wondering what I'm doing on here since I'm a Protestant, but I have a question (not a challengin question or anything, just clarification.) Why do you have to ask Mary to pray for you when you can simply talk to Christ himself?"

Great question! Well, why do you ask your friends here on earth to pray for you? For the same reason, we ask Mary to pray for us. So that more prayers will be sent up to heaven for us. And if we ask our friends and family to pray for us, why not ask Mary? After all, won't Jesus listen to his Mother? What happened at the Wedding at Cana?

Mary - Part Two

The Immaculate Conception


The Immaculate Conception is the most widely misunderstood Catholic teaching. Many Catholics don't understand it, either. This concept does not refer to Jesus' conception - that is called the Virginal Conception of Christ.


This means that Mary was conceived without original sin. And of course - Protestants will immediately ask you where that is in the Bible. First, think about Gabriel's greeting to Mary. "Hail Mary, full of grace." Also, as Mary was to be the mother of His Son, wouldn't God need her to be free from the stain of sin? So God took care of that. He has the power to save us all from sin. He did this for Mary, too. But He did long before this gift came to the rest of this, from the moment of her conception. And He didn't do it for her sake. He did it for ours.

Reread the last two sentences above. Mary's being free from original sin had nothing to do with any choice of hers. God freed her from sin. For us.

There are a few versus that might be brought up against this belief. Like Romans 3:23 - "All have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God." This is how to answer such a verse:

First, what exactly does that mean? That we are all human, and therefore fall under original sin? If that's so, then, yeah, Mary does fall into that category - but God saved her from it, early, so that she would ready to be the mother of His Son. But Protestants might say that it means that every single person has actually sinned. How can that be true though? What about babies? What about young children? Have they all sinned? But what about this - maybe Paul was trying to make a different point? Maybe that quote was taken out of context? Read that entire chapter.
If you do so, it is obvious that the verse was taken out of context. Paul is saying that both Jews and pagans are in equal need of Jesus' salvation. Neither is more important than the other.


The Assumption

Okay, the Bible tells us that one of the consequences of sin is death. Well, as Mary was saved from original sin, wouldn't you think that God would preserve her from the corruption of physical death? He did.


And this sort of thing is mentioned in Scripture. In 2 Kings 2:11, Elijah was taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, instead of dying. If God could do this for Elijah, why not for Mary?

Also, note that early Christians took great care in burying their dead, especially Christians of great importance. The whole Mediterranean are is filled with historical sites that have long histories of being associated with the tombs of early saints and holy people. But.....there are no places in history that have ever claimed to be the final resting place of Mary. Isn't that odd? Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion, in Jerusalem, is the place where Mary is said to have "fallen asleep in the Lord." But of course there is no tomb that contains her body.

So, when Mary's life here on earth was done, her body and sould were taken up to heaven. We celebrate the Assumption on August 15.

And the teachings of the Assumption and of the Immaculate Conception aren't just to do with Mary - they also show that God has the power to save us from sin and that in the end he will take us up to heaven, body and soul.


On Jesus and Siblings. . .

Protestants love to point this one out, because they think that Catholics don't take Scripture seriously. Because, several places in the Bible, Jesus' "brothers and sisters" are mentioned. And one of the early Church leaders was known as "James, the brother of the Lord."

So then why do Catholics claim that Jesus had no blood brothers or sisters? The people who translated the Gospels into Greek were working out of Hebrew and Aramaic. Neither of those languages have a word that specifically means "cousin" or "nephew." The only word they had to do with any male relative was "brother." There are a lot of places in the Old Testament that show this. Genesis 14:14 calls Lot Abraham's brother, but he was his nephew. In Genesis 29:15, Laban's nephew Jacob he's referred to as his brother. And in Deuteronomy 23:7 and Jeremiah 34:9, the word "brother" is used for just kinsmen in general. So when the New Testament writers were telling the story of Jesus, most of the stories they'd heard were in Hebrew and Aramaic. All the references to "brothers" that his (Aramaic-speaking) apostles had made were just translated into Greek, without being properly looking to see whether those relations were really cousins, uncles, or nephews.

Final Notes. . .

An interesting fact is that, Martin Luther, the very first Protestant, believed in both the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. Also, all the early Protestant reformers (from Luther to John Calvin) believed that Jesus had no blood brothers or sisters. Current Protestant beliefs came later. This is what Martin Luther said about Mary in his Christmas sermon in 1531:

[She is the] highest woman and noblest gem in Christianity after Christ. . .She is nobility, wisdom and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough. Still, honor and praise must be given to her in such a way as to injure neither Christ nor the Scriptures.

And that is precisely what the Catholic Church has always taught.

#3 - Mary - The Basics

First, I want to say that I'm sorry that I haven't posted for a while. Secondly, as there is so much to write on Mary, I'm going to divide this into three posts. This first one is going to establish the basic facts about why and how we honor Mary.

Protestants say that Catholics "worship" Mary like a "goddess". Well, we don't. We honor her. And why shouldn't we? After all, Mary played a very important part in salvation history. Most of the time, Protestants will insist that we worship Mary. Just show them Hail Mary, the most common prayer directed at Mary.

Hail Mary, full of grace
the Lord is with you,

blessed art thou amongst women,
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God
pray for us sinners,
Now and at the hour of our death.
Amen.

Now look in the Bible. The first two lines come from what the angel Gabriel said to Mary at the Annunciation. (Luke 1:28)
The second two lines come from what Elizabeth said to Mary at the Visitation. (Luke 1:48)

Half of this prayer comes straight from the Bible and the other half just asks Mary to pray for us.

Mary is the mother of Jesus, but how is she our mother, the mother of Christians? A passage which shows her as our mother is John 19:26-27 - "When Jesus saw his mother, and the disciple whom he loved standing near, he said to his mother, 'Woman, behold, your son!' Then he said to the disciple, 'Behold, your mother!"

Mary is obviously not our physical mother, but we see her as our mother in faith. This is because of what Jesus said and the special relationship that she had with him. In the same way that we, as Christians, are brother and sisters of Jesus through grace, Mary is the spiritual mother of all of us, as she is the mother of Jesus.

Again, I must stress the fact that we do not "worship" or "pray to" Mary. We ask Mary to pray for us. We believe that Mary's intercession has a big effect in calling forth God's graciousness and mercy. But this is not through her own choice but because of the relationship that she had with her Son. Catholics also believe in the importance of Mary's intercession because of her role in God's plan for salvation. Jesus and Mary are not in competiton. Mary directs our prayers and attentions to Jesus. God has given Mary a motherly concern for us. Catholics honor Mary because she teaches us what it means to follow Jesus. She is a model and a mother to us. We honor her for all these reasons, but most of all, because God chose her to be the mother of His Son.

Faith vs. Works

Catholics believe that you are saved by faith and works. The cornerstone of Protestantism is sola fide, "by faith alone". They say that Catholics believe that they are saved by their own efforts - how many prayers they say, whether or not they go to Mass every Sunday. Well, this is how the whole Faith vs. Works problem started:

Martin Luther couldn't feel the love and forgiveness of God in his soul. He went to confession several times a week, prayed a lot, and did every religious practice he knew - but he still felt like a terrible sinner. Then one day, he read Romans 1:17 -

For in it is revealed the righteousness of God from faith to faith;as it is written, "The one who is righteous by faith will live."

Luther then realized something that would change both his life, and the entire history of the world. He realized that there was nothing that he could do to "earn" God's forgiveness. God forgives freely, even when undeserved.

Soon after that, while looking at the religious practices of his culture, Luther saw many things that disturbed him. Many of the beliefs and practices of his fellow Catholics seemed to revolve around the hope that they could "earn" grace. So, that's how "Faith vs. Works" began.

Maybe Catholic popular religious practice had taken an unfortunate turn, and people began to think that theirs works were more important than God's grace, but that's not what the Catholic Church was teaching at the time. It never taught such a thing at all. But how could there be such a difference between the popular practice and what the Church taught? Just think about think about so-called "Cafeteria Catholics" today, people who call themselves Catholic, but pick and choose between what the Church teaches and what they want to believe. Get the picture?

Anyway, we're talking about the Catholic Church's teaching on the matter, not how it might be misunderstood. Let's go straight to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Since the initiative belongs to God in the order of grace, no one can merit the initial grace of forgiveness and justification, at the beginning of conversion. (No. 2010)

Our justification comes from the grace of God. Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help, that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life. (No. 1996)

The Catholic Church clearly teaches that we're saved because God chooses to save us. Now, this is where the difference comes and it's important. And biblical evidence is totally suportive of the Catholic viewpoint.

Protestants say, like Luther, that we are saved not only by faith, but by faith alone. They support their view by selective reading of Scripture. The Catholic Church teaches that we are saved by grace alone, but not by faith alone.

God's grace is the beginning and end of our salvation. When we cooperate with His grace, we're strengthened to grow in our holiness and to become more like that Divine Image. That holiness involves both faith and actions. But all of it, even the good works that we do, are possible because of God's grace. This quote from 1 Corinthians 15:10 might help explain -

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me has not been ineffective. Indeed, I have toiled harder than all of them; not I, however, but the grace of God [that is] with me.

So God's grace is responsible for our salvation but it's not all that's responsible.Protestants may say so. But............. that is not what the Bible says.

James 2: 24, 26 puts it bluntly:

See how a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.......Faith without works is dead.

This passage clearly shows that Martin Luther was wrong. So he got rid of the book of James. Took it out of the Bible. (I'll write more about the differences in Catholic and Protestant bibles later) Other Protestant reformers weren't comfortable with this so that's why the book of James is in all Bibles today.

Something which Protestants need to understand is that good works don't "earn" our way to heaven. They make us closer to God. And they are rooted in God's grace within us.

Here are two other quotes from the Bible:

Revelation 20:12 - I saw the dead, the great and the lowly, standing before the throne, and scrolls were opened. Then another scroll was opened, the book of life. The dead were judged according to their deeds, by what was written in the scroll.

Matthew 7:21 - Not everyone who say to me, "Lord, Lord," will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven.

Pretty much all of the "evidence" that Protestants give to support their view is going to come from Paul's letters. They say a lot about being saved by faith, not works. Read over them carefully. Paul was, at least in part, addressing Christians who had converted from Judaism. Most of them still engaged in Jewish practices. One of the biggest conflicts of earlier Christianity was, "Do you have do be Jewish in order to be Christian?" "Did former pagans who become Christians have to obey the Jewish law?"

Paul, after lots of reflection and prayer, concluded that you didn't. You have to see Paul's words in this context. He wasn't talking about the good deeds we do, he was talking about the Jewish Law. Every word that Paul says about "works" is to do with the Jewish law. He says so many things about the importance of works in other places. (like Galatians 6: 8-9: because the one who sows for his flesh will reap corruption from the flesh, but the one who sows for the spirit will reap eternal life from the spirit. Let us not grow tired of doing good, for in due time we shall reap our harvest, if we do not give up).

So basically, the Catholic Church teaches that it is through the grace of God that there is a possibility of salvation. Faith plays a vital role in our salvation, but not the only role. How can your friend say that our actions have nothing to do with our salvation? Just look at what the Bible says about it.