Mother Mary and the Catholic Faith

1.      God is Love (1Jn:4-8); God showed his love by sending his only begotten son to be incarnated as human, suffer and die as human, and be resurrected for the world to know Jesus was God

2.      Jesus is Love; He obeyed His Father and redeemed us all from our sin and those in Sheol, the waiting room to heaven, who were resurrected with Jesus, and those who were left behind slid into Hades / Hell

3.      The Holy Spirit is the Breath, the Gaze, the Love that God the Father and God the Son share with each other

4.      Mother Mary is the Daughter of God the Father; Mother of God the Son, and Spouse of the Holy Spirit – the Trinity – One God Three Persons

5.      Mother Mary is not God; Catholics do not worship Mother Mary; Catholics venerate Mother Mary and have a special devotion to her above all saints – who themselves in their saintly journey needed the intercession of Mother Mary with the Trinitarian God

6.      Mother Mary is Primus Inter Pares – first among equals - among all saints

7.      In Genesis 3:15 called the Proto-Evangelium (or “First-Gospel”), God promises to defeat Satan through the operation of “the woman” and “her seed.”

8.      Tradition identifies the “the woman” as the Blessed Virgin Mary and “the seed” as our Lord Jesus Christ.

9.      “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel” (Gen 3:15)

10.  Christ crushes the head of Satan absolutely, and Mary crushes the head of Satan by virtue of her role as the Mother of God and New Eve

11.  We erroneously seek and desire for wealth, health, pleasure, honour and power and allied

12.  We need seek only one all-encompassing gift: the “Grace of God” and everything else will follow that we may lack for nothing:

a.      “Seek ye first the kingdom of God all these things will be added on to you” (Mat 6:33)

b.      “My grace is sufficient for you; in your weakness my strength is made perfect” (2 Cor 12:9)

13.  Mother Mary is the only human we know of whom it is said, “Full of Grace” because she was immaculate and born without sin

14.  She was blessed with Honour and the Privilege (as should be our only desire when we seek the Lord’s Grace above everything else):

·         “The Lord is with you”

·         “Blessed are you among women”

·         “Blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus”

It is to “Mother of God” we turn to:

·         “Pray for us sinners”

·         “Now and at the hour of our death”

15.  The Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), is probably a prayer that Mother Mary recited in some form from the time she began praying that she had become fluent with it when she recited the Magnificat honouring God the Father, to Elizabeth her cousin, bearing John the Baptist who leaps in Elizabeth’s womb when experiencing Jesus in Mother Mary’s womb:

·         My Soul doth Magnify the Lord

·         And, My Spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour

·         For He hath regarded the Lowliness of His Handmaiden

·         For behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed

·         For He that is mighty hath Magnified me

·         And, Holy is His Name

·         And, his mercy is on them that fear Him

·         Throughout all generations He hath showed strength with his arm

·         He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts

·         He hath put down the mighty from their seat

·         And hath exalted the humble and meek

·         He hath filled the hungry with good things

·         And, the rich he hath sent empty away

·         He remembering his mercy hath beholden his servant Israel

·         As he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed for ever

·         Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost

·         As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be world without end

·         Amen

16.  The “Soul” is the ‘transmitter’ God has put in our body to magnify Him; Satan’s one purpose is to corrupt the soul through lust of the flesh (eyes, nose, ears, mouth, touch) to denigrate and defy God

17.  The “Soul” communicates with the Trinitarian God through “Spirit of God” within us the “Holy Spirit” “Third Person of the Trinity” when we are “full of Grace”

18.  Satan forces himself upon us through guile, as he did with Eve in the Garden of Eden, but the Holy Spirit’ presents himself only when ‘invited’; He does not impose himself on us like Satan, hence we need to work with prayer, penance and fasting to seek the Holy Spirit though not always; sometimes it is just God’s grace that the Holy Spirit is given to us to fight off the evil spirit i.e. Satan because our heart desires for the Holy Spirit

19.  “Full of Grace” means being ‘humble’ and ‘lowly of heart’ like Jesus was (Matt 11:28); “He must increase; I must decrease” as John the Baptist advocated (John 3:30)

20.  When we are full of Grace, we are all ‘Soul’, like Mother Mary’s Soul, “My (Our) Soul doth Magnify the Lord, And, my (Our) Spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour”

21.  When we are just all ‘Soul’ and the body is the rest

22.  Our soul descends to Sheol awaiting judgement, while our body which is corruptible, decays and becomes one with the earth or fire or water

23.  When our Soul cries out like Mother Mary did in the ‘Magnificat’, our body becomes the ‘Temple of the Holy Spirit’ (1 Cor 6:19); we are empowered not to submit to the desire of the flesh, but to the divine call of our soul

24.  “For our fight is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Eph 6:12)

25.  It is not our fight, but the fight of the ‘Holy Spirit” when we allow the ‘Holy Spirit’ to reign in every ‘nook and cranny’ of our body and in our heart and mind

26.  To win this fight we need to be full of ‘Grace’ and empty of ‘Sin’

27.  When we sign ourselves, and say the ‘Creed’, the ‘Our Father’, the ‘Hail and Holy Mary’,  the Memorare to our Lady, the Anima Christi and the Protection Prayer (Ps 91) our daily prayer will have a certain completeness to seek the “Grace of God”, “His Almighty’s Protection against all testing and evil”, and us being able to “Pray forward for ‘mercy at the time of our death’"

28.  Mother Mary, the blessed and mighty intercessor, along with all the angels and saints makes our prayer ‘salient’ with the Trinitarian God

29.  People argue why not just pray to God directly instead of involving an intercessor; it is just not us praying as individuals (which we do) but there is merit in having an army of the blessed praying with us; a Catholic tradition that Satan deeply dislikes because it makes him impotent against an army of God arrayed against him instead of just not an individual human being who he can easily manipulate

30.  We too when we ascend to heaven with Jesus will be given the power to intercede with the Trinity directly, for we too will be saints; today we seek the intercession of Mother Mary, the Archangels, Angels and Saints when we are interceding for our brethren

31.  We are not alone in our fight with the ‘principalities and powers of darkness’; we are with the “the woman” as the Blessed Virgin Mary and “the seed” as our Lord Jesus Christ, God the Father and the Holy Spirit – the Archangels and an army of saints who died that we may be blessed to know, adore and love Jesus died for them and for us.