The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception

Whether Mary was conceived free of original sin was long disputed among Latin theologians. Thomas Aquinas taught that she was sanctified in the womb, but only after her soul had been infused: had her soul never incurred the stain of original sin, “this would be derogatory to the dignity of Christ, by reason of His being the universal Saviour of all” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III.27.2, answer and reply to objection 2). John Duns Scotus argued from the same ground, the excellence of Christ as redeemer, to the opposite conclusion: the most perfect mediator would mediate most perfectly for his mother, and that means meriting to preserve her from original sin (Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III d.3 q.1, nn. 17–18). God, he said, could have kept her from it altogether, or cleansed her after an instant or after a time; which he did God knows, but unless the authority of the church or of Scripture stood against it, it seemed probable to attribute to Mary what is more excellent (Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III d.3 q.1, nn. 28 and 34 (pp. 84–85 of the file)).

In 1483 Sixtus IV, noting that the Roman church kept the feast of Mary’s conception, condemned as false the assertion of some preachers that those who hold her to have been conceived without original sin commit mortal sin, or that those who keep the office of the feast are heretics (Sixtus IV, Grave nimis Denzinger 735). He also reproved those who charged the contrary opinion with heresy, because the Roman church and the apostolic see had not yet decided (Sixtus IV, Grave nimis Denzinger 735). The Council of Trent, in its decree on original sin of 1546, declared that it did not intend to include “the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary” and renewed the constitutions of Sixtus (Council of Trent Session 5, decree on original sin, closing paragraph).

In February 1849 Pius IX, writing from Gaeta, asked the bishops how their clergy and people regarded the doctrine and what they themselves thought about defining it (Pius IX, Ubi primum 6 and dating clause). He says that they answered “with one voice” in favour (Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus ‘The Mind of the Bishops’). In the letter Ineffabilis Deus, given at St Peter’s in Rome on 8 December 1854, he declared, pronounced and defined that the doctrine which holds that Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful (Pius IX, Ineffabilis Deus ‘The Definition’ and dating clause).

The bishop of Tarbes wrote in 1862 that Bernadette Soubirous, a child of fourteen born at Lourdes, had by her own account, taken from her mouth before his commission, seen and heard a being that called itself the Immaculate Conception (“se disant l’Immaculée-Conception”) (Bishop Laurence of Tarbes, Mandement of 18 January 1862, p. 399). He judged that Mary had really appeared to her eighteen times in a grotto near the town, beginning on 11 February 1858 (Bishop Laurence of Tarbes, Mandement of 18 January 1862, art. 1, p. 408). The sanctuary at Lourdes gives the words as Bernadette recounted them, Que soy era Immaculada Concepciou, and dates them to 25 March 1858 (Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, The apparitions, 25 March 1858).

Statements of other churches rejected or questioned the definition. The patriarch of Constantinople and his synod wrote in 1895 that the “Papal Church” had made “an innovation” by laying down a dogma that the ancient church did not know (Patriarchal Encyclical of 1895 sect. 13). The Old Catholic bishops at Utrecht rejected it in 1889 as without foundation in Scripture and in the tradition of the first centuries (Declaration of Utrecht (1889) art. 3). A paper written for the Church of England’s General Synod in 2011 says that many Anglicans and other Christians found the definitions of 1854 and 1950 without a proper basis in the New Testament and the early church, and denied the pope’s authority to define the faith of the whole church (Church of England, GS 1818 (2011), section 2, The Marian Dogmas). The Anglican–Roman Catholic commission recorded in 1981 that the two dogmas, promulgated by the bishop of Rome apart from a synod, raise a special problem for Anglicans who do not consider their precise definitions sufficiently supported by Scripture (ARCIC, Authority in the Church II (1981), 30); see the council of 1869–1870 and the definition of 1950.