# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S14
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

14 The Newest Papist Council, etc.

...with the help of that well-known papal "holy spirit" (1 John 4:3), decided, and a new article of faith be fabricated for the final confirmation of an idolatry already pursued for so long.

That the doctrine of the so-called immaculate conception, or more clearly, of the sinless having-been-conceived of the holy Virgin Mary *) is a newly forged article of faith not only in the whole holy Christian Church, but even within the papal church itself — this, to be sure, people such as the editor of the New York Catholic Kirchenzeitung is (of whom it is written in Isa. 28:15) deny, brazenly and shamelessly; but to deny what has happened and what stands written in black and white is a futile thing, which proves nothing except what one ought to think of the denier.

Since we must now shortly expect the Pope's pronouncement that the Virgin Mary, just as Christ, was conceived and born without sin, and thus was free not only from actual sins but also from original sin **) — a papal pronouncement which millions of papists will then accept as the voice of God, and will carry the idolatry they already practice toward Mary to an even worse degree — for this idolatry is without doubt actually what Satan is aiming at when he prompts the Pope to declare the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Blessed One among women an article of faith within the Roman Church — it may hopefully not be unwelcome, and not without use, to some of our readers who do not have certain relevant literary documents at hand, if we hereby communicate to them a brief history of the doctrine of the alleged sinlessness of the holy Virgin.

*) The question here is naturally not, of course, whether the Blessed Virgin conceived the Son of God without sin, for that is the doctrine of Scripture and all Christians believe it; but rather whether she herself was born into the world without sin, of her parents Joachim and Anna.

**) We read just now in the "Catholic Kirchenzeitung" of New York that Pius IX, on December 9 of last year, publicly and solemnly read out the following amid cannon-fire: "We pronounce decisively that the doctrine which says that the most blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by the grace of almighty God, through a privilege granted her in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the human race, preserved from and free of every inherited guilt — has been revealed by God, and must therefore be firmly and steadfastly believed by all the faithful." Then followed, it is said, the clauses in which those who think otherwise are designated as such — namely, as separated from the Church (that is, in papal style, banished and eternally cursed and damned). Thereupon the hymn Regina Coeli ("Thou Queen of Heaven!"), struck up by the "Holy Father," was sung. In what follows it is said from Rome that the Church has "universally and continually believed" that dogma! Mr. Oertel adds: "Above all, however, we Catholics in the United States ought now to rejoice greatly, since the ever-immaculate Mary was some years ago solemnly declared the patroness of the United States."