# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S19
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

The Latest Papist Council, etc. 19

cenus (d. 760): “The Holy Spirit came upon her (Mary), cleansing her.” (Lib. 3, orth. fid., ch. 2.) And thus it reads in the biblical commentary of Theophylactus (d. ca. 1078): “The mother (Mary), perhaps moved to this by vainglory, comes to draw Him [Christ] away from teaching and to show the people that she had authority over Him, who was famous for such great miracles. The Lord therefore answered that it would be of no benefit to His mother to be His mother if she did not also possess other virtues.” (On Mark 3:31–35.) The same author writes: “She (Mary) urges Him (Christ) to perform a great miracle, thinking that because of the conception and the birth she had authority over Him. But He does not rebuke her without reason, for He says: If there is no wine, those who lack it must approach Me and ask Me for it, not My mother.” (On John 2:3–4.) What a powerful testimony against the invocation of saints!

That Mary was conceived without sin was first definitely asserted in the Roman Church around 1140 by several canons in Lyon, and from that time onward, first in that city and then also in other places, this fiction was celebrated with a special feast, the Festum immaculatae conceptionis, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Nevertheless, the feast did not immediately become universal. The Parisian theologian Joannes Beleth (around the year 1162) writes in his Divinorum officiorum explicatio: “Some have occasionally celebrated the Feast of the Conception and perhaps still celebrate it; but it is neither authentic nor approved; indeed, it seems that it ought rather to be forbidden. For she was conceived in sins.” (Ch. 146.) Durandus (d. 1296) likewise still reports and judges it this way in his Rationale divin. offic., book 7, ch. 7.

As for the Scholastics, the most highly regarded among them testify against it. Thus Anselmus (d. 1109) writes: “The Virgin herself, from whom Christ assumed His (human) nature, was conceived in sins; her mother conceived her in sins, and she was born with original sin, because she herself also sinned in Adam, in whom all have sinned. Once it is known that this man is God and the reconciler of mankind, there can be no doubt that He is entirely without sin; but this cannot be unless He assumed His nature without sin from the sinful mass. If we cannot understand in what manner the wisdom of God accomplished this, we must not be astonished, but must reverently acknowledge that among the mysteries of so great a matter there is something we do not know.” (Cur Deus homo? Book II, ch. 16.)

Yet the most important Scholastics, especially after that introduction of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, speak even more extensively against