# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S26
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

26                    The Latest Popish Council, Etc.

...left unmentioned; it says, however, only, at the close of the decree on original sin: "Yet the holy Synod declares that it is not its intention to include under this decree the blessed and immaculate Virgin Mary, the Mother of God; rather, the constitutions of Sixtus IV are to be observed, under the penalties threatened therein." When, therefore, the Dominicans rose up in the year 1614 against the Spanish Franciscan Franc. de San Jago, who defended the immaculate conception, they were soon forced, after papal intervention repelled them, to come off the losers (although as late as 1622 Pope Gregory XV declared that it had not yet pleased the divine wisdom to reveal this mystery to his vicar on earth).

However victorious, down to this hour, the party which defended the immaculate conception has been within the Roman church, that party has nevertheless been anything but united within itself as to just how, properly speaking, one is to conceive of this alleged mystery. 1. Some hold that for Mary there was not even the possibility of sinning along with Adam, for the prohibition against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, though given to Adam for himself and all his descendants, had excepted Mary; hence she did, indeed, eat in Adam, but thereby committed no sin. Bellarmine, however, who cites this as one of the explanations offered by some, lib. 4. de amiss. gratiae c. 19, declares it to be "not very certain." Yet Val. Gerardus, Catharinus Senensis, Vignerius, and others taught it in this way. 2. Others say that Mary did not take part in the fall, without determining more closely the how of it. Thus it is stated, for example, in the Geistliche Gesänge zu Gebrauch der heiligen Mission [Spiritual Hymns for Use in the Holy Mission], Mainz, 1720, page 22:

"When the first parents went
where forbidden apples hung,
Mary was not there."

3. Others maintain that in Adam a small particle of his body remained pure even at the fall, that this passed down through the whole chain of intermediate links and was kept pure all the way to Joachim and Anna, the parents of Mary, and that from this pure particle the nature of the eternal Virgin was formed. This is written, for example, by the Franciscan Petrus Galatinus, confessor of Leo X, in plain words, lib. 7 de arcanis; likewise by Franziskus Guerra (d. 1559 as Bishop of Placencia) in Majestas gratiarum Deiparae, Tom. I, p. 83. It disgusts us to reproduce the passages in question word for word. (Cf. Gerh. Conf. cath. f. 1398, and Sammlung von Alten und Neuen Sachen, vol. XXXIII, pp. 386-387.) 4. Still others maintain that, bodily, Mary was indeed conceived like other human beings, but that her soul, from the very first moment of its creation and infusion, was without the stain of original sin, so that the whole person of Mary, as soon as she existed, had no sin in herself; and that by this Mary is distinguished from the other saints, who through the grace of the