# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1855_S28
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

28                    The Latest Popish Council, Etc.

...gin was conceived with original sin, make themselves guilty of the crime of heresy or of a mortal sin, since the Roman church and the apostolic see have not yet decided the matter." — 9. There have also been such teachers in the papist church who declared both opinions to be correct. Thus M. Sebastian Fröschel relates, in his tract Vom Königreich JEsu Christi [On the Kingdom of Jesus Christ], of the year 1566: "So, too, in the year 1525 a barefoot friar preached at Halle in Saxony, in the monastery there, that both kinds of monks and orders were right: the preaching friars (Dominicans), in that they taught and believed that Mary was born in original sin; and the barefoot friars (Franciscans), in that they taught that Mary was conceived and born entirely without original sin. One should understand it, he said, by this comparison: as if someone stood up here above on the vault of this church and fell down, he would be a dead man; but if someone were there who caught him in such a fall and broke his fall, so that he did not reach the ground and truly fall, then he would remain alive. So, too, it happened with Mary the Virgin. Just as she was to be conceived in the womb in original sin, God stepped in at that point and cleansed her and freed her from such a fall into original sin."

As a curiosity we will share the following as well. In the year 1713 a work was reprinted which had originally appeared in the Spanish language in Madrid in the year 1666, under the title The Mystical City of God. The work was written by María de Jesús, abbess of the Franciscan convent at Ágreda. The book stood for a time on the Index libb. prohib. [Index of Prohibited Books], but Pope Innocent XI, at the request of the King of Spain, lifted the ban on this work by a brief in the year 1681, and declared it, together with several archbishops, to be free of error. The authoress claims to have been inspired by God and by Mary, and to have received great revelations; among other things, the following belongs here: that Mary was conceived without sin, by a miracle, of aged parents, on a Sunday; that she knew the divine mysteries in the very moment of her conception; that from that moment on she prayed to God as mediatrix on behalf of the human race; that she had even already composed hymns (!); that she later herself kept the feast of her own immaculate conception," etc. To this book the Franciscan general Samaniego, and Calderón, qualificator of the holy Inquisition, published notes. In them the latter writes that God does nothing without the counsel of holy Mary, and that she sits on the divine throne at the right hand of Christ. (See Löscher's Nachrichten von theologischen Büchern, Urkunden, etc., vol. XV, p. 1118f.)

Having perhaps already put the patience of our readers to too hard a test by the length of the foregoing article, we take the liberty of adding only a few brief remarks.

1. Is there any history of doctrine which proves how badly things stand with