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The Catholic sermon we'll reflect on "The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son" was published in Newman's Discourses to Mixed Congregations in 1849, about five years before Pope Pius IX declared the doctrine of Mary's Immaculate Conception to be official Catholic Church teaching:
We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful. Ineffabilis Deus, December 8, 1854
Newman begins his discourse with the bold statement: "that the glories of Mary are for the sake of Jesus; and that we praise and bless her as the first of creatures, [so] that we may confess Him as our sole Creator."
Then this disciple of Saint Athanasius of Alexandra proclaims the Mystery of the Incarnation and how difficult it really is for us to wrap our minds around it and really believe it: "When the Eternal Word decreed to come on earth, He did not purpose, He did not work, by halves; but He came to be a man like any of us, to take a human soul and body, and to make them His own."
But when we consider not just that the Second Person of the Trinity was Incarnate as a man but how He came to us as man, we discover the mysterious historical reality: the Son of God is also the Son of Mary:
The world allows that God is man; the admission costs it little, for God is everywhere, and (as it may say) is everything; but it shrinks from confessing that God is the Son of Mary. It shrinks, for it is at once confronted with a severe fact, which violates and shatters its own unbelieving view of things; the revealed doctrine forthwith takes its true shape, and receives an historical reality; and the Almighty is introduced into His own world at a certain time and in a definite way. Dreams are broken and shadows depart; the Divine truth is no longer a poetical expression, or a devotional exaggeration, or a mystical economy, or a mythical representation.
Newman quotes both the Letter to the Hebrews and the First Letter of St. John the Apostle to demonstrate the particular bodily reality of the Incarnation:
"Sacrifice and offering," the shadows of the Law, "you have not desired, but a body have you prepared for me" (Hebrews 10:5). "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have diligently looked upon, and our hands have handled," (1 John 1:1), such is the record of the Apostle, in opposition to those who denied that "Jesus Christ had appeared in the flesh" (1 John 4:2).
Declaring that Mary is the Mother of God, the Theotokos, is a key to the reality of the Incarnation:
And the confession that Mary is the Mother of God is that safeguard wherewith we seal up and secure the doctrine of the Apostle from all evasion. It declares that He is God; it implies that He is man; it suggests to us that He is God still, though He has become man, and that He is true man though He is God. By witnessing to the process of the union, it secures the reality of the two subjects of the union, of the divinity and of the manhood. If Mary is the Mother of God, Christ must be literally Emmanuel, God with us.
From this mysterious reality, Newman declares, all the glories accorded to Mary, including her freedom from sin from the moment of her conception, are fitting, for "the sake of Jesus", her Son because:
If she is to witness and remind the world that God became man, she must be on a high and eminent station for the purpose. She must be made to fill the mind, in order to suggest the lesson. When she once attracts our attention, then, and not till then, she begins to preach Jesus. "Why should she have such prerogatives," we ask, "unless He be God? and what must He be by nature, when she is so high by grace?" This is why she has other prerogatives besides, namely, the gifts of personal purity and intercessory power, distinct from her maternity; she is personally endowed that she may perform her office well; she is exalted in herself that she may minister to Christ.
Then Newman rehearses the defense of the the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception he would make in reply to E.B. Pusey in 1866: Mary is the Second Eve (as Jesus is the Second Adam); she would have the same privileges as Eve, the "mother of all the living" as Adam named her:
It was fitting that she should triumph, where Eve had failed, and should "bruise the serpent's head" by the spotlessness of her sanctity. In some respects, indeed, the curse was not reversed; Mary came into a fallen world, and resigned herself to its laws; she, as also the Son she bore, was exposed to pain of soul and body, she was subjected to death.
But she was not put under the power of sin. As grace was infused into Adam from the first moment of his creation, so that he never had experience of his natural poverty, till sin reduced him to it; so was grace given from the first in still ampler measure to Mary, and she never incurred, in fact, Adam's deprivation. She began where others end, whether in knowledge or in love. She was from the first clothed in sanctity, destined for perseverance, luminous and glorious in God's sight, and incessantly employed in meritorious acts, which continued till her last breath.
Hers was emphatically "the path of the righteous," which is "like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day" (Proverbs 4:18), and, sinlessness in thought, word, and deed, in small things as well as great, in venial matters as well as grievous, is surely but the natural and obvious sequel of such a beginning. If Adam might have kept himself from sin in his first state [or Eve hers!], much more shall we expect immaculate perfection in Mary.
Such is her prerogative of sinless perfection, and it is, as her maternity, for the sake of Emmanuel.
No wonder then that we ask the Mother of God to intercede for us:
If we have faith to admit the Incarnation itself, we must admit it in its fulness; why then should we be startled at the gracious appointments which arise out of it, or are necessary to it, or are included in it? If the Creator comes on earth in the form of a servant and a creature, why may not His Mother, on the other hand, rise to be the Queen of heaven, and be clothed with the sun, and have the moon under her feet?
For the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe on December 12, Blum has excerpted a similar sermon from the the Discourses to Mixed Congregations, "On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary."
Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!
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