Preview: Newman on "The Glories of Mary for the Sake of Her Son"

For our first discussion of an Advent/Christmas sermon by Saint John Henry Newman, Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim of the Son Rise Morning Show and I will celebrate the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on Monday, December 9! This feast has been transferred from its usual date, December 8 since it falls on the Second Sunday of Advent this year. It is still a Holy day of Obligation (or of Opportunity!) in most dioceses of the USA. 

I'll be on the air at my usual time! about 7:50 a.m. Eastern Time/6:50 a.m. Central Time. Please listen live here or listen to the podcast later.

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

We are using the excerpt from this longer sermon as it appears in Waiting for Christ: Meditations for Christmas and Advent, edited by Christopher O. Blum.

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!

Newman on the Assumption of the BVM

From his Discourses to Mixed Congregations: "Discourse 18. On the Fitness of the Glories of Mary":

. . . it is a great evidence of truth, in the case of revealed teaching, that it is so consistent, that it so hangs together, that one thing springs out of another, that each part requires and is required by the rest.

This great principle, which is exemplified so variously in the structure and history of Catholic doctrine, which will receive more and more illustrations the more carefully and minutely we examine the subject, is brought before us especially at this season, when we are celebrating the Assumption of our Blessed Lady, the Mother of God, into heaven. We receive it on the belief of ages; but, viewed in the light of reason, it is the fitness of this termination of her earthly course which so persuasively recommends it to our minds: we feel it "ought" to be; that it "becomes" her Lord and Son thus to provide for one who was so singular and special, both in herself and her relations to Him. We find that it is simply in harmony with the substance and main outlines of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and that without it Catholic teaching would have a character of incompleteness, and would disappoint our pious expectations.

Let us direct our thoughts to this subject today, my brethren; and with a view of helping you to do so, I will first state what the Church has taught and defined from the first ages concerning the Blessed Virgin, and then you will see how naturally the devotion which her children show her, and the praises with which they honour her, follow from it.

Now, as you know, it has been held from the first, and defined from an early age, that Mary is the Mother of God. She is not merely the Mother of our Lord's manhood, or of our Lord's body, but she is to be considered the Mother of the Word Himself, the Word incarnate. God, in the person of the Word, the Second Person of the All-glorious Trinity, humbled Himself to become her Son. Non horruisti Virginis uterum, as the Church sings, "Thou didst not disdain the Virgin's womb". He took the substance of His human flesh from her, and clothed in it He lay within her; and He bore it about with Him after birth, as a sort of badge and witness that He, though God, was hers. He was nursed and tended by her; He was suckled by her; He lay in her arms. As time went on, He ministered to her, and obeyed her. He lived with her for thirty years, in one house, with an uninterrupted intercourse, and with only the saintly Joseph to share it with Him. She was the witness of His growth, of His joys, of His sorrows, of His prayers; she was blest with His smile, with the touch of His hand, with the whisper of His affection, with the expression of His thoughts and His feelings, for that length of time. Now, my brethren, what ought she to be, what is it becoming that she should be, who was so favoured? . . .

But in a festive season, my dear brethren, I must not weary you with argument, when we should offer specially to the Blessed Virgin the homage of our love and loyalty; yet, let me finish as I have begun;—I will be brief, but bear with me if I view her bright Assumption, as I have viewed her immaculate purity, rather as a point of doctrine than as a theme for devotion.

It was surely fitting then, it was becoming, that she should be taken up into heaven and not lie in the grave till Christ's second coming, who had passed a life of sanctity and of miracle such as hers. All the works of God are in a beautiful harmony; they are carried on to the end as they begin. This is the difficulty which men of the world find in believing miracles at all; they think these break the order and consistency of God's visible word, not knowing that they do but subserve a higher order of things, and introduce a supernatural perfection. . . .

Who can conceive, my brethren, that God should so repay the debt, which He condescended to owe to His Mother, for the elements of His human body, as to allow the flesh and blood from which it was taken to moulder in the grave? Do the sons of men thus deal with their mothers? do they not nourish and sustain them in their feebleness, and keep them in life while they are able? Or who can conceive that that virginal frame, which never sinned, was to undergo the death of a sinner? Why should she share the curse of Adam, who had no share in his fall? . . . 

Also, here are some meditations on titles of Mary from Newman's Meditations and Devotions. Remember that Newman was writing and meditating upon Mary's Assumption more than one hundred years before Pope Pius XII defined the doctrine of the Assumption on November 1, 1950 in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus!