Mary, Destroyer of All Heresies Part I & Part II

Throughout history, Our Lady has been a stumbling block to heretics and a nurturing mother to the truth. The term comes from the Tract in the Mass of the Common of the Blessed Virgin. 

From Pilgrim Priest

By Fr David J. Nix

Part I

Although she is the most tender of mothers, Mary has also been known for centuries as “the destroyer of all heresies.” Why?

Most of my readers probably know from Church history that any correction of a Marian heresy was usually de facto a correction of a Christological heresy afflicting the faithful. For example, Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer (of holy memory) points out that “the Council of Ephesus taught categorically and definitively that in Jesus Christ there is only one person, the Person of the Son of God, in which subsist two natures, really distinct, the divine nature, by which Jesus Christ is truly God, and the human nature which made Him truly a man. And the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, declared the Council, being Mother of Jesus Christ, became truly the Mother of God.” In other words, recognizing Mary is the “Mother of God” is really only recognizing that Jesus Christ is God.

But reading the words of the late Brazilian traditionalist Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer helped me to understand that Mary may be key to defeating modernism in a very specific way. In so many words, Bishop de Castro Mayer points out that Mary’s life is full of miracles. Modernism, on the other hand, is indeed the synthesis of all heresies, but it has also has a new offense against God: It is the replacement of the supernatural with the natural in the Catholic Church. Modernism has created a hierarchy that is now man-centered, not God-centered (as all of us clergy should be.)

Many people know that modernist clergy shy away from Marian devotion because it is a stumbling block to their “ecumenism.” (Ecumenism is tantamount to the heresy of religious indifferentism, the notion that any religion can you to heaven.) But there’s another reason most people miss: Even though the New Testament only implicitly (rarely explicitly) reveals the miracles of Mary, her life was a set of miracles from start to finish: She was the only human person in all of history who was Immaculately conceived. Jesus appeared to Mary at the Resurrection. She was the channel of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost upon the Apostles. The Holy Theotokos was assumed into heaven as she fell asleep in the Lord. After her earthly life, even more miracles abounded. For example, just Our Lady of Guadalupe converted 10 million in simply the first century of the Americas hearing of her and seeing her on the tilma.

We often hear modernists say that Mary was just a normal mother who led a normal life of a Jewish mother in the 1st century. There’s a truth to this, that her day-to-day life would have looked pretty normal to her friends and family. But under it all, her life was a giant miracle from start to finish.

Recently, a priest friend explained to a group of us that everyone’s interior life will ultimately reflect that of Mary or that of Satan. The interior life of Mary is entirely God-centered. The interior life of Satan is entirely self-centered. This is truly the difference between Apostolic Catholicism and narcissistic modernism: Apostolic Catholicism is focused entirely on God. Narcissistic modernism is entirely focused on self (often under pretext of being “pastoral” for others.) Modernism is a man-centered approach to Catholicism that has replaced the natural with the supernatural. Apostolic Catholicism (or traditional Catholicism) is so entirely Marian because it is a religion based on God. And that God is a God of miracles, as reflected from the moment of her being the Immaculate Conception, to her Glorious Assumption.

Part II

In Part I, we discussed how Mary’s interior life was entirely God-centered (not man-centered) and how her life, although ordinary in her daily duties, was a string of miracles from her Conception to her Assumption.  Miracles overturns the heresy of modernism which is primarily a man-centered version of Catholicism that looks through the ancient faith through natural goggles instead of the supernatural vision given to us by Divine Revelation.

I release this blog on 13th of October which is not only the anniversary of the greatest miracle since the Resurrection (namely, the miracle of the sun seen at Fatima by 70,000 believers and unbelievers alike on 13 Oct 1917) but is also the anniversary of the Moscow Revolution beginning the killing of faithful (even children on 13 Oct 1917.)  The 13th of October is also the anniversary of a slightly earlier event in Church, namely, Pope Leo XIII’s astonishing locution of a discussion between God and Satan following his Mass (on 13 Oct 1884.)

While Mary is primarily God-centered, the above events show that she is intimately tied up in the current events of world history and Church history.  Some even say she is “more” involved in this époque of the Church than past ages, as St. Louis De Montfort rightly wrote about a future age that would be the “age of Mary.”  “My dear brother,” wrote the saint a few hundred years ago,  “when will that happy time, that age of Mary, come, when many souls, chosen a procured from the Most High by Mary… lose themselves in the abyss of her interior”?

The above picture is a a group of us praying in front of a Planned Parenthood in Colorado with the missionary image of Our Lady of Guadelupe at a 40 Days for Life.  One of the women gave the history of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and we were again reminded how we in the pro-life movement pray that God through Mary would again stop a slaughter just as he stopped the slaughter of the tribes surrounding the Aztecs five hundred years ago through the appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe triumphing over the pyramids of those lake cities now know as “Mexico City” or “D.F.”

Now the “errors of Russia” have killed many more than pagan Aztecs and the “errors of Russia” have now filled the United States from abortion laws to the scamdemic to every lie being pushed to replace God with a leftist government in the hearts and minds of our citizens.  While God has allowed many heresies to be attached to His Holy Name of Jesus, it seems that God has allowed very few heresies to be attached to the Holy Name of Mary, the Mother of God.  I don’t know why that is the case, but that is just how it has shaken out in world history and Church history.

That means that the key to defeating the errors of Russia (at least until and probably beyond a great miracle of Divine Intervention) is to be formed as Marian as possible in the interior life.  This is first done by the daily Rosary.  As I have preached before:  “Five decades a day for purity of hands, fifteen decades a day for purity of mind.”  And after that (and only after that) can we aim for the heights of that “age of Mary” where St. Louis De Montfort says “many souls, chosen and procured from the Most High by Mary, shall lose themselves in the abyss of her interior.”  In fact, St. Louis De Montfort goes so far as to say that the final age of Marian souls will even become “living copies of Mary to love and glorify Jesus.”