Systematic Mariology: The Collected Essays of Peter Damian Fehlner

By Peter Damian Fehlner OFM Conv. and Arthur Burton Calkins

This second volume of Collected Essays, Systematic Mariology, contains Peter Damian Fehlner's essays on several central Marian topics and disputes. Written over the span of more than twenty years, these essays represent Fehlner's most complete studies on the question of Mary's participation with Christ in the redemption, her role with the Holy Spirit in the mediation of grace, and her place in the sacramental economy, flowing from the Eucharist. Fehlner provides theological resolutions to these inquiries by establishing Mary's predestination as the Immaculate Mother of God and Spouse of the Holy Spirit in the eternal plan of the Father. This flowers into a theological vision of the divine missions that is Trinitarian, christological, and pneumatological. This triple viewpoint opens upon a theological account of divine action and perfect creaturely re-action because it is framed within an ecclesiology that decodes Mary's virginal and divine maternity as the "Great Sign" of the perfection and promise of the church through Christ her spouse in the love of the Holy Spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Aug 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781532663826

Peter Damian Fehlner OFM Conv.

Peter Damian Fehlner, OFM Conv. (1931–2018), was a Franciscan priest and theologian. For nearly forty years he taught theology in Franciscan schools and seminaries in Italy and the United States. He is the author of several books and countless articles in theological and pastoral journals. His final work was published posthumously as The Theologian of Auschwitz: St. Maximilian Kolbe on the Immaculate Conception in the Life of the Church (2019).

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Introduction

Arthur B. Calkins

It is indeed a singular honor for me to present this second volume of The Collected Essays of Father Peter Damian Fehlner, who had such a profound and decisive influence on my own life as a priest and Marian scholar. I sincerely hope that he will eventually be even more appreciated in death than he was in life. I have often commented that he was one of the very rare priests whom I have ever known who was truly wise, transparently holy and perhaps the most brilliant theologian whom I have ever had the privilege to know as a mentor and a friend. His gifts were multi-faceted, but I believe that his Mariological insights were second to none and among the greatest of our era, precisely because of his being totally consecrated to the Immaculate.

I would like to use this foreword, first of all, to provide background and context to the selections which have been chosen for this Fehlner Marian anthology so that non-specialists may not be put off, but may come to appreciate something of the height and breadth and depth of Fr. Peter Damian’s Marian investigations. Many of these essays come from nine symposia entitled Mary at the Foot of the Cross, which he organized, directed and contributed to. He presided at each symposium, introducing each speaker and commenting knowledgeably on each presentation afterward as well as editing all nine volumes.¹ These have become a veritable Encyclopedia of Marian Coredemption along with another volume to which he contributed and edited entitled Studies in Honor of Our Lady of Guadalupe. A secondary purpose is to provide other texts from the church’s authentic magisterium and tradition, which further confirm the expositions of Fr. Peter Damian.

Immaculata Mediatrix—Toward a Dogmatic Definition of the Coredemption

The first selection is from the paper with which he opened the symposium on Marian coredemption held in Castelpetroso, Italy from the 8th to the 12th of September in 1996, with the opening date the Feast of Our Lady’s Nativity and the closing date the commemoration of the Holy Name of Mary. It was printed in Mary Coredemptrix, Mediatrix, Advocate, Theological Foundations II: Papal, Pneumatological, Ecumenical (Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Company, 1997) edited by Mark I. Miravalle, STD. Early in this essay Fr. Peter Damian discusses the distinction between a Marian maximalist and a Marian minimalist. Undoubtedly, he was a maximalist and he was so on very solid ground. Indeed, one of his many statements in this regard comes early on in this essay:

[T]heologians on the eve of the Council were divided into maximalists and minimalists. In the terminology of the time exponents of the two approaches were dubbed, rather inaccurately, christotypologists and ecclesiotypologists, respectively. For it would be a mistake to think the former did not relate Mary to the Church and the latter were the only theologians to do so.

The difference in their approaches to the place of Mary in the Church rests on the fact that the first insists she, and she alone as God’s Mother, precedes the Incarnation. A mariological maximalist in doctrinal matters was and is one who wishes to ascribe to the Virgin an active role both at the beginning, during and at the end of her Son’s historical sojourn in our midst. A minimalist, by contrast, is one who denies her such a role, absolutely with the protestants in general, inconsistently with those Catholics who concede her an active role as Mother, but deny her an active role in the oblatio Christi, viz., as Coredemptrix. And so they only [speak] of her part in representing the mediatory role of the Church at the moment of its formation.

Without a doubt the minimalists have gained control of academic Mariology ever since the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council even though chapter eight of Lumen Gentium very clearly emphasizes Mary’s role in the work of redemption and was prohibited from using the term coredemptrix by higher authority out of deference to Protestants.² Thus Peter Damian would insist that Vatican II is not a charter for Marian minimalism, much less the repudiation of the doctrine of coredemption. He went on to state:

This form of Marian minimalism in terms of the Coredemption is in a sense the final stage in a movement which began with a radical refusal to ascribe the title Mediatrix to the Virgin Mother, whether as a rank in the order of esse, or as a unique mode of operation, whether this be for the sake of mankind in relation to God in view of the Divine Maternity (Nestorianism), or for the members of the Church, potential and actual, in relation to Christ, the head. Initially justified in terms of the solus Christus³ theology, it ends with a total repudiation, both of the divinity of Christ and of the necessity of the cross for salvation, in favor of doctrinal and moral relativism.

Very definitely, Fr. Peter Damian saw the mystery of Mary’s role in the work of the redemption as an absolutely necessary key to dealing with the chaos that has ensued in Catholic theology since the Second Vatican Council and we will continue to see this illustrated from various angles in every one of the succeeding essays.

Mater Unitatis

The second essay in this Marian collection deals with the specific topic of Mary as the Mother of Unity—Mater Unitatis. In some way it may seem to beg the question since the most vociferous opposition to the doctrine is always on behalf of a more inclusive ecumenical sensitivity, which I have referred to in other places as lowest common denominator ecumenism.⁴ Cognizant of this issue, as we will continue to see, Fr. Peter raises this question in his conclusion: Does not the fact that Marian coredemption can arouse everyone so intensely indicate that the issue is in itself very important, urgently important? What interests us is the way in which he deals with it in this essay.

He does so in proposing this schema:

It is for the reader to savor all of the nuances in his explanation of what he calls Marian exemplarity for the church, but his fine reasoning leads us to ponder the intimate correlation between (1) the incarnation and the divine (virginal) maternity, (2) the redemptive sacrifice and the mediatorial role of Mary and (3) the analogy between the triumph of Jesus and the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.⁵ In his conclusion of this presentation Fr. Peter Damian is truly prophetic in stating:

[T]he promoters of Marian coredemption quite rightly note that the universal and unique Mediation of Mary as Mother of the head of the Church and Mother of the Church as body of Christ: the mystery of Mary in Christ and in the Church is the indispensable key to unlock the treasures of Vatican II for the Church, to bring the ecumenical movement to its much desired and correct conclusion, and to resolve the current crisis in religion and in civilization in general.

Indeed, the mystery of Mary is precisely that she has been inserted into the mystery of Christ and cannot be understood outside it; she is indissolubly united to him.⁶ Father Peter Damian made this declaration in 2002 and now is truer than ever. The crisis in the church and in the world will not cease until Our Lady’s role as the first participant in the redemption and the channel through which its graces flow to us is preached, taught, celebrated and solemnly defined.

Maria Coredemptrix—Mater Viventium (Gen 3:20)

Here is how Fr. Peter Damian sets out the theme:

Mother of the living: the title recalls that given to the first Eve, spouse of the first man Adam, in Gen 3:20, immediately after the fall and punishment of our first parents. In addressing the Virgin Mary with the same title, we are clearly acknowledging her as the New Eve—for that is how the inspired text of Gen. explains the meaning of Eve, but in the case of the anti-type, Mary, not wife, but Mother and helpmate (socia) of the New Adam, Jesus. Indeed, as Bl. Eric notes, in a homily familiar to all who recite the office of readings for the Saturday memorial of Our Lady, Mary is the Mother of the living, or Eve, in a manner far transcending that of the first Eve, who is better called in fact step-mother of the dying, that is, of those born to die, while Mary is the Mother of all born to live forever.⁷

Since Pentecost, as Cardinal Newman long since noted, the Eve-Mary typology has been basic, not only to mariological reflection in the church, but to the whole of theology. This is what is fundamentally wrong and wrong-headed about the Protestant solus Christus. There is no Christ without the maternal mediation of Mary, without the Woman who is the source of life.⁸

As St. John Henry Newman clearly indicates, the New Eve typology is found in the sub-apostolic period as early as the writings of St. Justin Martyr (+ c. 165) and St. Irenaeus of Lyons (+ c. 202), a theme, as Jaroslav Pelikan argued, that could very well have come from the apostles themselves.⁹ Fr. Peter Damian also draws from another image that comes to us from the writings of St. Irenaeus: Mary as the terra virgo, the virgin earth.¹⁰

The new Eve is far more than the old Eve, a far more that has a biblical antecedent in the Marian type terra virgo. The first Adam was formed from the slime of the virgin earth, before anything else had been produced; in still more marvelous fashion the new Adam and Savior was not only formed from, but by the Virgin Earth who is Mary, and by whom we are all re-formed (cf. John 1:12–13; 3:1–8) after the likeness of her First-born, precisely because the Son of God is like his Mother. Please note: she is not only similar to the Son because enjoying as daughter of the Father by grace a filiation to the Father as no other creature, she is similar to the Son of the Father as no other creature. But the Son is also perfectly like her because she is His Mother in the most perfect maternity and so is revealed His likeness by nature to the Father. To be marianized, viz., likened to Mary in being born of her spiritually, yet truly and not merely metaphorically, is to be likened to Christ and so to the Father and only thus can one resemble Christ. Not to resemble Christ is to be dead, not living by the Father as He lives (cf. John 6:56–60; 15:1–11).

We have only scratched the surface of the many themes woven together by Fr. Peter Damian in this essay and I have tried to provide some helpful framework for grasping his profound thought. I will offer but two more points of reference to this brief, but dense statement, which may be of some elucidation to the reader:

Alone among the redeemed and saved is the Virgin Mother actively present in this consecration of the Son of God. To use a time-honored phrase Mary Immaculate belongs to the order of the hypostatic union, or in the language of the Seraphic Doctor St. Bonaventure occupies a hierarchy all her own, above those even of the angelic choirs.

First, the great Sulpician Scripture scholar André Feuillet, offers a helpful insight into the consecration of Christ referred to first in John 10:36 as the one whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world as priest/mediator who then consecrates himself as victim saying for their sake I consecrated myself, that they also may be consecrated in truth (John 17:19).¹¹ Secondly, the reference to Mary’s belonging to the order of the hypostatic union requires some explanation since almost all postconciliar Mariologists have eliminated this concept from their discussions. Père Étienne Richer of the Community of the Beatitudes clearly elucidates this concept:

G. M. Roschini alludes here to a fundamental truth, all too often passed over in silence in our days, namely the belonging of the Virgin Mary to the order of the hypostatic union¹² according to metaphysical terminology which has proven itself. There exist in effect three orders of reality which are irreducible but ordained among themselves in view of a more and more intimate communication of the Divinity¹³: the order of nature, the order of grace and the hypostatic order. This last is most certainly distinct from the hypostatic union which designates the union of the two natures, human and divine, in the one divine Person of Christ. But the hypostatic union is the principle of an order which includes two members, namely the human nature of Christ (which does not subsist apart from his divine Person) and the Mother of God. As the French Dominican Mariologist M.-J. Nicolas explains: There are two in this order because God wished to bring about the Incarnation by means of birth and not by way of creation.¹⁴ In the final analysis, this is to take into account the fact that the Virgin Mary is party to the divine decree, constitutive of the hypostatic order, which ordained the Incarnation of the Word. It is this belonging of Mary to the hypostatic order which fully justifies the church’s practice of rendering to the Mother of God a cultus which is entirely special, having as its foundation a grace of another order than that venerated in the other saints, that is to say the grace of the Divine Maternity: Mary, by her Divine Maternity is above the entire order of common grace and comes closer to God than any other creature. That is why we owe her an exceptional veneration. It is not only the Incarnate Word whom we honor in her, it is she herself in her own person, for her own greatness which she is ever endowed from her relation to Him.¹⁵

Mariae Advocatae Causa: The Marian Issue in the Church Today

This paper was carefully prepared by Fr. Peter Damian for an international symposium on Marian Coredemption held in Fatima, Portugal from the 3rd to the 7th of May 2005 and entitled Maria Unica Cooperatrice alla Redenzione, an explicit citation from the Second Vatican Council’s most fundamental constitution on the church, Lumen Gentium #61, where Mary is characterized as being "united with Jesus by compassion as he died on the cross [Filioque suo in cruce morienti compatiens] and thus in this singular way cooperating [operi Salvatoris singulari prorsus modo cooperata est] by her obedience, faith, hope and burning charity in the work of the Savior in giving back supernatural life to souls [ad vitam animarum supernaturalem restaurandam]."¹⁶

The 2005 Fatima symposium had been planned long in advance and it was originally hoped that many cardinals and bishops would attend, but because of the then-recent death of Pope Saint John Paul II and the election of Pope Benedict XVI, a number of curial prelates did not come and sadly no bishops were present from either Europe or North America, most probably because none of them considered the matter of any serious significance for the life of the church. Nonetheless Peter Damian spent months preparing his extraordinary concluding paper, which I had the privilege of reading in a number of successive drafts and of hearing delivered. It was on Marian coredemption as the most fundamental theological question facing the church in our day.

First and foremost, we must be clear that the doctrine on Mary coredemptrix is well established in the church¹⁷ and was taught by the Second Vatican Council and by Pope Saint John Paul II.¹⁸ However—and very sadly—by and large this doctrine has not been taught and clarified since the time of the council and many commentators on the council and those considered experts have been doing their best to downgrade the topic and to insist that the council abandoned both the terminology and the doctrine and mandated that theologians should take a different path.¹⁹ Peter Damian was very aware of this situation and thus explained why he chose to speak of Mary’s cause:

Etymologically, cause is a legal term. If its use to summarize our discussion of the mystery of Mary Immaculate and of her unique place in the divine counsels governing the economy of salvation retains a legal scent, that is quite intentional. For the cause of Mary in the economy of salvation: the place she occupies from eternity in the divine counsels of salvation and the crucial role she fulfils so perfectly in bringing these counsels to pass at the Incarnation, on Calvary and in the church, as well as the recognition of the part she plays by the church and by every soul redeemed and delivered from sin by her Savior-Son, viz., by those whose salvation in fact hinges upon the successful prosecution of that cause, are very much today a matter of intense dispute. Those who would promote her cause and those who, either violently oppose it or who just as adamantly want to hear nothing of it, are locked in battle.

As the reader has no doubt already discovered, Fr. Peter’s statements are packed with very careful terminology and with multiple points of reference. The economy of salvation refers to God’s eternal plan whose first adumbration appears in Gen 3:15, known as the Protoevangelium, the first glimmer of the Good News to break through after the fall. To the serpent God says: I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and hers; you will strike at her heel while she crushes your head.²⁰ Mary only began to exist in time, but from all eternity she existed in the plans of God. This is a fundamental tenet of Franciscan Mariology and is known as the principal of the joint predestination of Jesus and Mary, i.e., as Blessed Pope Pius IX put it, God "by one and the same decree, [uno eodemque decreto] had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom."²¹

His point is that God has willed that our salvation depends on what Jesus did on Calvary, but also hinges on Mary’s fiat, first given at the Annunciation, but never revoked and also made explicit on Calvary where she stood, in keeping with the divine plan, enduring with her only begotten Son the intensity of his suffering, associated herself with his sacrifice in her mother’s heart, and lovingly consenting to the immolation of this victim who was born of her.²² In effect, our redemption depended on Jesus, but also on Mary. Since this is the case, why should we not promote the cause of Mary? Yet the resistance is very stiff on the part of many who occupy very high positions in the church and who promote lowest common denominator ecumenism. Others are completely ignorant of it because they have never been taught these truths of faith. Those who do not recognize Mary’s unique place in the divine counsels and what she has done and continues to do for us see her cause as either something to be resisted vigorously or as a non-issue. The situation has not changed since Fr. Peter Damian laid it out in 2005. In fact, it is worse. We are locked in battle over a matter that should unite all Catholics. That battle, as he states, is ultimately a battle for souls at the very heart of the crisis of faith in the church.

His assertion in this regard is brilliant:

Apropos a very similar situation at the time of the Protestant reform the great English convert and apologist, G. K. Chesterton, made this observation: When in the midst of all the din of controversy, with rights and wrongs on all sides, there was heard the mocking and demeaning of the Virgin Mother mild, at that moment one distinctly began to hear the little hiss that only comes from hell (cf. his A Party Question: Collected Works, vol. XI). In one form or another the entire history of the church has always been marked by this controversy, an aspect of the battle between the Woman and the dragon, sketched so accurately in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse. Recalling that heavenly scene revealed to the beloved disciple and apostle especially consecrated to Mary as her child by the Saviour himself should remind us of another aspect of this cause of Mary. She is not in the first instance an object of legal disputation either in the church or outside. She is rather in her own right and before all others an Advocate, our Advocate in the final settlement of all claims bearing on who owns us: Christ or the anti-Christ. And her intervention or less is the decisive factor. Against that Advocate the Prince of this world and his brood, heavenly or earthly, avail nothing.

In the first passage we discovered the text of Gen 3:15 in the background. In this second passage its parallel in the Book of Revelation chapter twelve is brought into explicit relief. Both of them speak about the enmity, the struggle between Satan and the Woman. In the first instance the enemy is represented by a serpent and in the second by a dragon. In both cases the Woman triumphs, but not without a struggle, indeed with a seeming defeat. Here is the way John Paul II put it in his Marian encyclical Redemptoris Mater:

Thanks to this special bond linking the Mother of Christ with the church, there is further clarified the mystery of that Woman who, from the first chapters of the Book of Genesis until the Book of Revelation, accompanies the revelation of God’s salvific plan for humanity. For Mary, present in the Church as the Mother of the Redeemer, takes part, as a mother, in that monumental struggle against the powers of darkness which continues throughout human history. And by her ecclesial identification as the Woman clothed with the sun (Rev 12:1), it can be said that in the Most Holy Virgin the church has already reached that perfection whereby she exists without spot or wrinkle.²³

Mary is in the salvific plan of God for humanity, as we have seen, and thus takes part in that monumental struggle against the powers of darkness. As we approach ever closer to the end times, we can expect that the struggles will intensify and at this stage the Woman herself is not only involved in the struggle but sadly has also become the object of what Chesterton called "the mocking and demeaning of the ‘Virgin Mother mild.’ Not only in the world, but also in the church those who work for Our Lady’s cause become more and more accustomed to hearing that little hiss that only comes from hell" (a refrain we will hear in this essay again and again). I heard it very distinctly after the first symposium on Marian Coredemption held in Castelpetroso, Italy in September 1996 at which Father Peter Damian and I both participated—and that little hiss has not stopped because hell wants to stall the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as long as feasible so as to capture as many souls as possible. This tactic also keeps the church from being without spot or wrinkle in many more of its members.

Father Peter Damian had profound insights into the battle plans of the enemy:

That aspect of the enmity between the Woman and the serpent foretold in the Protoevangelium reveals in a special way both the distinctive tactics and weak points of the liar and murderer from the beginning (cf. John 8:44). He has a certain sophisticated cleverness enabling him to excel in prevarication and seduction of men and so take charge of this world, but he has neither the courage nor the means to confront directly the invincible Woman, the Mother of Truth, which will make you free, viz., from sin (cf. John 8:32; Matt 1:21). The dragon can only attack the Woman to the extent he can persuade her children, the rest of the brethren of her First-born (cf. Rev 12:17), therefore His friends (cf. John 15:12–17), that she is not the Mater et Magistra Veritatis, and so her cause is either irrelevant or downright counterproductive: respectively the position of those indignantly indifferent to it or violently opposed to it.

This is highly significant: the enemy will not take on the Woman directly, but rather by convincing others that she is not the Mother and Teacher of the Truth who says of himself I am the Truth (John 14:6). The denial of Mary’s true identity and role has been used on unsuspecting and gullible Catholics since the time of the so-called Reformation.

But the Protestant version of reform was a false version, precisely because organized around the systematic rejection of Marian mediation, and therefore of any other form of cooperation, either by the Church (hierarchical-sacramental) or by believers (good works) in the subjective redemption. Wherever Protestant reformers, especially Calvinistic, succeeded in persuading a nation to abandon Marian-Catholic spirituality based on the mystery of her unique cooperation or mediation in the work of redemption, there they succeeded in detaching permanently a local church from Rome. Where the defenders of Catholic tradition organized their efforts, in theory and in practice, around the mystery of the Immaculate Mediatress, there they succeeded in keeping whole nations loyal or in bringing them back to the unity of faith.

I offer here a simple clarification on the scholastic terminology employed by Father Peter Damian. Objective redemption was achieved by Jesus with the cooperation of Mary on Calvary. Subjective redemption is our reception and response to the grace of objective redemption. A Lutheran dogma fully embraced by John Calvin (1509–64) is that we can do nothing to respond to objective redemption according to the doctrine of sola gratia grace alone whereas a Catholic understanding always sees the possible cooperation with God’s grace on the part of the receiver.

Obviously, Fr. Peter Damian’s language will not appeal to the army of those who promote lowest common denominator ecumenism, but this is precisely why we are at the impasse where we are. The solution is the recognition of the role that God has given to Mary from all eternity. Fr. Peter finds so many ways to bring this argument home in this essay, which I believe, is one of his most brilliant and lucid. I leave it to the reader to savor and ponder it at length.

Marian Coredemption in the Eucharistic Mystery

Fr. Peter Damian was a master interpreter of the Franciscan Marian tradition. Indeed, no other religious body in the church can boast such a long and consistent Marian tradition, which St. Maximilian Kolbe characterized as the golden thread of the cause of the Immaculata.²⁴ Undoubtedly, one of the great sources of this tradition comes from the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure (1221–74), whom Peter Damian had spent his life studying and explaining. In his introduction to Mary at the Foot of the Cross–VI: Marian Coredemption in the Eucharistic Mystery he describes what he calls the Marian mode of the incarnation and redemption according to St. Bonaventure citing his Collationes in septem donis Spiritus Sancti [Conferences on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit] chapter 6 in which the saint states that the Virgin Mary at the incarnation brought forth (protulit), on Calvary paid (persolvit), and so now in the church owns or possesses (possidet) the price of our redemption. Fr. Peter Damian then goes on to state that

The first moment, then, of the one and only redemptive sacrifice is that of the Incarnation itself: the virginal conception and birth of the Savior, whereby in the words of St. Paul the Son of God was fitted with a body in order to offer himself for our salvation (cf. Heb 10:6). The second moment is that of Calvary where the sacrificial mission of the Incarnate Word was consummated, a mission signaled through the Mother during His private life, a mission publicly introduced by the Mother as well as Baptist at the inauguration of His public ministry, a mission shared and supported by that same sorrowful Mother on Calvary. Finally, the Marian mode of the Incarnation resting on the mystery of the Immaculate Conception or preservative redemption finds its ultimate historical moment and expression in the sacramental order, above all in the mystery of the Eucharist, because it is the extension of the Redemptive Sacrifice of Calvary, of the great Hour of the Savior. It is an extension of this because the un-bloody and bloody Sacrifice of Jesus are not two, but one and the same sacrifice, both resting on the reality of the Incarnate Word present as priest and victim of this one and the same sacrifice under two modes.²⁵

From this Fr. Peter Damian concludes The active, unique presence of Mary in each of these moments cannot be canceled without canceling Christ and redemption. This rather brief excerpt from Fr. Peter Damian’s introduction to volume 6 of Mary at the Foot of the Cross is a marvelous illustration of how his speculative genius could further illuminate the last chapter of Pope Saint John Paul II’s last encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia on Mary’s presence in the eucharistic mystery.

Coredemptrix, therefore Mediatrix of All Graces

If Mary had a unique role, always subordinate to that of Jesus in bringing about our salvation, then she also has a mediatory role in bringing the graces of salvation to us. This has been taught by many popes. I cite here from Pope St. Pius X’s great Marian Encyclical Letter Ad Diem Illum of 2 February 1904:

From this community of will and suffering between Christ and Mary she merited to become most worthily the reparatrix of the lost world and dispensatrix of all the gifts that our Savior purchased for us by his death and by his blood.

It cannot of course be denied that the dispensing of these treasures is the particular and supreme right of Jesus Christ, for they are the exclusive fruit of His death, who by His Nature is the Mediator between God and man. Nevertheless, by this union in sorrow and suffering, We have said, which existed between the Mother and the Son, it has been allowed to the August Virgin to be the most powerful Mediatrix and advocate of the whole world, with her Divine Son.

The source, then, is Jesus Christ, and of his fullness we have all received (John 1:16); "from him the whole body (being closely joined and knit together through every joint of the system according to the functioning in due measure of each single part) derives its increase to the building up of itself in love. But Mary, as St. Bernard justly remarks, is the aqueduct, or if you will, the neck by which the body is joined to the head and the head transmits to the body its power and virtue: For she is the neck of our head, by which he communicated to his mystical Body all spiritual gifts." We are thus, it will be seen, very far from declaring the Mother of God to be the authoress of supernatural grace. Grace comes from God alone. But since she surpassed all in holiness and union with Christ, and has been associated with Christ in the work of Redemption, she, as the expression is, merits de congruo what Christ merits de condigno, and is the principal minister in the distribution of grace. He sits at the right hand of the Majesty on high (Heb 1:3); but Mary sits as a Queen on his right hand, the securest refuge of those who are in peril, as well as the most faithful of helpers, so that we have naught to fear or despair of, as long as she is our guide and our patroness, she is our defender and our protector.²⁶

Effectively, Mary is mediatrix of all graces because she is coredemptrix.²⁷ Pope St. Pius X states this with clarity. Fr. Peter Damian says this from his speculative perspective and draws further conclusions:

Either Mary is Mediatrix of all graces because Coredemptrix, or there is no fruitful mediation: magisterial, pastoral, sacramental, charismatic, by anyone in the church. In rejecting the maternal mediation of Mary in the church and her invocation (not merely her veneration) in trouble and the practice of true devotion to her, the Protestant reformation logically also rejected the mediation of the church, in particular priestly-sacramental. With this it becomes clear that the slogan: Christus solus is simply a modern western version of the ancient monophysitism and monotheletism²⁸: a radical denial of the very possibility of creaturely, free cooperation (merit and good works above all) in the work of redemption, beginning with the Divine Maternity and effecting of the Incarnation. The mystery of Mary as Mediatrix, whether affirmed or denied, becomes the center of a controversy over grace and justification, faith and good works, above all over the mission of the Holy Spirit and of life in the Spirit in the realization of the plan of salvation. The reason is this: at the center of the working of the Spirit is the maternal mediation of the Virgin Mother. Affirmation or denial of this maternal mediation leads to one or another of two mutually contradictory notions of Christian spirituality.

The Predestination of the Virgin Mother and Her Immaculate Conception

By any consideration this is a massive essay that contains two closely interrelated topics as the and clearly indicates. The first topic, as Fr. Peter Damian rightly indicates, has been almost totally ignored in modern Mariological studies even though Lumen Gentium #56 explicitly declares that The Father of mercies willed that the incarnation should be preceded by assent on the part of the predestined mother [Voluit autem misericordiarum Pater, ut acceptatio prædestinatæ matris incarnationem præcederit]. This predestination is not to be understood in the Calvinistic sense that God arbitrarily predestines some souls to heaven and others to hell without regard to their efforts, but rather that in willing the incarnation, he also willed the existence of Mary and predestined her for her unique role as Mother of the Redeemer. In his Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus by which Blessed Pope Pius IX solemnly declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception he stated that God,

by one and the same decree, had established the origin of Mary and the Incarnation of Divine Wisdom [ad illius Virginis primordia transferre, quæ uno eodemque decreto cum divinæ Sapientiæ incarnatione fuerant præstituta.]²⁹

In the first instance, this is a matter of common sense. From all eternity God had a perfect plan that in the fullness of time would send his Son who is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col 1:17) born of a woman (Gal 4:4). Obviously, the woman who have to be prepared to be the dwelling place of the Son of God.

As a master of the Franciscan Marian tradition, Fr. Peter Damian was in a unique position to expound the Franciscan thesis, which passed into the papal magisterium with Ineffabilis Deus. He presented the scriptural bases and indicated the witness of the tradition. Then he considered the unique contribution of Blessed John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) about whom he was an expert and succinctly presented Scotus’ position:

[P]redestination to glory, at the very core of the theology of grace, is commonly considered a matter of faith. Further, this concept of predestination to grace and glory is, in the order of divine intentions, prior to any consideration of sin, either on the part of the Angels or on the part of Adam and Eve and their offspring. On the very possibility of the grace of the Incarnation or absolute primacy of Christ rests the possibility both of creation and of a redemption from sin.

He then went on to explain that all who are members of the body of Christ are predestined to glory in Christ (cf. Eph 1:4–5), introducing the distinction

within the divine counsels of salvation, between the order of the hypostatic union and the order of the saved-redeemed. Mary by reason of her singular role as Mother of God, a role resting on her unique personal state of holiness (Immaculate Conception), pertains to both orders, so making possible the realization of the Incarnation and the cooperation of the church and faithful in the work of salvation.

Let us recall again what we have noted earlier about the three orders of nature, grace and glory. Original sin leaves us in the state of fallen human nature. Redemption brings us into the state of grace. Following Jesus faithfully to the end of our lives will bring us into the state of glory. Mary pertains to both the order