If God could create the Angels and even Eve free from sin, could he not do the same with Mary?
3 min • Digitized on February 11, 2022
From The Glories of Mary, page 343
By St. Alphonsus Liguori
It is a common axiom among theologians, that no gift has ever been granted to any creature with which the blessed Virgin was not also enriched.
St. Bernard thus expresses it: We certainly cannot suspect that what has been bestowed on the chosen among mortals should be withheld from the blessed Virgin.*
And St. Thomas of Villanova says: Nothing was ever given to any of the saints that did not shine more pre-eminently in Mary from the beginning of her life.*
And if it be true, according to the celebrated saying of St. John Damascene, that there is an infinite distance between the mother of God and the servants of God,* it certainly must be supposed, as St. Thomas teaches, that God has conferred greater graces of every kind on the mother than on the servants.*
Now, asks St. Anselm, the great defender of the privileges of the immaculate Mary, this being granted, was the wisdom of God unable to prepare a pure abode for his Son, free from every human stain?*
Has it been in the power of God, continues St. Anselm, to preserve the angels of heaven unstained amidst the ruin of so many, and could he not preserve the mother of his Son and the queen of angels from the common fall of man?*
Could God, I add, give the grace even to an Eve to come into the world immaculate, and afterwards be unable to bestow it on Mary?
Ah, no, God could do it and has done it, since it was altogether fitting, as the above-named St. Anselm says, that this Virgin, to whom God was to give his only Son, should be adorned with such purity, that it not only should surpass the purity of all men and of all angels, but should be second in greatness only to that of God.*
And still more plainly does St. John Damascene declare, that he preserved the soul as well as the body of this Virgin, as beseemed her who was about to receive God into her womb, for he being holy, dwells only with the holy.*
Thus the eternal Father could say to this beloved daughter: “As the lily among the thorns, so is my love among the daughters.” [Cant. ii. 2.] Daughter among all my other daughters, thou art like a lily among thorns; for they are all stained by sin, but thou wert ever immaculate, and ever my friend.