That it is fundamentally inconsistent to trust the Fathers and be against Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary
3 min • Digitized on May 8, 2023
From A Defense of the Teachings of Mary, page 82
By St. John Henry Newman
I cannot help hoping that your own reading of the Fathers will on the whole bear me out in the above account of their teaching concerning the Blessed Virgin. Anglicans seem to me to overlook the strength of the argument adducible from their works in our favour, and they open the attack upon our mediaeval and modern writers, careless of leaving a host of primitive opponents in their rear.
I do not include you among such Anglicans, as you know what the Fathers assert; but, if so, have you not, my dear Friend, been unjust to yourself in your recent Volume, and made far too much of the differences which exist between Anglicans and us on this particular point? It is the office of an Irenicon to smoothe difficulties; I shall be pleased if I succeed in removing some of yours.
Let the public judge between us here. Had you happened in your Volume to introduce your notice of our teaching about the Blessed Virgin, with a notice of the teaching of the Fathers concerning her, ordinary men would have considered that there was not much to choose between you and us. Though you appealed ever so much, in your defence, to the authority of the “undivided Church,” they would have said that you, who had such high notions of the Blessed Mary, were one of the last men who had a right to accuse us of quasi-idolatry.
When they found you calling her by the titles of Mother of God, Second Eve, and Mother of all Living, the Mother of Life, the Morning Star, the mystical new heaven, the sceptre of Orthodoxy, the All-undefiled Mother of Holiness, and the like, they would have deemed it a poor compensation for such language, that you protested against her being called a Co-redemptress or a Priestess. And, if they were violent Protestants, they would not have read you with that relish and gratitude with which, as it is, they have perhaps accepted your testimony against us.
Not that they would have been altogether right in their view of you;—on the contrary I think there is a real difference between what you protest against, and what with the Fathers you hold; but unread men and men of the world form a broad practical judgment of the things which come before them, and they would have felt in this case that they had the same right to be shocked at you, as you have to be shocked at us;—and further, which is the point to which I am coming, they would have said, that, granting some of our modern writers go beyond the Fathers in this matter, still the line cannot be logically drawn between the teaching of the Fathers concerning the Blessed Virgin and our own. This view of the matter seems to me true and important; I do not think the line can be satisfactorily drawn, and to this point I shall now direct my attention.