So last week I looked at the fact that the earliest Christians talk a lot about Mary as the new Eve and give a surprisingly prominent place to her. And for many non-Catholics, particularly Protestants, this can be a bit unusual because regularly we get asked, “Why do you Catholics make such a big deal about Mary?” So I wanted to do my best to give a biblical answer to that question to show why, if you read the Bible right, you should make a big deal about Mary as well.
And I want to start with a verse in Genesis of all places, Genesis 3:15. So to give some context to this, Adam and Eve have just rebelled from God and God has cursed them both, but he’s also cursed the serpent who tempted them. And he says to the serpent, “I’ll put enmity strife conflict between you and the woman and between your seed and her seed, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.”
Now the first thing to know here is that the serpent, the devil, he’s not omnipotent. He’s not omniscient. We sometimes can forget this and we can imagine that the devil knows the whole story of salvation and that he knew the inner life of God and all of this, and we have no reason to believe that’s true and a lot of reasons to believe that’s not true. That if he had what we call the beatific vision, he could never have rebelled from God in the first place because he’d be totally happy and totally at peace. So he is a created being. He’s smarter than we are. He’s more cunning than we are, but he doesn’t know everything. And I mentioned this at the outset to stress that think about this passage not from our perspective where it’s really good news, but from the devil’s perspective where it’s really bad news.
He’s just been told that he’s going to be at war with someone called the woman and that there’s going to be offspring or seed of the woman and seed of him and that this is somehow going to mean that his head gets crushed. So we’ve got those three features. One we’re told just generally God is going to provide a remedy for the fall, that the devil’s plan has succeeded in the short term. He’s convinced Adam and Eve to rebel from God. He’s brought disrupture and disunity into the original unity of Eden, but that’s not the end of the story. God’s going to fix this somehow that somehow at this point in Genesis 3:15, it’s still mysterious. Two, we know that this remedy is going to somehow involve a woman and her son and that’s where salvation is going to come. And three, it’s going to mean that Satan’s head gets crushed.
This is the beginning of the transcript from Joe Heschmeyer’s podcast on @catholicanswers. You can read the full article: https://www.catholic.com/audio/sp/why-catholics-make-such-a-big-deal-about-mary
Let us know what you think about this article.
But, we all know and believe what Our Lady of Fatima said, “In the end, My Immaculate Heart will triumph.” “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.”
– Our Lady of Fatima, July 13th, 1917
