Pope Francis rejects Marian title of Co-Redemptrix, says it’s an exaggeration

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Pope Francis rejects Marian title of Co-Redemptrix, says it’s an exaggeration

Saints like Jerome, Augustine, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as numerous Popes, have referred to Our Lady as Co-Redemptrix.

VATICAN CITY, March 25, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Francis has launched yet another attack on Our Lady, as he used his weekly general audience to undermine Catholic teaching on her Divine Motherhood, as well as the understanding of her role as Co-Redemptrix, suggesting that such a title was the fruit of exaggerations.

On Wednesday morning, as the Pope addressed the handful of clergy seated around him, as well as those watching via video link, delivered an address containing a mixture of both Catholic and non-Catholic teaching.

Francis moved swiftly to denounce the teaching of Mary as Co-Redemptrix, by correctly pointing out that Christ is the mediator between God and man, but rejecting the possibility of a co-redeemer: “Christ is the mediator. Christ is the bridge that we cross in order to turn to the Father. He is the only redeemer; there are no co-redeemers with Christ, He is the only one. He is the mediator par excellence.”

The Church’s understanding of Marian co-redemption has been consistent since the days of the early Fathers — right up until recent times, when it became a controversial topic following the Second Vatican Council, due concerns from left-leaning clergy about its effect upon ecumenism.

“Mary points out the mediator,” Francis continued, “Mary is completely directed towards Him, she is more His disciple than His mother, we could say.”

This point could be read to contradict Church teaching, which has traditionally held that all the titles and honors proper to Mary, stem from her role as Mother of God, as taught in the Council of Ephesus in 431.

Seeming to comment off-script, the Pope specified his attack, saying that Christ did not intend for Mary to be Co-Redemptrix. “The mother who covers everyone under her mantle as a mother, Jesus entrusted us to her as a mother, not as a goddess, not as a co-redemptrix, as a mother.”

The Pope went so far as to suggest that such a title, by which numerous saints and popes have addressed Mary, was born out of loving exaggeration, but was not factually true. “It’s true, Christian piety likes to give beautiful titles to her, but above all she is a mother, what a wonderful title that is. But remember, all the wonderful titles that the Church gives to Mary, they don’t take anything away from the unique mediating role of Jesus. Sometimes when we love someone it makes us exaggerate.”

With Francis casually dismissing devotion to Mary as Co-Redemptrix as an exaggeration, he seemed to reject the perennial teaching of the Church on this topic — albeit not a dogma declared ex cathedra. ...


What is co-redemption?

The word Co-Redemptrix itself is composed of the two Latin words cum and redimere. Cum translates to “with” in English, denoting one person acting alongside another, but never means “equal” or “interchangeable” in the manner of “co-pilot,” for instance. Redimere is the verb meaning “to buy back, set free by payment.” When combined with the female ending of the verb, one gets the meaning “she who buys back with.”

Drawing heavily from Scripture, figures such as Saints Irenaeus, Ephraim, Jerome, and Augustine laid the foundations for the understanding of the term in the first centuries of the Church, before later theologians such as Saints Bernard, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Louis de Montfort and Alphonsus Liguori fully expounded the mysteries contained in the title.

In addition to numerous other non-canonized scholars, the Holy Office has also weighed in on the issue, writing in 1908 in response to a query about the feast of the Seven Sorrows of Mary that “the devotion of the Sorrowful Mother may increase and the piety of the faithful and their gratitude toward the merciful Co-Redemptrix of the human race may intensify.”

Five years later, the Holy Office granted a partial indulgence to a prayer addressing Mary as “Co-Redemptrix of the human race.”

Pope Pius XI also used the term Co-Redemptrix as part of his public addresses, in 1933, 1934 and 1935, building on the previous papal support for the teaching as expressed by Popes Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, and Benedict XV.

Pope John Paul II also used the term at least seven times during his pontificate, both in his writings and addresses, as well as teaching the meaning of the title in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater and in his General Audience’s between 1995 and 1997.

So in-depth and constant is the teaching of the Church on this topic, that in 2017 the International Marian Association released a statement as part of a longer appeal to Pope Francis, saying: “Not only is the Co-redemptrix term theologically acceptable in articulating the intimacy and complementarity between the divine Redeemer and his immaculate human mother, but the title is actually necessary to properly denote and signify in a single term the providentially designed unity between Jesus and Mary, God-man and human woman, New Adam and New Eve, Redeemer and Co-redemptrix, in the historic work of Redemption.”

However, the latest general audience is by no means the first time the current Pope has attacked Marian co-redemption. On December 12, 2019, Francis proclaimed that moves to officially declare Mary Co-Redemptrix, were “foolishness.”

In response, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò sternly rebuked Francis [see reply below], saying that “Pope Bergoglio once again gave vent to his evident Marian intolerance, recalling that of the Serpent in the account of the Fall, in that Proto-Gospel which prophesizes the radical enmity placed by God between the Woman and the Serpent, and the declared hostility of the latter, who until the consummation of time will seek to undermine the Woman’s heel and to triumph over her and her posterity.”

[Emphasis mine.]

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Abp Viganò’s [2019] defense of Virgin Mary in response to Pope Francis (FULL TEXT)

'On the occasion of the liturgical memorial of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Pope Bergoglio once again gave vent to his evident Marian intolerance.'

December 20, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has issued a strong defense of the Virgin Mary in response to Pope Francis’ controversial homily on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in which he appeared to call the doctrine of Mary as co-Redemptrix “nonsense.”

In a homily delivered in St. Peter’s Basilica on the liturgical feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Pope said of Mary: “Faithful to her Master, who is her Son, the only Redeemer, she never wanted to take anything from her Son. She never presented herself as co-Redemptrix. No, disciple.”

The Pope continued: “She never stole for herself anything from her Son … When they come to us with stories saying we have to declare this, or make this or that other dogma, let us not get lost in nonsense [tonteras].”

For years, popes have been petitioned to proclaim a ‘fifth Marian dogma,’ honoring Our Lady as co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces.

While theologians and pastors have debated whether the dogmatic definition of Our Lady’s unique participation in Christ’s saving work is opportune, two popes have taught the doctrine (Pius XI and Pope John Paul) under the term co-Redemptrix and more still have taught the content while certainly no pope has dismissed it or claimed it derogates from Our Lord’s honor and dignity as sole mediator and redeemer.

Josef Ratzinger writing in 2002 indicated that while he agreed with the content of the term, he feared the term itself was novel and open to misunderstanding: “a correct intention being expressed in the wrong way.”

While St Pius X explained in 1904  “...since Mary carries it over all in holiness and union with Jesus Christ, and has been associated by Jesus Christ in the work of redemption, she merits for us de congruo, in the language of theologians, what Jesus Christ merits for us de condigno.”

Saints including Maximilian Kolbe and Mother Teresa of Calcutta have also invoked the Blessed Virgin under the title “co-Redemptrix.”

Here below we publish the official English text of Archbishop Viganò’s statement, titled “Mary Immaculate Virgin Mother — Acies Ordinata, Ora pro nobis,” which was first released in Italian on December 19 by Corrispondenza Romana.

***

Thus says God, the Lord,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread forth the earth and what comes from it,
who gives breath to the people upon it,
and spirit to those who walk in it…

“I am the Lord, that is my name;
my glory I have given to no other,
nor my praise to graven images…

The Lord goes forth like a mighty man,
Like a man of war he stirs up his fury;
he cries out, he shouts aloud,
he shows himself mighty against his foes.

For a long time I have held my peace,
I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out like a woman in travail,
I will gasp and pant.
I will lay waste mountains and hills,
and dry up all their herbage;
I will turn the rivers into islands,
And dry up the pools…

They shall be turned back and utterly put to shame,
who trust in graven images,
who say to molten images,
“You are our gods.”

Who gave up Jacob to the spoiler, and Israel to the robbers?
Was it not the Lord, against whom we have sinned,
in whose ways they would not walk,
and whose law they would not obey?

So he poured upon him the heat of his anger
and the might of battle;
it set him on fire round about, but he did not understand;
it burned him, but he did not take it to heart.

(Isaiah 42:5-24)


MARY IMMACULATE VIRGIN MOTHER
ACIES ORDINATA, ORA PRO NOBIS


“Is there in the heart of the Virgin Mary anything other than the Name of Our Lord Jesus Christ? We too want to have only one name in our hearts: that of Jesus, like the Most Blessed Virgin.”

The tragic story of this failed pontificate advances with a pressing succession of twists and turns. Not a day passes: from the most exalted throne the Supreme Pontiff proceeds to dismantle the See of Peter, using and abusing its supreme authority, not to confess but to deny; not to confirm but to mislead; not to unite but to divide; not to build but to demolish.

Material heresies, formal heresies, idolatry, superficiality of every kind: the Supreme Pontiff Bergoglio never ceases stubbornly to humiliate the highest authority of the Church, “demythologizing” the papacy — as perhaps his illustrious comrade Karl Rahner would say. His action seeks to violate the Sacred Deposit of Faith and to disfigure the Catholic Face of the Bride of Christ by word and action, through duplicity and lies, through those theatrical gestures of his that flaunt spontaneity but are meticulously conceived and planned, and through which he exalts himself in a continuous narcissistic self-celebration, while the figure of the Roman Pontiff is humiliated and the Sweet Christ on earth is obscured.

His action makes use of magisterial improvisation, of that off the cuff and fluid magisterium that is as insidious as quicksand, not only flying at high altitude at the mercy of journalists from all over the world, in those ethereal spaces that can highlight a pathological delirium of illusory omnipotence, but also at the most solemn religious ceremony that ought to incite holy trembling and reverent respect.

On the occasion of the liturgical memorial of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Pope Bergoglio once again gave vent to his evident Marian intolerance, recalling that of the Serpent in the account of the Fall, in that Proto-Gospel which prophesizes the radical enmity placed by God between the Woman and the Serpent, and the declared hostility of the latter, who until the consummation of time will seek to undermine the Woman’s heel and to triumph over her and her posterity. The Pontiff’s intolerance is a manifest aggression against the prerogatives and sublime attributes that make the Immaculate Ever-Virgin Mother of God the feminine complement to the mystery of the Incarnate Word, intimately associated with Him in the Economy of Redemption.

After having downgraded her to the “next door neighbor” or a runaway migrant, or a simple lay woman with the defects and crises of any woman marked by sin, or a disciple who obviously has nothing to teach us; after having trivialized and desacralized her, like those feminists who are gaining ground in Germany with their “Mary 2.0” movement which seeks to modernize Our Lady and make her a simulacrum in their image and likeness, Pope Bergoglio has further impugned the August Queen and Immaculate Mother of God, who “became mestiza with humanity... and made God mestizo.” With a couple of jokes, he struck at the heart of the Marian dogma and the Christological dogma connected to it.

The Marian dogmas are the seal placed on the Catholic truths of our faith, defined at the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon; they are the unbreakable bulwark against Christological heresies and against the furious unleashing of the Gates of Hell. Those who “mestizo” and profane them show that they are on the side of the Enemy. To attack Mary is to venture against Christ himself; to attack the Mother is to rise up against her Son and to rebel against the very mystery of the Most Holy Trinity. The Immaculate Theotokos, “terrible as an army with banners” (Canticle 6:10) — acies ordinanata — will do battle to save the Church and destroy the Enemy’s unfettered army that has declared war on her, and with him all the demonic pachamamas will definitively return to hell.

Pope Bergoglio no longer seems to contain his impatience with the Immaculate, nor can he conceal it under that seeming and ostentatious devotion which is always in the spotlight of the cameras, while deserts the solemn celebration of the Assumption and the recitation of the Rosary with the faithful, who filled the courtyard of St. Damascene and the upper loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica under St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

Papa Bergoglio uses the pachamama to rout the Guadalupana. The enthronement of that Amazonian idol, even at the altar of the confession in St. Peter’s Basilica, was nothing less than a declaration of war on the Lady and Patroness of all the Americas, who with her apparition to Juan Diego destroyed the demonic idols and won the indigenous peoples for Christ and the adoration of the “Most True and Only God,” through her maternal mediation. And this is not a legend!

A few weeks after the conclusion of the synodal event, which marked the investiture of pachamama in the heart of Catholicity, we learned that the conciliar disaster of the Novus Ordo Missae is undergoing further modernization, including the introduction of “Dew” in the Eucharistic Canon instead of the mention of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity.

This is a further step in the direction of regression towards the naturalization and immanentization of Catholic worship, towards a pantheistic and idolatrous Novissimus Ordo. The “Dew,” an entity present in the “theological place” of the Amazonian tropics — as we learned from the synodal fathers — becomes the new immanent principle of fertilization of the Earth, which “transubstantiates” it into a pantheistically connected Whole to which men are assimilated and subjugated, to the glory of Pachamama. And here we are plunged back into the darkness of a new globalist and eco-tribal paganism, with its demons and perversions. From this latest liturgical upheaval, divine Revelation decays from fullness to archaism; from the hypostatic identity of the Holy Spirit we slide towards the symbolic and metaphorical evanescence proper to dew which masonic gnosis has long made its own.

But let us return for a moment to the idolatrous statues of rare ugliness, and to Pope Bergoglio’s declaration the day after their removal from the church in Traspontina and their drowning in the Tiber. Once again, the Pope’s words have the scent of a colossal lie: he made us believe that the statuettes were promptly exhumed from the filthy waters thanks to the intervention of the Carabinieri [Italian police]. One wonders why a crew from Vatican News coordinated by Tornielli, and Spadaro of Civiltà Cattolica, with reporters and cameramen from the court press, did not come to film the prowess of the divers and capture the rescue of the pachamamas. It is also unlikely that such a spectacular feat did not capture the attention of a few passers-by, equipped with a mobile phone to film and then launch the scoop on social media. We are tempted to pose the question to the person who made that statement. Certainly, this time too, he would answer us with his eloquent silence.

For more than six years now we have been poisoned by a false magisterium, a sort of extreme synthesis of all the conciliar misconceptions and post-conciliar errors that have been relentlessly propagated, without most of us noticing. Yes, because the Second Vatican Council opened not only Pandora’s Box but also Overton’s Window, and so gradually that we did not realize the upheavals that had been carried out, the real nature of the reforms and their dramatic consequences, nor did we suspect who was really at the helm of that gigantic subversive operation, which the modernist Cardinal Suenens called “the 1789 of the Catholic Church.”

Thus, over these last decades, the Mystical Body has been slowly drained of its lifeblood through unstoppable bleeding: the Sacred Deposit of Faith has gradually been squandered, dogmas denatured, worship secularized and gradually profaned, morality sabotaged, the priesthood vilified, the Eucharistic Sacrifice protestantized and transformed into a convivial Banquet...

Now the Church is lifeless, covered with metastases and devastated. The people of God are groping, illiterate and robbed of their Faith, in the darkness of chaos and division. In these last decades, the enemies of God have progressively made scorched earth of two thousand years of Tradition. With unprecedented acceleration, thanks to the subversive drive of this pontificate, supported by the powerful Jesuit apparatus, a deadly coup de grace [death blow] is being delivered to the Church.

With Pope Bergoglio — as with all modernists — it is impossible to seek clarity, since the distinctive mark of the modernist heresy is dissimulation. Masters of error and experts in the art of deception, “they strive to make what is ambiguous universally accepted, presenting it from its harmless side which will serve as a passport to introduce the toxic side that was initially kept hidden.” (Fr. Matteo Liberatore SJ). And so the lie, obstinately and obsessively repeated, ends up becoming “true” and accepted by the majority.

Also typically modernist is the tactic of affirming what you want to destroy, using vague and imprecise terms, and promoting error without ever formulating it clearly. This is exactly what Pope Bergoglio does, with his dissolving amorphism of the Mysteries of the Faith, with his doctrinal approximation through which he “mestizos” and demolishes the most sacred dogmas, as he did with the Marian dogmas of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God.

The result of this abuse is what we now have before our eyes: a Catholic Church that is no longer Catholic; a container emptied of its authentic content and filled with borrowed goods.

The advent of the Antichrist is inevitable; it is part of the epilogue of the History of Salvation. But we know that it is the prerequisite for the universal triumph of Christ and his glorious Bride. Those of us who have not let ourselves be deceived by these enemies of the Church enfeoffed in the ecclesial Body, must unite and together face off against the Evil One, who is long defeated yet still able to harm and cause the eternal perdition of multitudes of souls, but whose head the Blessed Virgin, our Leader, will definitively crush.

Now it is our turn. Without equivocation, without letting ourselves be driven out of this Church whose legitimate children we are and in which we have the sacred right to feel at home, without the hateful horde of Christ’s enemies making us feel marginalized, schismatic and excommunicated.

Now it is our turn! The triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary — Coredemptrix and Mediatrix of all graces — passes through her “little ones,” who are certainly frail and sinners but are absolutely opposed to the members enlisted in the Enemy’s army. “Little ones” consecrated without any limit whatsoever to the Immaculate, in order to be her heel, the most humiliated and despised part, the most hated by hell, but which together with Her will crush the head of the infernal Monster.

Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort asked: “But when will this triumph take place? God knows.” Our task is to be vigilant and pray as St. Catherine of Siena ardently recommended: “Oimè! That I die and cannot die. Sleep no longer in negligence; use what you can in the present time. Comfort yourselves in Christ Jesus, sweet love. Drown yourselves in the Blood of Christ crucified, place yourselves on the cross with Christ crucified, hide yourselves in the wounds of Christ crucified, bathe yourselves in the blood of Christ crucified” (Letter 16).

The Church is shrouded in the darkness of modernism, but the victory belongs to Our Lord and His Bride. We desire to continue to profess the perennial faith of the Church in the face of the roaring evil that besieges her. We desire to keep vigil with her and with Jesus, in this new Gethsemane of the end times; to pray and do penance in reparation for the many offenses caused to them.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò

Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana

Apostolic Nuncio

Translated by Diane Montagna of LifeSiteNews