Salvation through the Catholic faith is not possible without Mary. Mark Miraville, a leading advocate of Marian theology, states, “It is in the light of Mary’s unique and intimate cooperation with the Redeemer, both at the incarnation…and at the work of redemption at Calvary…that the Church has invoked Mary under the title “Coredemptrix.”

Have you ever been in the position of trying to educate someone on what their particular religion believes and practices? As a teacher of comparative religions for over thirty years, I’ve been confronted with that situation many times. It happens often with Catholics, especially on the topic of Mary.
Today, Mary, the mother of Jesus , is increasingly being given a prominence in Roman Catholicism which finds little or no support in the Bible. When a contrast is made between the biblical Mary and the Mary of Roman Catholic tradition, the result is two very different portraits of Mary. The Roman Catholic portrayal quite often obscures Christ. In many respects, the Mary of Rome is portrayed as a female parallel to Jesus.
For example, consider the following Catholic teachings: Jesus was born without sin; Mary was conceived without original sin. Jesus was sinless; Mary lived a sinless life. Jesus ascended to heaven following His resurrection; Mary was bodily assumed into heaven at the end of her earthly life. Jesus is a Mediator; Mary is Mediatrix. Jesus is a redeemer; Mary is co-redeemer. Jesus is the King; Mary is the queen of heaven.(1)
These things are true with regard to what the Catholic Church believes and teaches about Mary. And while each one deserves much more space than is available in this article, we will concern ourselves here only with Catholicism’s teaching that Mary was sinless along with the practice of praying to her. See here for more information on other points about Mary: https://arcapologetics.org/will-the-real-mary-please-stand-up/(2)
MARY WAS A SINNER
It has been my experience over the years that some Catholics do not understand the “immaculate conception” of Mary. Some have believed that this refers to Mary being impregnated by the Holy Spirit without carnal sex so she could give birth to Jesus. Somehow they have missed that this doctrine is not referring to Jesus’ conception, but rather the conception of Mary herself. However, folk Catholicism is not official Catholicism. The official position is that Mary, in her immaculate conception, was preserved from original sin. As such, she was miraculously preserved from the pollution of sin inherited from Adam. In both body and soul, she is believed by Catholics to be holy, stainless, spotless, undefiled, pure and innocent in every way. In his papal Bull Ineffabilis of 1854, Pope Pius IX defined Mary’s immaculate conception as follows:
[A]ccordingly, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, for the honor of the Holy and undivided Trinity for the glory and adornment of the Virgin Mother of God, for the exaltation of the Catholic religion, by the authority of Jesus Christ our Lord, of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own: “We declare, pronounce and define that the doctrine which holds the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.” (3)
This is not a suggestion by the Pope, rather an edict, something to be obeyed by all Catholics. How serious is it to reject this? The same Pope said, “Hence, if anyone shall dare–which God forbid–to think otherwise than has been defined by us, let him know and understand that he is condemned by his own judgment; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from the unity of the Church; and that furthermore, by his own action he incurs the penalties established by law if he should dare to express in words or writing or by other outward means the errors he thinks in his heart.”(4)
Virtually, all catechisms of the Catholic Church teach the sinless perfection of Mary. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, affirms the same. On page 252, paragraph 966, it says,” Finally the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all original sin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory,…”(5) Not only does the Roman Catholic Church teach she was without sin, it teaches she never died.
TO PRAY OR NOT TO PRAY TO MARY
It is logical for Catholics to make a connection between Mary’s sinless human nature and praying to her. All Catholics are not necessarily in agreement on all things including praying to Mary. However, we should not kid ourselves about language. Some say they don’t pray to Mary, but they ask Mary to pray for them either to the Father or to the Son. Whether it is asking Mary or the saints in heaven to pray for them, it is still using words that are in fact the same as praying. Asking, beseeching, urging, appealing, petitioning, communing with, talking to, etc., are all used as synonyms for praying.
Although some do not want to admit they are praying to Mary, the Catholic Church openly endorses praying to Mary. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, second edition, says, “Mary is the perfect Orans (pray-er), a figure of the Church. When we pray to her, we are adhering with her to the plan of the Father, …We can pray with her and to her. The Church is sustained by the prayer of Mary and united with it in hope.”(6)
Also, consider the following from the third novena of another Catholic source: “O Mother of Perpetual Help, thou art the dispenser of all the gifts which God grants to us miserable sinners; and for this end He has made thee so powerful, so rich, and so bountiful, in order that thou mayest help us in our misery. Thou art the advocate of the most wretched and abandoned sinners who have recourse to thee.
In thy hands I place my eternal salvation, and to thee I entrust my soul. Count me among thy most devoted servants; take me under thy protection, and it is enough for me. For, if thou protect me, I fear nothing; not from my sins, because thou wilt obtain for me the pardon of them; nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all hell together; nor even from Jesus, my judge, because by one prayer from thee He will be appeased.
But one thing I fear: that in the hour of temptation I may through negligence fail to have recourse to thee and thus perish miserably. Obtain for me, therefore, the pardon of my sins, love for Jesus, final perseverance, and the grace ever to have recourse to thee, O Mother of Perpetual Help.”(7)
RESPONSE
The prayer above confirms what the Catholic Church teaches in regard Mary being sinless and the issue of praying to her. In reference to the latter, we encounter the issue of praying to the dead. There is no Old or New Testament approval of this. Instead, the Bible looks upon this as a pagan practice and equivalent to necromancy (conjuring of the spirits of the dead) which is condemned in Deuteronomy 18: 10-13.
Addressing Mary as ‘the dispenser of all gifts’ is to mean that no salvific benefit can come to us without her mediation. The St. Peter Catechism of the Catholic Church asks, “Did God will to make our redemption and all its consequences depend upon the free consent of the Blessed Virgin Mary?” The Catechism answers, “God willed that our redemption and all its consequences should depend on the free consent of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”(8)
Salvation through the Catholic faith is not possible without Mary. Mark Miraville, a leading advocate of Marian theology, states, “It is in the light of Mary’s unique and intimate cooperation with the Redeemer, both at the incarnation…and at the work of redemption at Calvary…that the Church has invoked Mary under the title “Coredemptrix.”(9) Also, Pope Leo XIII wrote, “Every grace granted to man has three degrees in order: for by God, it is communicated to Christ, from Christ it passes to the Virgin, and from the Virgin it descends to us.”(10)
Granting Mary or any of the saints such a prominent position in salvation means that our Lord has other competitors for His one and only advocacy for us. Having others mediating between Him and mankind is contrary to biblical theology. Scripture says, “There is only one mediator between God and man, and that is the man Christ Jesus” (I Tim. 2:5). It is so because He, not Mary, angels, or saints, is qualified as our only mediator and it is to Him and Him only that we have access to our heavenly Father for salvation.  As Luke says in Acts 4:12, “ And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men[a] by which we must be saved.”
Clete Hux is Director of the Apologetics Resource Center headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama. A Teaching Elder in the PCA, he has pastored churches in Alabama and South Carolina.

Ron Rhodes, The 10 Most Important Things You Can Say to a Catholic (Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 2002), 55.
Will the Real Mary Please Stand Up, Clete Hux, https://arcapologetics.org/will-the-real-mary-please-stand-up/
James White, Mary Another Redeemer? (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1998), 37.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), 252.
, p. 644
https://sacredheartparish.net/novena-prayers-to-our-mother-of-perpetual-help/
Peter Catechism (Liverpool: Print Organization, 1972), question 319.
Mark Miravalle, Mary: Coredemptrix Mediatrix Advocate (Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship Publishing Company, 1993), XV.
Pope Leo XIII, Jucunda Semper (1894).

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God’s solution to the universal problem of evil doesn’t change, from place to place or culture to culture. Prayer is the standard. In fact, part of the transformation that Christianity brings to each culture is how it seeks supernatural intervention. Philippi was also the place where Paul met a slave girl with a spirit of divination. Through that spirit she “brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling” (Acts 16:16). Other spiritual forces and religious practices existed in Philippi. They even appear to possess a degree of power and ‘success.’ Yet Paul says to the people living there: pray about everything. The Christian faith doesn’t deny supernatural intervention. Instead God redirects us away from the traditions, things, places, and people to himself. Thus we pray: “deliver us from evil.”

The problem of evil is one that all humans face. We might debate the details of its origin or how to resolve it, but we generally agree on its existence. In this article I will be reflecting on how the Bible exhorts Christians to seek deliverance from evil, in relation to the temptation to combine African traditional religions with the Christian faith. 
In traditional African religions, as Adamo says, evil is both moral and physical; it “concerns any misfortune that befalls an individual or community or any voluntary antisocial behaviour or any infringement of the decrees of God, the deity or the ancestors.” This is why “propitiatory sacrifices become one of the major ways by which Africans deliver themselves from the effects of evil in the world.” Because the need for sacrifices are embedded both in many Africans’ religious outlook as well as culture, it’s a very difficult practice to abandon.
In this article I reflect on the biblical solution for seeking deliverance from evil, and how this speaks into our traditional practices. Can Africans be in Christ and continue with sacrifices? Should African Christians consult the ancestors or the local sangoma for deliverance? How does the Bible exhort Africans to seek deliverance from the problem of evil? Will we find salvation through a blend of the Christian faith and traditional practices?
The Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver Us from Evil”
The Bible gives one solution for seeking deliverance from evil: prayer (Matthew 6:13). Now, this can be difficult for us to hear, especially considering that our worldview provides us with various alternatives that promise to resolve our problems. Practices handed down by our forefathers, which we’ve implemented and seen fruits from. When we ask our neighbours or family, they recommend one thing when we’re suffering. But Jesus teaches that prayer is foundational. It is the greatest tool at our disposal, when seeking deliverance from evil. 
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What does this mean for the Christian living in a given neighborhood? What does this mean for a Christian going to work? What does this mean for a Christian taking their child to soccer practice and how they mix with other parents? What does this mean for the children themselves and how they act towards their friends on the team who are not Christians? This is where the rubber meets the road, isn’t it? And from 1 Peter the answer should be quite obvious. The kind of true revolution we are talking about, the one that Paul himself spoke about in 1 Corinthians, where it is truly a work of God in people, not just a work of humans, is one where the Holy Spirit transforms lives and those lives shine out to others. No gimmicks, no shortcuts.

When the first Christians were in process of becoming something big, something substantial from the perspective of all around them, a Jew named Gamaliel stood up and gave this speech:
35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too perished, and all who followed him were scattered. 38 So in the present case I tell you, keep away from these men and let them alone, for if this plan or this undertaking is of man, it will fail; 39 but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them. You might even be found opposing God!” (Acts 5:35-39)
From this it seems that there can be no “theories” of effective revolutions. They just are. They must just happen. The Holy Spirit either will or won’t blow with gale force strength in the direction he intends, carrying along the otherwise pathetic little boat, taking it to exactly the place he intends it. This is about absolute divine agency. Paul writes about this too by way of his strategy in evangelism:
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. (1 Corinthians 2:2-5)
Note, however, there is still a strategy here, its just a strategy to focus on the right things, things that will rightly direct people towards God and his power, not towards human powers.
Not too long ago I was inspired by something I read in Fredrick Nietzsche. (I know, but stick with me….) It was in a section on how to learn from history. Nietzsche was walking a tight rope – on the one hand, as a true modernist, he wanted everyone to find their own way, not looking always backwards to tradition, yet on the other hand he recognized that to take a completely renegade attitude risked failing to learn good lessons from the past. So, Nietzsche advocated a balance, sifting through what is good and inspirational from the past and taking it on board, while at the same time never being bound by the parameters of the past. As an example of such inspiration, Nietzsche gave the Renaissance, a movement form the 13th century, predominantly in Florence, wherein roughly two hundred people had a common vision which they worked out together. Pause and consider! If one knows anything about the effects of the Renaissance on the history of Western Civilization, it is quite extraordinary to realize that it all started with roughly two hundred people.
Also not long ago I read Immanuel Kant’s little essay, Was ist Äufklarung? (“What is Enlightenment?”). In this powerful little essay Kant effectively warned that the Enlightenment would never become an effective movement while people in their enthusiasm were just dislocated, just running madly in their own individual directions. The world traditions, the systems of society, will take such enthusiasm and simply crunch it up, grind it to dust. So, in order to really have an Enlightenment movement, Kant argues, what is needed is group support, people striving together for the cause.
What both Nietzsche and Kant say is quite similar: we must all at least have a vision and know where we are going.
None of this will sound very novel. It is simply the stuff of good management. One needs to set a vision of which people can grab hold, and one needs to unify people around that vision. But missing are Gamaliel and Paul’s insights: respectively, things failing unless God is in them and making sure that God is at the center, not people.
The danger here is that we see both Gamaliel and Paul as presenting an alternative to what we learn from Kant and Nietzsche: worldly effective revolutions have vision and commonality, but Christian ones have neither, they are just carried by a force bigger than any human force.
In this essay I want to briefly explore 1 Peter, because it seems to me that 1 Peter presents us with something of a middle-ground in this whole debate (and possibly also then a middle ground between James Hunter and his critics). 1 Peter is a letter about a Christian revolution, a revolution that is anticipated and expected to impact the whole of society. What Peter touts is quite clearly a God-centered Christian revolution, but it is not at all “disorganized” in a kind of “let-go and let-God” kind of way. It has definite structure to it. It is also revolutionary in the truest sense of the word too. In other words, it is not just a benign kind of pattern being presented. Everything in 1 Peter shouts: “Here is how Christianity will turn the world upside down!” So what does it say? What is the message?
Ancient letters kept a standard form, a normal way to write them. Just as children in more modern times have been taught to start a letter with “Dear John” and finish it with “Yours Sincerely,” so in the ancient world letters had a form. What is often unrecognized is that this form included a section where the author was meant to tell the audience why they were writing. This is gold! This is extraordinary, because if we are able to learn to pay attention to this it will make it a whole lot easier trying to understand the purposes of the many letters in the New Testament of the Bible. 1 Peter was a letter, and it also followed the form-guide in terms of having a section intended to disclose the purpose for writing. Here is the relevant section, according to letter theory:
11 Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. 12 Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation. (1 Peter 2:11-12)
Three clues show the first readers (and us) that this is meant to be Peter’s statement for writing: the position of these verses (coming after the prayer of thanksgiving), the word “urge,” and the direct address to the readers.
So, what is the outcome Peter hopes to see? A revolution. He hopes that when God comes to visit an expansive number of people will glorify God. This sounds an awful lot like the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which asks: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” 1 Peter 2:11-12 is revolutionary in that it describes a movement throughout humanity, among not just Christians but the wider society, such that those who are not Christians will either become Christians or at least be directed towards God’s overall glory in the future.
Then notice here is what comes next. 1 Peter has much in common with other New Testament letters, especially Ephesians and Colossians. All these letters have large sections at the end where they go through different classes of people and tell them how they should behave. But interestingly in 1 Peter there is a difference. Whereas in Ephesians and Colossians the direction of discussion seems to be about unity of the body of Christ and also protection against future attacks—do these things and you will be an effective Church for effectiveness sake—in 1 Peter pretty much everything is directed towards the impact such behavior will have on the outside world.
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