Homework help? Please? Re: Immaculate Conception

[StJudePray4Me]

Hi all,

My daughter is on 5th grade. she has an assignment to write a short explanation and history of the Holy days of obligation, specifically the Immaculate conception.

We came across this statement, attributed to Pope Pius IX :

“Mary was conceived immaculate by expectation of the merits of Christ.”

Can someone help me understand this, in 11 year old child terms?

Does it mean the God the Father knew that Mary would be the mother of Jesus from her very conception and that’s why he created her soul without original sin? The phrasing “expectation of the merits of Christ” has got me confused.

Thanks!!!

 

[Glorthac]

Yes.

The Father made Mary without original sin, because she was going to be the Mother of Christ our God.

 

[Salvatore123]

If you search for “Immaculate Conception”, “St. Thomas Aquinas” and “Duns Scotus”, it should give you SOME discussion of this.

For all his brilliance, St. Thomas Aquinas could not quite figure out how Mary, if she was conceived without sin, could still need Jesus, her Son, as her Redeemer.

Duns Scotus came up with the theological answer that was adopted by one of more recent popes.

Mary was in need of redemption like all other human beings, but through the merits of Jesus’ crucifixion, given in advance, she was conceived without the stain of original sin. God could have brought it about:

(1) that she was never in original sin;

(2) she was in sin only for an instant; or

(3) she was in sin for a period of time, being purged at the last instant.

Whatever of these was more excellent should probably be attributed to Mary.

Duns Scotus simply carried out, to its logical end, the following principle attributed to Anselm of Canterbury: “potuit, decuit, ergo fecit” (God could do it, it was appropriate, therefore he did it).

This argument appears in Pope Pius IX’s declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Pope John XXIII recommended the reading of Duns Scotus’s theology to modern theology students.

I hope this helps.

 

[the_phoenix]

Jesus, being God, saved Mary before she was born from the original sin she would have inherited from Adam and Eve.

 

[coolduude]

CAF provides a good analogy in one of their articles:

Consider an analogy: Suppose a man falls into a deep pit, and someone reaches down to pull him out. The man has been “saved” from the pit. Now imagine a woman walking along, and she too is about to topple into the pit, but at the very moment that she is to fall in, someone holds her back and prevents her. She too has been saved from the pit, but in an even better way: She was not simply taken out of the pit, she was prevented from getting stained by the mud in the first place. This is the illustration Christians have used for a thousand years to explain how Mary was saved by Christ. By receiving Christ’s grace at her conception, she had his grace applied to her before she was able to become mired in original sin and its stain.

So I guess you can put that in 11 year old terms and I’m sure it would make sense

 

[Poco]

Well, the previous posters have already said pretty much what I was going to say. Make sure you have her throw in the Latin from Anselm of Canterbury for good measure!

 

[StJudePray4Me]

Thanks everyone!!

I’m kind of proud of myself that I figured that out!

She’s done a lovely little report, but I just wanted to make sure our reading of the text was correct!