The Catholic Church is not to be trifled with. Christ speaks through His Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit directs & guides the Church through Peter. Peter lives in Rome, so when Rome speaks, Christ is speaking - and when Christ speaks, the Father speaks. I assent fully to all of this. Please do not think to place me with the “Christ followers” and “No-religionists”. I am a Roman Catholic.
I have nothing against the authority of the Church, and wish to hold to it as to Christ. I just asked why the Church calls Mary’s status a Saving Office, and why she is said to give all the Gifts of Eternal Salvation to us at this very moment - not as Mother of God, but personally and effectively, through her own will, at this moment, the giver of all good gifts (a characteristic of God in James 1:17). There’s not a hint of that in scripture, tradition, or the Fathers for more than a millennium…
… but I guess that doesn’t matter, does it? If the Catechism makes a poetic, narrative claim like Vatican 2, it must be true and there’s no room for inquiry, right?
First thing you must realize is that the teaching itself does not need to have been defined or taught from the beginning itself. Divine revelation ended with the last Apostle. But the church uses and interprets that Divine revelation to teach and clarify till the end of time. Apart from “Faith” related doctrine, think about moral doctrine. The early Church never had a pronouncement that In Vitro fertilization (IVF) is immoral. But she teaches as such today. It uses divinely revealed truths about human dignity and natural law to arrive at that conclusion. Is it a novel teaching to say “IVF is immoral?” CERTAINLY. But therefore is it false? NO!
So the fact that something was not present before is not a reason to say that the Church teaching is wrong. Since it is the only authority we got and we are speaking of matters beyond direct verification, the Church is the only one that can tell us if some teaching is wrong anyway.
Now Mary as the Mediatrix is one such conclusion to all the truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition.
If you are looking for hints, the biggest hint you have is the description of the incarnation. God, being omnipotent and the creator of all things through nothing, does not need the consent of a woman or any assistance by a woman to be incarnated. But God chose to enter in to the world through Mary. The WORD itself was given to us through Mary and her “yes”. At this very fact itself, we must realize how God seems to want to do things in ways we would not do, had we been in his position (this is why Muslims have a problem with the incarnation). More importantly, it seems that God went out of his way to involve a woman in the role of giving Christ to the world.
Also from Tradition, your view that Marian devotion was absent for the entire first millennium is incorrect. The Marian dogma, “Mother of God”, was pronounced before 500 AD. The B
asilica Sanctae Mariae Maioris (Basilica of Saint Mary Major), which you can see even today was built in the time of Pope Sixtus III which was from 432 - 440 AD. So it shows the level of Marian devotion even back in the day.
If you go to Church fathers, Irenaeus (189 AD) says
“Thus, the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. What the virgin Eve had bound in unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosed through faith”
Odes of Solomon considered to be from the 1st century,
“So the Virgin became a mother with great mercies. And she labored and bore the Son, but without pain, because it did not occur without purpose. And she did not seek a midwife, because he caused her to give life.”
Or you have the likes of St. Augustin
“That one woman is both mother and virgin, not in spirit only but even in body. In spirit she is mother, not of our head, who is our Savior himself—of whom all, even she herself, are rightly called children of the bridegroom—
but plainly she is the mother of us who are his members, because by love she has cooperated so that the faithful, who are the members of that head, might be born in the Church. In body, indeed, she is the Mother of that very head”
With respect to mediatrix, we can see St. Ephraem (373 AD)
“With the Mediator, you are the Mediatrix of the entire world”
Or St. Cyril of Alexandria
“Hail Mary Theotokos, venerable treasure of the whole world…it is you through whom the Holy Trinity is glorified and adored,…through whom the tempter, the devil is cast down from heaven, through whom the fallen creature is raised up to heaven, through whom all creation, once imprisoned by idolatry, has reached knowledge of the truth, through whom holy baptism has come to believers…through whom nations are brought to repentance”
Now I did not initially think you were Catholic so I did not mention this. But if you want to get a good understanding of Mary, I want to suggest a very short book (but packed with information and insight) that you can read.
That is the “
True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary” by St. Louis De Montfort. You can find the entire text online here
ewtn.com/library/montfort/truedevo.htm
This is the work that Bl. John Paul II’s stated as
"I myself, in the years of my youth, found reading this book a great help. There I found the answers to my questions, for at one point I had feared that if my devotion to Mary became too great, it might end up compromising the supremacy of the worship owed to Christ”
So it may help you too
I pray one day you have this eye opening experience.
My goodness! You saw my doubts about one specific Marian teaching, and you assumed that I must be treating every single Marian doctrine as if it’s up for grabs. Please don’t jump to conclusions so easily, friend.