Hi, I’m new and have already made some errors in trying to figure this whole forum thing out, but I’m loving the opportunity…my question/comment is… I’v attended hundreds of ‘christian’(non-catholic) services(evangelical.Presbyterian, Baptist)…(my wife is not catholic) and they NEVER play music which was written by/for the Catholic Church…Their music is awesome, and I am blessed by it, but they intentionally, deliberately avoid an entire body of music because it’s catholic. One pastor actually said, from the pulpit, that satan wrote the Ave Maria! Anyone else have a thought on this…non-catholic musicians especially…
I suspect, Asthmaticus, that this pastor was referring to the words of Hail Mary itself. The Hail Mary is of course, as follows:
Hail Mary, full of grace (
Ave Maria, gratia plena)
The Lord is with the (
Dominus tecum)
Blessed art thou among women (
Benedicta tu in mulieribus)
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus (
Et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus)
I will pause there for a minute and remark that there is only a single word above that is
not Biblical: the word “Jesus”. The rest is taken from the first couple of chapters of the Gospel of Luke (from the Annunciation and the Visitation - where Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth).
The prayer continues:
Holy Mary, mother of God (
Sancta Maria, mater Dei*)
Pray for us sinners (
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus)
Now and at the hour of our death (
Nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae)
Amen.
He probably takes issue with terming Mary the “mother of God”. This term, which in Greek is
Theotokos is an invaluable part of the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church. It was defined at the Third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus, in 431 AD. It was defined not to exult Mary in any way, but in order to refute the error of Nestorius. Nestorius wanted to call Mary
Christokos, which means “mother of Christ”. He wanted to do this in order to indicate that Mary is not the
eternal mother of God, which of course is correct. However, all heresies focus too much on one correct point, to the detriment of other sound doctrine. In this case, saying that Mary is the mother of Christ the person and not Christ the Lord our God actually indicates that Christ is two persons: a human person and a divine person. This is heresy; Christ is
one person, with a human
nature and a divine nature. Therefore the Fathers of the Church at Ephesus defined this word
Theotokos in order to indicate that Mary is indeed the mother of one person: Jesus the Christ our Lord and God.
Many Protestants today take issue with this term, because they mistakenly claim that Catholics think this means Mary is the
eternal mother of God, which she is not. It is a silly, absurd straw man. And the problem with Protestantism is that you can explain this to one person and they’ll get it - or even to one generation and they’ll get it - but then the next generation comes around and you have to explain it to them as well (my point being that Protestants do not learn from their mistakes; whereas Catholics define all the errors that have been made since the start of the Church - that is the point of the Magisterium). The result is that Protestantism is plagued by Nestorianism; even if they won’t admit it.
You can read
this for more information on the term “mother of God”.
*In case you’re listening to Schubert’s version of
Ave Maria, you’ll notice that instead of singing “
Sancta Maria” here, Schubert repeats “
Ave Maria”.
