Was the Immaculate Heart of Mary the only human who purely loved Jesus?

[BarbaraTherese]

Thanks for sharing that, Carole - beautiful indeed…I am still in the process of printing the link you gave - 36 Word pages…quite a lengthy document. It seems as one draws closer to Christ and the Blessed Trinity that They point to Mary and that she in turn points to Them. This is not any sort of declaration of Church teaching I am making, rather a personal observation. My Dad had awesome devotion to Our Lady under the title Perpetual Help and taught me to pray to her before I could walk I think!!! …hence at a very early age indeed I had great confidence and trust in the help of Our Lady no matter the circumstance. I still say the prayer he taught me to our Lady of Perpetual Help most daily.

Actually I hve been truly blessed to know a couple of people in my life I regard as living breathing saints…in all I have noticed two things: an incredibly beautiful sincere and entirely endearing humility and a great devotion to Our Lady…so that what I read sometime in my teens re criteria and common denominator of holiness was to be borne out by my experiences in latre life.

Blessings and my regards…Barb

 

[AveSantaMaria]

*Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. *

Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse.

I really am not understanding your question.

Fraternally,

JREducation

I see the question in this way now, I’m not sure that I remember how I saw it when I originally posted the thread:

We honor certain types of love more than others because they are purer in a sense, they are loves that give to others without the need for getting back in return. For example, Mother Teresa is honored by the world, including with a Nobel Peace Prize, because she went to Calcutta, India and served poor, dying people. These people had nothing to give back to her. However, if I love the fireman who has rescued me from a burning house, it is a love, no less as real, but less noble perhaps - he did something for me for which I should love him for, and people would perhaps think me immoral if I did not love that fireman and help him in his time of need but would think me normal if I do not help a random poor stranger in that poor stranger’s time of need for that poor stranger has done nothing for me in the past.

Therefore, I am struck by the fact that the Immaculate Heart of Mary loves the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as do we all, for being her Savior. However, I think that she has the unique privelege of also having a motherly love for him as well, whereby even if she did not know that he was her Savior, I strongly suspect she would still have loved him extremely deeply - while I probably would have not loved him deeply and neither would most other people. This strong and nearly unconditional mother’s love is testified to in the Bible as God compares his love to a mother’s love: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See I have engraved you on the palms of my hands…”** (Isaiah 49:15-16)**

So… when I say pure… St. Joseph may not have taken care of the baby Jesus if the angel of the Lord had not appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”(1:20-21) St. Paul may not have cared for the Sacred Heart of Jesus if this hadn’t happened: “As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.””(Acts 9:3-6)… It is within the realm of human imagination that the Immaculate Heart of Mary might not have loved the Sacred Heart of Jesus if the Angel had not told her who he was and she had simply become pregnant. However, I strongly doubt it.

So I contemplate on the purity of her love, because I suspect that my mother loves me more than anyone else in the world and I suspect that she probably always will. I wonder if the Immaculate Heart of Mary’s love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus is the human love for the Sacred Heart of Jesus that is the most pure, that has the least bit of self-interest involved… especially at the Cruxificion. Did she understand what it meant that he would rise up again in three days the way that we understand it at that time? No one else did so… I don’t know what to think, but to give her the benefit of the doubt and imagine that she must have had the most sorrow possible at his death as well.

I invite you to read a beautiful document by Paul VI for your studies

BarbaraTherese and JoySong. Thank you so much for your beautiful and informative posts! You have cleared up my questions and given me new material to ponder that has enriched me: most especially the Marian document written by His Holiness Pope Paul VI. I have added it to my resource list.

Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse.

*Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. *

 

[AveSantaMaria]

*Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. *

Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus also compares his love to a mother’s love, though to a hen’s love, not a human mother’s love!! “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who killt he prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”(Luke 13:34)

Free information on almost all I know on devoting oneself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary:
Pereptual online Adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus louisville-catholic.net/WebCameras/AdorationChapel/tabid/825/Default.aspx
True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin montfort.org.uk/Writings/TrueDev.html
**Secret of the Rosary ** montfort.org.uk/Writings/Rosary.html
Preparation for 33 day consecration to the Blessed Virgin saintlouisdemontfort.com/consecration.cfm
Reflections on True Devotion to Mary by His Holiness Pope John Paul II http://www.michaeljournal.org/montfort.htm
**The Glories of Mary, ** by St. Alphonsus de Liguori, one of the 33 Doctors of the Catholic Church, explains Hail Holy Queen http://www.catholictradition.org/Mary/glories.htm
On the Dolors of Mary by St. Alphonsus de Liguori, one of the 33 Doctors of the Catholic Church, explains the sufferings of Our Lady http://writer.zoho.com/public/immaculate/Seven-dolors
Marialis Cultus (Apostolic Exhortation for the Right Ordering and Development of Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary of His Holiness, February 2, 1974 by His Holiness Pope Paul VI ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/P6MARIAL.HTM
Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus en.wikisource.org/wiki/Devotion_to_the_Sacred_Heart_of_Jesus#FIRST_POINT._.E2.80.94_The_ardent_desire_Jesus_Christ_feels_to_be_with_us.
Divine Mercy Chaplet ewtn.com/Devotionals/mercy/dmmap.htm
Cathechism of the Catholic Church vatican.va/archive/catechism/ccc_toc.htm

Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world!! Jesus, I trust in you!! May the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary glorify himself through us!! Jesus, I trust in you!! For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world!! For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world!! Jesus, I trust in you!! May we be gifted with the gifts of the Holy Spirit through the Immaculate Heart of Mary that we most desperately need! Jesus, I trust in you!! For the sake of his sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world!! Holy God, Holy Mighty One, Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us and on the whole world!!

Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse. Come Holy Spirit, come by means of the powerful intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, your well beloved spouse.

*Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee. Blessed art Thou among women and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. *

 

[BarbaraTherese]

BarbaraTherese and JoySong. Thank you so much for your beautiful and informative posts! You have cleared up my questions and given me new material to ponder that has enriched me: most especially the Marian document written by His Holiness Pope Paul VI. I have added it to my resource list.

You are very welcome, ASM:thumbsup: …Laus Dei! I always read your posts and they are beautiful - it is not too often that I comment as they are beautiful and thought provoking, worth the pondering, just in the reading.

Blessings and warm regards…Barb

 

[benedictus2]

Let’s restructure the question. Was Mary the only person who could love Jesus perfectly because she was the Immaculate Conception? That raises another interesting point. If we follow the tradition of the Church, we notice that the Church speaks of Mary as exemplar. She is the model to which we all aspire. A model of what?

She is a model of true love of God, without being part of the Trinity. If she is the model and the Church encourages us to follow her example and aspire to love her Son as she loved him. Then the answer has to be, she is not the only person capable of pure love of God.

Whether others achieved the intensity of love that she achieved or not, that’s another question and we will have to wait until we get to Heaven to find out.

The fact that her heart is immaculate means that it was conceived without sin. It does not mean that no one can love as she loved. There is a difference. It’s like the difference between possible and probable.

Mary was conceived without sin. We were not. Mary’s heart was in a perpetual state of sanctifying grace from the moment of conception. But as someone cited from the CCC, we too have a share in sanctifying grace through the sacraments and the life of virtue.
JR

I followed this post from another thread on Franciscan Spirituality which Barbara Therese linked.

I myself have an issue with the claim that others like St Francis can love as Mary did. Since she is full of grace and conceived without sin then obviously while on this earth, only she can love Christ to that degree because what stops us from pure love is the fact that we were conceived with original sin and it’s effect lasts until we are re-united with the Lord. The smallest smidgen of sin is a denial of Love and only Mary was free from sin.

Now it may be that at the time of his death, St Francis had been purged of any trace of self-love which would mean no passage through purgatory. Then and only then would he have been able to love like Mary.