William Albrecht provides a comprehensive explanation of the Immaculate Conception, addressing common questions and misconceptions.
Transcript:
Thank you. I’m a recent convert to the Catholic faith and I just wanted to know, I’m getting a lot of questions from family members. Why did Mary need to be immaculately conceived and why was only she needing to be immaculately conceived? A lot of my Protestant family asked me how far back the immaculately exceptions need to go. That doesn’t make sense that Mary’s the only one.
Yeah, okay. That is a fantastic question. Very often, to be very fair to our evangelical friends, many times we have them wondering, okay, well, if Mary was immaculate, well, why not Anne and their parents? And then, you know, you go in an endless kind of cycle. But the fact of the matter is the Bible is very clear on the role of holy Mary. And we read in the very beginning, in Genesis 3, that there is going to be a woman that will be at complete enmity, complete odds with the devil, that woman and her child, the seed of the woman. So we know that the woman is predestined to have a very incredibly specific and special role in salvation history. Now, why do I bring up Genesis 3 well before holy Mary was even created? What does that have to do with Mary? It’s a prophecy of the Messiah that will crush the head of the devil. But people tend to forget, there’s also prophecy of the woman. And that woman historically is holy Mary. And from the earliest of times from the New Testament and in the early church, they’ve interpreted that woman to be holy Mary.
Well, if that woman would never be under the clutches of the devil and at complete odds with the devil, right in the context of original sin, the conclusion is that woman would never be tainted with original sin. And sure enough, you get to Luke chapter one, and the archangel Gabriel will greet holy Mary. How in the vocative with the Greek, which means hail, having been filled with grace. Now the incredible thing is she was full of grace, even before the angel ever even appeared to her, as the tense of the Greek indicates it, showing us that holy Mary was already full of this incredible kind of grace. So because remember what the Catholic dogma in Ephabilis Deum tells us, it was all by a grace of God.
God showed His love for us by showing us the greatest of His creations created this way, immaculate, but not only that, she was born with free will. That free will, her choosing led her to say, “Let it be done unto me according to thy word, every moment, every moment of her life, sai.” She lived dedicated to the Lord. Thus we’ve got the biblical foundations of holy Mary being all immaculate, and then we go and we look into the early church, and from the earliest of times this is being taught. So we’ve got this, we’ve got the Bible on our side, early church history on our side, and even I love to bring this upside, even the early reformers believed Mary was all immaculate.
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