Marian Co-Redemption will go the way of women deacons

Martin Luther was convinced that justification by faith alone was orthodox, and no matter how many times or by whom he was told that it simply was not, that spurred him only to wage war on the authorities that did so, up to and including the See of Peter. He was not the first like that, nor has he been the last. In our own time, we have the proponents of Marian Co-Redemption. They have now been told that the title “Co-Redemptrix” might still be used in private devotion provided that anyone who did so meant it in a sense that practically no one who did so ever would, but that it was expressly banned from the Liturgy and from the official documents of the Holy See, in which case no one should wish to use it in private devotion. Get the message.

This is not about ecumenism. The Truth is the Truth, and there will only ever have been anything much to ecumenism when a church full of Pentecostalists chanted Salve Regina. Rather, the Church’s defined dogma is already complete with regard to Our Blessed Lady’s cooperation in the Redemptive Work of Her Divine Son, and the movements to proclaim Her Co-Redemptrix have been motivated by the desire, not to summarise that dogmatic corpus in that title as Popes had occasionally done, but to assert Her equality with Him in that Work. That position is blasphemy and heresy, leading to idolatry and sacrilege. It is “another Gospel”. Catholics are required to accept the principle of private revelation, permitted to accept those specific examples which the Church had formally approved, and forbidden to accept those which She had formally repudiated. In any event, no private revelation can be a basis for dogma. Those invoked by the proponents of Marian Co-Redemption manifestly fail 1 John 4:1, and any apparent blessing flowing from them should be referred to Galatians 1:8 and to 2 Corinthians 11:14.

Likewise, on the question of women deacons, the Commission under Cardinal Petrocchi recently reported that it had, “received a large amount of significant written material to analyse on the issue of women deacons, after the Synod had invited anyone who wished to do so to send in their contributions. Although there were numerous submissions, only twenty-two individuals or groups sent in their papers, representing only a few countries. Consequently, although the material is abundant and in some cases skillfully argued, it cannot be considered the voice of the Synod, let alone of the People of God as a whole.” And so has ended the tiny but noisy, and therefore obviously very well-funded, women’s ordination craze that, although theologically always doomed, had exercised such institutional power within the Church in those “only a few countries” around the turn of the century. Its remnant is clutching at straws, but so is the Co-Redemptrix cult, which will go the same way, probably in about a quarter of a century’s time. On This Rock, brothers and sisters. On This Rock.