Letter to the editor regarding Barnaby Devitt

Correction:
Mary Ann Pollard wrote to Barnaby Devitt:
Per your article in Southside Pride for December, 2009, re: Immaculate Conception. WRONG! The Immaculate Conception was when Mary was conceived in St. Anne’s (Mary’s mother) womb. Check any Catholic calendar and you will find March 25 is the Feast of the Annunciation when the Archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that she was to be the Mother of God. Is that not 9 months?
Glaring irregularity, indeed. Ahem (& Amen).

Barnaby Devitt responds:
My apologies to Mary Ann Pollard and other readers of the Catholic calendar. Yes, of course Ms. Pollard is correct. Please forgive my careless mistake. I forgot about the Feast of the Annunciation.

The cult of Mariology is an interesting phenomenon. In 1854 Pope Pius IX declared that the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 and the Feast of Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven on August 15 should be celebrated as Holy Days of Obligation. This was unique in Church history in that it was the first time a Pope asserted dogma (a church teaching that Catholics must believe as a divine revelation of Truth) without clearing it through the College of Cardinals, and it wasn’t until much later in Vatican I, in 1868, that some of the Cardinals affirmed the infallibility of the Pope when speaking on matters of faith and morals.*

Probably the reason the Pope felt the urgency was that in 1848 there were revolutions in all the major capitals of Europe. Feudalism and (by extension) the Catholic Church were under attack. Karl Marx and Frederich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1849. It looked like the great unwashed masses would overwhelm the autocracy, but by 1852 the wave receded and after small concessions the forces of authority reasserted themselves. It is in that context that establishment of the cult of Mary should be understood.

*Robert Caruso, author of “The Old Catholic Church: Understanding the Origin, Essence and Theology of a Church that is Unknown and Misunderstood by Many in North America,” commented on this section:

The doctrine of infallibility during and after Vatican I sparked much controver-sy among bishops and their local churches in Europe. Not all bishops or the faithful were in agreement with this pronouncement. Interestingly, the doctrine of infallibility was one of the last pronouncements made at Vatican I—towards its closing of the council—where many bishops, archbishops (and some cardinals) who opposed the teaching had left for their respective local churches thinking the major pronouncements of the council were done. Some theologians and church historians today assert quite convincingly that the papacy made a strategic manuver of “slipping” the infallibility issue into the council at the last minute, where a majority of bishops who supported the teaching would be present and ensure it’s reception as an official teaching of the council. Although this point is controversial, there is substantial evidence within history to support the above assertions against the papal infallibility doctrine. Once the “calculated” pronouncement of papal infallibility had been made at Vatican I, the papacy and its supporters began forcing bishops and archbishops who disagreed with the doctrine to publicly declare it (sometimes in writing) as dogma. Further, they were to instruct the faithful to believe it as a divine truth. Meaning, there was nothing more to debate; bishops and their local churches either received the dogma as truth or suffered the severe penalty of excommunication. The last of the bishops who held out until he no longer could was (I believe) a German bishop at Bonn. Not all the faithful, nor its priests and Vatican I theologians in Europe, would succumb to the oppressive and political maneuvers of the papacy. Josef Ignatz von Dollinger, historical theologian at Vatican I and highly regarded, publicly declared the infallibility teaching of the pope as a false doctrine because its pre-cedent was not to be found in the Bible nor the Church’s Tradition. In creating this novel doctrine Dollinger asserted that the Roman Church had instituted a “New Catholicism” antithetical to the Catholic Church of the ages, and he for one would remain faithful to the Western Catholic Church of the ages, better known today as the “Old Catholic Church.”