CATHOLICISM – GUILTY OF MARIOLATRY?

Worship of a god or God means adoring submission to that being. Instead of adoringly submitting to God alone, the Catholic Church gives him the most of the submission and keeps the rest for the saints. The excuse is that to submit to the saints is to submit to God for they are his friends. If God is all-love, then he alone should get adoring submission.
 
Idolatry is a problem because it is the worship of something that is not God and also because it is about you controlling how you worship instead of caring how God or any deity wants to be worshipped. It is possible to intend to be a good person and worship the wrong thing. But you cannot be a good person if you engage in worship that is all about doing what you want. That is not worship however good it feels.
 
The Catholic Church says that we must worship only God and it says God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit - three persons in one God. God the Son became a man having been born of Mary who the Catholics call Our Lady. It says she brings us to God.
 
The Church honours Mary, the Mother of Jesus, more than any of the angels or the saints.  Yet "there is little evidence of the Mary cult during the first four centuries of the Christian era" (page 42, The Cult of the Virgin Mary, Psychological Origins, Michael P Carroll, Princeton, New Jersey, 1986).
 
The Virgin Mary supposedly appeared to St Bernadette in 1858. Mary did not say much to her. Most of the time, it was just a case of Bernadette staring at her engrossed in her. Bernadette was in a state of trance called ecstasy. Mary allegedly saying only the simplest things to her might indicate to a sceptic that Bernadette was too stupid to make up better things. But if Bernadette really had a vision, she was relating intensely to Mary instead of God and in preference to God. It was not God she was absorbed in but Mary. It is no excuse to say that God was behind the scenes for Mary is his masterpiece and his work. If somebody was engrossed in the Statue of Liberty nobody would say, "It's made by God the creator therefore it is him she is engrossed in."
 
Prayer of Pope Pius XII which he composed for the Marian Year “Oh Immaculate Mother of Jesus and our Mother Mary … O Conqueress of evil and death, inspire in us a deep horror of sin, which makes the soul detestable to God and a slave of Hell!”
 
This prayer implies that we do not have a deep horror of sin and need it. So we must be sinners and hated by God. Mary is prayed to because God hates us. She has a civilising influence on God.
 
"Our Lady is the surest, the easiest, the shortest and most perfect means of going to Jesus Christ" - St Louis de Montfort.
 
The Holy Spirit is bypassed in favour of Mary. The Bible is clear that he lives in the hearts of God's people making them temples of God and that like God the Son, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with God the Father.
 
Whoever thinks that it is not enough to go to Jesus directly is really just praying to Mary while pretending it brings him closer to Jesus. If Jesus is as approachable and understanding and as human as the Bible says there is no need for Mary. To go to her is really bypassing Jesus while hypocritically pretending that this bypassing isn't happening. Indeed the only Jesus it can bring one close to is the one in one's head not the real one. The Catholic Church believes Jesus is physically present in the Eucharist or communion. To say that you need Mary to go to Jesus is strange if the Church really believes one is united with Jesus in tremendous intimacy by receiving communion. Clearly then one must keep one's focus on Mary even then. That is like having sex with your wife while looking at your wife's mother and giving her the attention.
 
The Catholic Church teaches that God is to come first but that we must pray to the saints and his angels and especially to Mary, the Mother of Jesus Christ who is God the Son. Mary is the greatest creature in Heaven. The Church says we must give full worship to God and he must be the reason we do all we do. We only pray to the saints for the sake of God and to honour God. Mary is singled out for special devotion. I find this eccentric for when people are only honoured for God it is God who is really being honoured so why address Mary and say her Rosary which has ten times more prayers to her than to God? The real reason Mary is prayed to is to put her before God. It has to be. Mary-worship represents defiance of the divine command to love God only.
 
Yet the Church argues that it was God himself who exalted Mary above all created beings when he made her the Mother of God so by giving her special love and devotion we are only copying him. But what about those who receive the body and blood of Christ in holy communion? Their union with God is deeper than carrying God incarnate in one's womb! Also, God might have exalted Mary but did she accept this exaltation or reject it? If she rejected it then she is the lowest creation of God and refused to rise to her potential.
 
St Bernadine of Siena wrote that even God obeys the Blessed Virgin and she is omnipotent because God has given her the same privileges as Jesus the King for she is queen and power is equally shared between the Son and the Mother. Jesus was omnipotent by nature and Mary by grace (page 20, Why I am not a Roman Catholic).

A Fr Oakley wrote that the body and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist is really the flesh of Mary from whom he was made so he who eats the Son also eats the mother (page 20-21, ibid).

Theologians today say that some Catholic writers in the past, including some saints, went too far in honouring Mary. Rome was big into book-burning when it was able to use the law against heretics but it never touched theirs.

Mary being Jesus’ mother does not mean that she has the most influence with him now though Rome maintains that it does. Jesus said that doing God’s will was more important to him than giving birth to him (Luke 11:27, 28). The king may have a mother but that does not mean that he does or should do what she says. Jesus did not have to choose the holiest woman in the world to be his mother so it is mad to say that he did and therefore Mary being the best creature is now at his right hand in Heaven.

The Roman Church makes a lot out of Jesus telling Mary that his time for doing miracles had not come and then doing one – the changing of water into wine – allegedly at her behest (John 2). It is supposed to show the supreme influence that Mary holds over God. There is no evidence that Mary changed Jesus’ mind in the story. He would not have told her that the time wasn’t right and then do a miracle when he shouldn’t. Something else could have happened that made the time right and it happened subsequently. He told her he would not obey her. Even if he did what she said eventually, it only proves that he wanted to do it and not that he was doing it to obey her. He may have done it to please himself and not her.

Catholic scholar Monsignor Ronald Knox wrote, "In one passage a Hebrew idiom has been obscured by Challoner who does not even allude to it in his footnote on the passage. When our Lady says, at Cana of Galilee “They have no wine,” there is no reasonable doubt that our Lord replied, “Let me alone”, the Jewish idiom for which is, “What have I to do with thee?” The Protestant Bible in translating the idiom literally, makes it sound much too harsh But Challoner has not dared even to be literal, he adopts without comment the far less probable interpretation, “What is that (the absence of wine) to me and to thee?”  See Some Problems of Bible Translation.

The words Jesus said to Mary, “It is not my time yet”, can be translated, “Is this not my time now?” The footnotes in the Catholic New American Bible admit this. Rome says the latter is an unlikely rendering because the time or hour mentioned here means the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection (John 13:1). It cannot for Jesus could not have meant that he couldn’t do miracles without dying first! The Cana story does not back up Rome’s doctrine of Mariolatry.

1 Timothy 2:15 states that woman will be saved through bearing children. What is this salvation referred to here? Is it saying a woman needs to be a mother to be saved? Some Christians say it does not but means that woman will be saved from an unfulfilled spiritual life and having the wrong role in life if she bears children. Either way, if a woman refuses to have children she is doing wrong. This condemns the Catholic belief that Mary though she had Jesus, refused to have any children though she was married and that this was right. If Mary did what the Church says, then she can't be the greatest saint in Heaven.

There were apocryphal gospels that the Church never destroyed and some of these pornographically describe Mary's vagina being examined after she gave birth to Jesus Christ. Could you imagine modern Catholics wanting to think about that? Those traditions came from a time before Mary was turned into a goddess. The Church didn't condemn these gospels in the hope that there might be some truth in them.

Rome says that Mary is the heavenly being who is next to God and whose prayers have the most influence with him. That isn’t very fair considering that there are many sinless angels in Heaven who achieved more than she did. She was not even necessary to do God’s work for God could have given the world the saviour without her or any woman. Mary did not give up as much for God as some saints did so how could she be better? If she had signs from God unlike them then they sacrificed without being as sure of a reward as she was. She did not die as a martyr!

Consider the idea that it is okay to pray to beings other than Mary. It is surely immoral to pray to the likes of St Martin de Porres when their prayers aren’t as mighty as hers are. Saint-worship and Mary-worship are incompatible.
 
Rome reasons that as Mary was chosen to carry God-made-man for nine months she must have been an exceptionally holy woman. This is nonsense for the Church itself holds that we carry Jesus inside us in a far more intimate way when we receive his body in Holy Communion. Rome reasons that Mary must have been the greatest saint when she agreed to be the mother of Jesus. That is nonsense for priests don't have to be exceptionally holy to be able to turn bread into Jesus or to eat him in communion.

The Catholic argument that Mary became the one whose agency gets everybody grace from God because she was the mother of the Saviour is odd.  His foster-father Joseph had to feed Jesus and earn his bread for him. More importantly Joseph would have taken care of Jesus’ spiritual formation more than Mary would. So why is nobody saying that Joseph is the mediatrix of all graces? And as head of the family he was superior to Mary on earth!  Catholics rely a lot on arguments from how Mary lived on earth to work out what her role is in Heaven.  That is not logical and Christ did say that Heaven is very different and nobody marries there and only single people go there.
 
Rome calls Mary the mother of all Christians. It alleges that Jesus gave us his mother to be our mother too. The pagan origin of this notion is obvious from the following observation. Mary is not just our mother in name but in fact according to the Church. We are adopted by her as her sons and daughters. She looks after us then. She can do this only by interceding with God for us for she supposedly has no power of her own. But if that is how she looks after us then it follows that St Martin de Porres is our father for he is doing what makes her a mother! There is a major contradiction then in Roman theology. Calling Mary mother in Roman theology despite their denials must be an attempt to make her a goddess for she cannot be mother just by interceding. She must have magic power of her own and perhaps the power to force God to do things against his will. Satan must be working behind the apparitions of Mary in which she calls for her flock to acknowledge her as mother.

Finally
 
Catholicism has a goddess and her name is Mary.  That it won't admit that makes her more of a goddess to them not less!  It is dishonest to say that honouring Mary is only honouring God having made her what she is.  If you revere Joan for she is wealthy you do not really revere her but the money.  If you do respect her then maybe it is not as much about the money as it would seem.