Quote:
Originally posted by Bad_Rich_Chic
Not quite sure, ask a Catholic on this one. I remember the story was that she and hubby were really, really old and had no kids and prayed and God cut them a break & the kid was therefore specially dedicated to god somehow it was related to that. But I am pulling that out of my hat.
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Close enough. Keep in mind it's all a peregrination from basic Catholic theology about Mary. The Church gathered up a bunch of saint stories that people already believed, and picked and chose which ones were consistent with its Christology, which was a moving target until Pope Gregory. The rest of the folk legends were condemned or suppressed. So we're left with traditions that are logically "necessary" to the doctine of original sin, which is that Mary's uterus was some kind of sinless "clean room" from which Jesus could be birthed. For the uterus to be sinless and magical, Mary's birth had to be sinless and magical. Somehow, it took the Church until 1854 to come up with this.
Frankly, I think the Marian devotion types do a lot of damage to basic Christian principles. Only the Opus Dei types know everything about it
and believe it at the same time. I mean, when you're basing it on Gabriel's salutation to Mary, "
chaire kecharitomene" (hail, full of grace), you're pushing the bounds of credibility.
