A Note on Our Lady’s Title of Coredemptrix
(St Alphonsus Liguori, The Glories of Mary)
This past week the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a new Doctrinal Note called Mater Populi Fidelis, which denied Our Blessed Mother her titles of Coredemptrix and Mediatrix of all Graces.
The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer do not accept this new teaching.
The aim of Mater Populi Fidelis does not seem to be to understand the Tradition concerning Our Lady more deeply and correctly, but rather to further an agenda. The accompanying letter itself states that the reason for its issuance is “a particular ecumenical effort”. Here is the point. Catholics don’t think that Our Lady is higher than Our Lord. Catholics aren’t confused about Who redeemed us. Who is it that is worried about elevating Our Lady too far, and obscuring Our Lord? Who is it that have a problem with Mary as Coredemptrix and Mediatrix? It is the Protestants, and the Jansenists, the “first cousins of Calvinism” (Carreyre, DTC, 8/1 [1924], col. 319).In fact, this document bears many of the hallmarks of Jansenistic thinking. It has a veneer of Marian piety, but that veneer is only a distraction, while it rips the guts out of some of the most important Marian mysteries. Jansenists want a measured, minimalist reverence towards Our Lady to avoid any hint that Our Lady might be elevated too far, and that is certainly what this document delivers. Mater Populi Fidelis says explicitly that “Such notions elevate Mary so highly that Christ’s own centrality may disappear or, at least, become conditioned.” The Jansenist mentality downplays Our Lady’s active role at Calvary and emphasises that Christ alone is the one Redeemer, and views phrases like “Our Lady co-redeemed the world” as pious excess or doctrinal error. St Alphonsus Liguori, “Hammer of the Jansenists”, devoted much of his work to combatting this specific heresy.
Our Lady, the New Eve foretold in Genesis, was united with Christ in the work of our redemption as a true cause, though always secondary and dependent on Him. Just as Eve had freely shared in Adam’s fall, so Mary freely shared in Christ’s saving work. Her cooperation was not just physical, but spiritual and moral: through her faith, obedience, and loving consent to the sufferings of her Son, she took part in redeeming the human race in the way God had planned. Fr Garrigou Lagrange, O.P., explains it thus in his book The Mother of the Saviour and Our Interior Life:
“According to what the Fathers of the Church tell us about Mary as the New Eve whom many saw foretold in the words of Genesis, it is common and certain doctrine, and even fidei proxima [not defined as dogma, but just one step below being of faith], that the Blessed Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer, is associated with Him in the work of redemption as secondary and subordinate cause, just as Eve was associated with Adam in the work of man’s ruin…. It was not merely by having conceived the Redeemer physically, by having given Him birth and nourished Him, but rather was her association moral, through her free, salutary, and meritorious acts. Eve contributed morally to the fall by yielding to the temptation of the devil, by disobedience, and by leading up to Adam’s sin; Mary, on the contrary, co-operated morally in our redemption by her faith in Gabriel’s words, and by her free consent to the mystery of the redemptive Incarnation and to all the sufferings it entailed for her Son and for herself.”
One of the key questions when we speak about Our Lady as Coredemptrix is how she merited for us. Was it the same kind of merit by which Our Lord, through His Passion and death, redeemed the world? If it were, wouldn’t that place Her on the same level as God Himself?
This question is where the traditional distinction, mentioned in the new document, between merit de condigno and merit de congruo comes in. Condign (de condigno) merit truly deserves its reward because God, in His goodness, has promised to reward works done in His grace. When someone is in a state of grace, his good works are pleasing to God, and God has freely bound Himself to give the reward He has promised (all of this depends on Christ, the Head, from whom our ability to merit flows).
When we say that such merit is “owed,” we must ask what is owed, and to whom. Any soul in grace, and above all Our Lady, can truly merit for themselves an increase of grace and, in the end, eternal life, because God has promised these rewards. But no creature, however holy, can merit the salvation of others as something owed, i.e. de condigno; that belongs to Christ alone, for only He is both God and man and the Head of the human race. Our Lady’s condign merit is for Her alone, and as a creature She cannot transfer that to someone else, as would be necessary if She were condignly to merit our redemption.
Congruous merit (de congruo), by contrast, is based not on obligation but on love and fittingness. God is not bound to reward it, but it is fitting that He should do so. In this sense, Our Lady’s cooperation in the Redemption was de congruo: by Her perfect love and union with Her Son, God willed, in a way most fitting, to associate Her freely with the Redemptive work of Our Lord.
With that understood, the doctrine of Coredemptrix is not based on necessity. No one denies that Our Lord, by His Passion and Death, fully and more than fully satisfied for the sins of all men. His merits on their own are enough. But it is fitting or becoming that Our Lady should be associated with Him in this task, not only as the second Eve, not only as the Virgin Mother who brought him into the world, but also as a co-sufferer.
Our Lady suffered in herself, because she loved her Divine Son more than any mother will ever love their son, and His tremendous sufferings and death caused Her to suffer too; She also offered both Her own suffering and that of Her Son to God the Father for the salvation of the world. St Alphonsus Liguori, Doctor of the Church, and “Hammer of Jansenists” expounds the doctrine of the Coredemptrix in his book, The Glories of Mary. Having related that, from the prophecy of Simeon onward, Mary continually renewed Her offering of Jesus and lived Her whole life in a constant interior martyrdom, suffering unceasingly from the foreseen death of Her Son, he continues:
“Hence the Divine Mother, on account of the great merit she acquired by this great sacrifice which she made to God for the salvation of the world, was justly called by Saint Augustine ‘the repairer of the human race;’ by Saint Epiphanius, ‘the redeemer of captives;’ by Saint Anselm, ‘the repairer of a lost world;’ by Saint Germanus, ‘our liberator from our calamities;’ by Saint Ambrose, ‘the Mother of all the faithful;’ by Saint Augustine, ‘the Mother of the living;’ and by Saint Andrew of Crete, ‘the Mother of life.’
For Arnold of Chartres says, ‘The wills of Christ and of Mary were then united, so that both offered the same holocaust; she thereby producing with Him the one effect, the salvation of the world.’ At the death of Jesus Mary united her will to that of her Son; so much so, that both offered one and the same sacrifice; and therefore the holy abbot says that both the Son and the Mother effected human redemption, and obtained salvation for men—Jesus by satisfying for our sins, Mary by obtaining the application of this satisfaction to us. Hence Denis the Carthusian also asserts ‘that the Divine Mother can be called the saviour of the world, since by the pain she endured in commiserating her Son (willingly sacrificed by her to Divine justice) she merited that through her prayers the merits of the Passion of the Redeemer should be communicated to men.’”
St Alphonsus goes on to explain that during His Passion, and especially at the foot of the Cross, Our Lady endured in her heart all the pains that Our Lord endured in His Sacred Body:
“All these sufferings of Jesus were also those of Mary: ‘Every torture inflicted on the body of Jesus,’ says Saint Jerome, ‘was a wound in the heart of the Mother.’ ‘Whoever then was present on the Mount of Calvary,’ says Saint John Chrysostom, ‘might see two altars, on which two great sacrifices were consummated; the one in the body of Jesus, the other in the heart of Mary.’ Nay, better still may we say with Saint Bonaventure, ‘there was but one altar—that of the cross of the Son, on which, together with this Divine Lamb, the victim, the Mother was also sacrificed;’ therefore the Saint asks this Mother, ‘O Lady, where art thou? near the cross? Nay, rather, thou art on the cross, crucified, sacrificing thyself with thy Son.’ Saint Augustine assures us the same thing: ‘The cross and nails of the Son were also those of His Mother; with Christ crucified the Mother was also crucified.’ Yes; for, as Saint Bernard says, ‘Love inflicted on the heart of Mary the tortures caused by the nails in the body of Jesus.’ So much so, that, as Saint Bernardine writes, ‘At the same time that the Son sacrificed His body, the Mother sacrificed her soul.’”
For these reasons especially, the tradition of the Church is that Our Blessed Lady, Mary Most Holy, merited de congruo, to be such a co-operator in the Redemption worked by Her Divine Son as to deserve the title Coredemptrix.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of Saints, Popes, and theologians who taught, at least implicitly, the doctrine of Our Lady as Coredemptrix. The title itself is more modern, as Mater Populi Fidelis points out: “The title ‘Co-redemptrix’ first appeared in the fifteenth century as a correction to the invocation ‘Redemptrix’...which had been attributed to Mary since the tenth century.” However, the principles on which this title is based are not modern, especially that Our Lady is the New Eve:
St. Justin
St. Irenaeus
Tertullian
St. Cyprian
Origen
St. Cyril of Jerusalem
St. Ephrem
St. Epiphanius
St. Basil
St. Ambrose
St. Jerome
St. John Chrysostom
St. Augustine
St. Proclus
St. John Damascene
St. Germanus of Constantinople
St. Anselm
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
St. Albert the Great, O.P.
Hugh of Saint-Cher, O.P.
St. Thomas Aquinas, O.P.
St. Bonaventure, O.F.M.
Richard of Saint-Laurence
St. Alphonsus Liguori, C.SS.R.
Francisco Suárez, S.J.
St. Lawrence of Brindisi, O.F.M. Cap.
St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J.
Ferdinand Chirinos de Salazar, S.J.
Angelo Vulpes, O.F.M. Conv.
Placido Mirto Frangipane, C.R.
Roderick de Portillo, O.F.M.
George de Rhodes, S.J.
St. John Eudes, C.J.M.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, S.M.M.
Fr Frederick William Faber, C.O.
St. Pius X
Bl. Pius IX
Pope Leo XIII
Pope Benedict XV
Pope Pius XI
Pope Pius XII
St. Pio of Pietrelcina, O.F.M. Cap.
Benoît-Henri Merkelbach, O.P.