The Pope and Mary
The religious adoration of Mary, often referred to as “mariolatry”, is one of the most blatant corruptions of the Church of Rome. The Pope’s New Year homily was brimful of this dreadful error. If one is “entangled in life’s knots”, then the advice from the Vatican is, “Lift up your eyes to Mary . . . she is present wherever she is needed”. The many blasphemous assertions made by the Pope on this occasion include the statements that Mary “is a mother who generates in her children the amazement of faith. . . . Faith is a bond with God that engages the whole person; to be preserved, it needs the Mother of God.” He further said that “God Himself needed a mother”.
The failure to distinguish properly between Christ’s humanity – which was born of the Virgin – and His essential and uncreated divinity as the Son of God, allows Rome to ascribe the title “Mother of God” to Mary and thence to open the door to ascribing divine attributes and veneration to her. The Lord Jesus Christ was the Son of Mary according to His humanity but not the son of Mary according to His Person as the eternal Son of God. The unity of His Person as God-man allows the attributes of His humanity and His sufferings in our nature to be ascribed to His whole Divine Person, but this does not mean that Mary can be regarded as the mother of deity in any sense. Of course, the “Mary” of Rome is not the Mary of the Bible; she is none other than the Queen of Heaven of the ancient heathen religions.
Robert Shaw writes very appropriately concerning the offering of prayer to Mary and other human mediators in the Roman Church: “It must import that they are omnipresent and omniscient; for how could the Virgin Mary, for example, have any knowledge of the prayers which are addressed to her at the same time in ten thousand places, and, it may be, by millions of individuals? Protestants, therefore, with good reason, reject the notion of angelical and human intercessors, and rely solely on the intercession of that glorious Mediator whom the Father heareth always.” AWM