Raynaud explaining how falsely honoring Mary could be an insult to Christ
2 min • Digitized on May 12, 2023
From A Defense of the Teachings of Mary, page 117
By St. John Henry Newman
In another portion of the same work, he speaks in particular of one of those imaginations to which you especially refer, and for which, without strict necessity (as it seems to me) you allege the authority of à Lapide.
“Nor is that honour of the Deipara to be offered, viz. that the elements of the body of Christ, which the Blessed Virgin supplied to it, remain perpetually unaltered in Christ, and thereby are found also in the Eucharist …
“This solicitude for the Virgin’s glory, must, I consider, be discarded; since, if rightly considered, it involves an injury towards Christ, and such honours the Virgin loveth not.
“And first, dismissing philosophical bagatelles about the animation of blood, milk, &c., who can endure the proposition that a good portion of the substance of Christ in the Eucharist should be worshipped with a cultus less than latria? viz. by the inferior cultus of hyperdulia?
“The preferable class of theologians contend that not even the humanity of Christ, is to be materially abstracted from the Word of God, and worshipped by itself; how then shall we introduce a cultus of the Deipara in Christ, which is inferior to the cultus proper to Him? How is this other than a casting down of the substance of Christ from His Royal Throne, and a degradation of it to some inferior sitting place?
“It is nothing to the purpose to refer to such Fathers, as say that the flesh of Christ is the flesh of Mary, for they speak of its origin.
“What will hinder, if this doctrine be admitted, our also admitting that there is something in Christ which is detestable? for, as the first elements of a body which were communicated by the Virgin to Christ, have (as these authors say) remained perpetually in Christ, so the same materia, at least in part, which belonged originally to the ancestors of Christ, came down to the Virgin from her father, unchanged, and taken from her grandfather, and so on. And thus, since it is not unlikely that some of these ancestors were reprobate, there would now be something actually in Christ, which had belonged to a reprobate, and worthy of detestation.”—p. 237.