A Reflection from “Flee From Heresy” by Bishop Athanasius Schneider

“Rejoice, O Virgin Mary, for thou alone have destroyed all heresies in the whole world. Thou believed the word of the Archangel Gabriel. A virgin still, thou brought forth the God-man; thou bore a Child, O Virgin, and remained a Virgin still. Mother of God, intercede for us.”

Holy Mother Church has prayed these words for more than a millennium in the Roman Rite, in the Divine Office and Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The battle of the Blessed Virgin Mary against Satan (the one chiefly responsible for spreading errors and heresies in the world) is already indicated by God’s words after the sinful Fall of Adam and Eve: “I will put enmity between you and the Woman, between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head while you will strike at his heel” (Gen 3:15). In his Marian Encyclical Redemptoris Mater, Pope John Paul II taught that Mary is collocated in the very center of the battle of Christ against Satan: “Mary, Mother of the Incarnate Word, is placed at the very center of that enmity, that struggle which accompanies the history of humanity on earth and the history of salvation itself. In this history Mary remains a
sign of sure hope.”

Why has the Blessed Virgin Mary “destroyed all heresies,” when we continue to see errors throughout the world? Because she was the first to hold explicit faith in the historical incarnation of the Son of God, the essential grounding of the Christian faith; for, the one who believes in the true divinity of Christ will accept all that Christ teaches, and order his life accordingly. As the first to fully embrace this living faith in the Incarnation of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary is herself a perpetual vessel and testament of that Faith on earth—a Faith which will never perish, but will endure until the Last Judgement. Through the faith and fidelity of Mary, the true Faith was established on earth, and she who was first to believe is therefore most powerful to destroy all unbelief and heresy.

For this reason, Pope Pius X (+1914) spoke about Our Lady as the noblest foundation of the house of our faith:

To Mary it was said: “Blessed is she who has believed, because the things promised Her by the Lord shall be accomplished” (Lk 1:45). The promise was that she would conceive and bring forth the Son of God… Therefore, since the Son of God made Man is the “author and finisher of faith” (Heb 12:2), we must recognize His most holy Mother as the partaker and, as it were, the custodian, of the divine mysteries. We must acknowledge that, after Christ, she is the noblest foundation on which is built the house of faith for all ages.

The same Pope continues to explain the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin as the most powerful bulwark against modern unbelief, and further illuminates the title of Mary as Destroyer of all Heresies:

What truly is the point of departure of the enemies of religion for the sowing of the great and serious errors by which the faith of so many is shaken? They begin by denying that man has fallen by sin and been cast down from his former position. Hence, they regard as mere fables original sin and the evils that were its consequence. Humanity vitiated in its source vitiated in its turn the whole race of man; and thus was evil introduced amongst men and the necessity for a Redeemer involved. All this rejected, it is easy to understand that no place is left for Christ, for the Church, for grace, or for anything that is above and beyond nature; in one word the whole edifice of faith is shaken from top to bottom. But let people believe and confess that the Virgin Mary has been from the first moment of her conception preserved from all stain; and it is straightway necessary that they should admit both original sin and the rehabilitation of the human race by Jesus Christ, the Gospel, the Church, and the law of suffering. By virtue of this, Rationalism and Materialism is torn up by the roots and destroyed, and there remains to Christian wisdom the glory of having to guard and protect the truth. It is moreover a vice common to the enemies of the faith of our time especially that they repudiate and proclaim the necessity of repudiating all respect and obedience for the authority of the Church, and even of any human power, in the idea that it will thus be more easy to make an end of faith. Here we have the origin of Anarchism, than which nothing is more pernicious and pestilent to the order of things, whether natural or supernatural. Now this plague, which is equally fatal to society at large and to Christianity, finds its ruin in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—by the obligation which it imposes of recognizing in the Church a power before which not only the will must bow, but the intelligence must subject itself. It is from this sort of subjection of the reason that Christian people sing thus the praise of the Mother of God: “Thou art all fair, O Mary, and the stain of original sin is not in thee” (Mass of the Immaculate Conception). And thus, once again is justified what the Church attributes to this august Virgin: that she has exterminated all heresies in the world.