Is Mary the “Mother of God”?
This is what early Christians believed; from a letter by Saint Cyril, bishop of Alexandria in Egypt from 412 to 444 A.D. Thus, written more than 300 years before Islam appeared.
"That anyone could doubt the right of the holy Virgin to be called the Mother of God fills me with astonishment. Surely, she must be the Mother of God, if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, and she gave birth to him!
Our Lord’s disciples may not have used those exact words, but they delivered to us the belief those words enshrine, and this has also been taught to us by the holy fathers.
The distinctive mark of holy Scripture is that it was written to make a double declaration concerning our Savior; namely,
– that he is and has always been God, since he is the Word, Radiance, and Wisdom of the Father; and
– that for our sake in these latter days he took flesh from the Virgin Mary, Mother of God, and became man.”
There have been many holy men, free from all sin. Jeremiah was sanctified in his mother’s womb, and John while still in the womb leaped for joy at the voice of Mary, the Mother of God.
The divinely inspired Scriptures affirm that the Word of God was made flesh, that is to say, he was united to a human body endowed with a rational soul. He undertook to help the descendants of Abraham, fashioning a body for himself from a woman and sharing our flesh and blood, to enable us to see in him not only God but also, because of this union, a man like ourselves.
Thus, there are in Him two entities, divinity and humanity. Yet our Lord Jesus Christ is nonetheless one, the one true Son, both God and man; not a deified man on the same footing as those who share the divine nature by grace, but true God who for our sake appeared in human form. We are assured of this by Saint Paul’s declaration: “When the fullness of time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law and to enable us to be adopted as sons."
We should express amazement at the wonders God has worked. Filled with immense joy, we must exclaim with the Church: ‘Mary gave birth to the King whose name is eternal; she united the joy as a Mother with the honor as a Virgin; such as this has never happened before, nor will it happen again.
Mary's divine motherhood is a dogma of our Catholic faith. It was solemnly defined early in the Church's history at the Council of Ephesus, in AD 431.
Video: