No Pain for Our Lady in Childbirth?
JH Goossens, Pretoria – Father Ron Rolheiser in his column “We give birth to Christ too” imagines that Mary suffered “excruciating pain” during the birth of Jesus. Venerable Fulton Sheen, the late bishop of Rochester in the US, would respectfully disagree.
He wrote in his book The World’s First Love: “As the Virgin conceived Our Lord without the lusts of the flesh, so now she brings Him forth in joy without the labours of the flesh. As Eve was taken out of the side of Adam, without any grief to him, so now in remaking the human race, the new Adam is taken from the new Eve without any grief to her.”
Clarification: What is being referred to here is the doctrine of the immaculate conception – Mary being born without original sin or a fallen nature. If we follow this logically then the consequences of the fall in Genesis would not apply to Mary.
Genesis 3:16 – [After Adam and Eve had taken and ate the fruit of the tree of good and evil]
To the woman he said,
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor, you will give birth to children”
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