In response to this shortvideo, which amounts to an undisguised and open attack after all, one needs to see the wider picture by reflecting on what the Bible actually has to say.
Extra-biblical resources (Protestant or the Roman Church) do not offer a uniform picture and are of limited help.
Apostolic Christianity knows nothing about Mary crushing the seed of the serpent (contrary to the mistranslation of the Vulgate (according to the Council of Trent, “no one is to dare, or presume to reject it under any pretext whatever”), see Genesis 3:15. It can be safely repudiated on linguistic grounds! William Tyndale had to be murdered for translating the Bible into English in 1536, long before the Council was convened!
The immaculate conception, Mary’s hymen not being broken when giving birth to her first-born son, her perpetual virginity, let alone her sinlessness (did Jesus not die for Mary’s sins?) are nowhere found on the pages of Scripture! We read nothing in the Bible about Mary being the queen of heaven, or her bodily assumption, or the use of the rosary, which implies that Mary hears our prayers and is more approachable than her Son! It also makes Mary omniscient and omnipresent, i. e. divine, which is blasphemous! Marian statutes, her breast milk, apparitions and such like have, of course, no place even in the early post-apostolic church, but enough about all that.
Jesus’s treatment of his mother most often is couched in the language of ‘sinless rebuke’, as we read in the Gospel narratives. The diligent reader will note that this can be verified without any fear of contradiction!
Martin Luther rightly protested that the Church cannot create new articles of faith! Extra-biblical Roman dogma surrounding Mary may be, indeed, must be, rejected with a good and robust conscience.
Karl Barth’s quotation is far more accurate when he says, “as Luther understood it in his perfectly correct exegesis of the Magnificat, the greatness of the New Testament figure of Mary consists in the fact that all the interest is directed away from herself to the Lord” (Church Dogmatics, in loc.). In other words, Christ must increase and Mary must decrease, as, indeed, she did in the apostolic Church. We hide not under her mantle, but behind the Cross.
