Chapter 2 47 and a mirror. Thus, there is a close link between the dogmatic definition of 1854 and Mary’s words in Lourdes on March 25, 1858. They charismatically confirm the dogma of faith, solemnly declared by the Church only four years earlier through the Petrine ministry of Blessed Pius IX, and acknowledge it on a theological level. While the bull Ineffabilis Deus emphasizes mainly the Christological dimension of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, redeemed intuitu meritorum Christi, a personalistic interpretation of the Name of the Beautiful Lady of Lourdes in the light of Paschal theology helps uncover the Holy Spirit’s crucial role in the lofty mystery of the redemption of the Mother of the Redeemer, presenting it as her deepest identity. The Church believes that by the power of the foreseen merits of Christ, the Paschal Lamb, Mary was conceived without the stain of Adam’s sin. The words Mary spoke in Lourdes confirm this faith, but simultaneously reveal more. They illustrate the unbreakable bond between the Son who is the Redeemer and the Mother who is redeemed. This bond should be seen in terms of a natural love between a mother and son, which transcends the death of the body, but firstly in the order of grace, as rooted in the Spirit’s transcendental holiness in which the Father eternally begets the Son. François-Xavier Durrwell, interpreting the meaning of the words of the Lady of Lourdes, said: Mary precedes the world’s first sin and every other sin: she is “younger than sin, younger than the race from which she has sprung.” Born millennia after the first sinner, she is prior to him, much younger than he: she is “the youngest daughter of the human race,” “our little youngest sister,” she who never reached the age of sin.35 What allowed him to make such a statement? By adopting a theological, rather than positivistic or chronological perspective,36 and considering 35 Durrwell, Mary, the Icon of the Spirit and of the Church,, p. 33. 36 It is a reference to Joseph Ratzinger’s method of theology called “theological” theology (la teologia “teologica”) in which the Revelation of the Scripture of the Old and New Testaments is the starting point of any reflection. According to this concept, God and the realities connected with God are never treated as philosophical abstractions but as a historical and salvific reality (la realtà historico-salvifica) accessible to our cognition only in the typological way. About the mystery of Mary’s freedom from the original sin, Ratzinger claims that one can understand and define it only through typology. Indeed, it is not about a “positivistic fact,” e.g. that Goethe was born on August 28, 1749, but about a reality of a different type. This theological reality can be understood only in the context of chapter 5 of the Epistle to Romans, where St. Paul
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