94 THE SIGNS OF THE MYSTERY mainly from his Piarist times when, still a zealous teacher of rhetoric, he tried to prove the validity of the immaculistic doctrine writing briefly, [F]rom the consequences [ex consequentiis], it can be proved in the following epigram that the Most Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived without the original sin: “Who would dare, oh Virgin, to say that you’ve been touched by the original stain, Whose thoughts were not touched / by any evil inclination? You trampled the infernal serpent with your foot. He lost the last of his strength / when the labour started. Your spirit, led by love and not by the power of death, left Your Body by itself / it left the earth. The members of your body will forever remain unharmed. Already glorified / they shine in the won heaven. Untouched by any punishment for the original sin, who would dare to call you stained?”104 This poetic epigram from 1663 is very similar to the previously cited short hymn, Triumph of the Great Virgin Conceived without Sin, “sung out” by Father Stanislaus to the Immaculate Virgin in Kraków in 1669 after reading an extensive immaculistic work of the Polish Franciscan Korwin Kochanowski. Both writings of Father Papczyński reveal the image of the Immaculate Virgin Mary trampling the head of the “Stygian serpent,” well known to all Marians due to the 18th-century painting by the Polish artist Franciszek Smuglewicz. In 1782, the Marians asked Franciszek Smuglewicz, then living in Rome, to paint this image of the Immaculate Conception. The painting was to be placed in the church of St. Vitus, near the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore which came under the ownership of the Marians on July 14, 1779, and where the original it is still displayed. It is hard to find a better and more vivid expression of Father Stanislaus’ understanding of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception: The Most Pure and Immaculate Virgin Mother, by the power of God, conquers Satan, the father of lies and pride! As if describing this very painting, which 100 years later his spiritual sons would have placed in the first church of their Congregation in Rome, the Father Founder wrote in his meditation to the religious for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception: 104 Saint Stanislaus Papczyński, Zwiastun Królowej Sztuk, in Pisma zebrane (Warsaw: PROMIC Wydawnictwo Księży Marianów, 2016), p. 374.
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