Theological Foundations new file

140 Theological Foundations Although this truth was not considered a dogma of faith at that time, he treated it as if it had already been formulated. When, in his Oblatio , he confessed his faith in everything that the Holy Roman Catholic Church believes and instructs us to believe, he stated that the truth about the Immaculate Conception, thus far present in the ordinary teaching of the Church, will be among the truths to be solemnly promulgated in the future. 2 The privilege of the Immaculate Conception takes our thoughts back to the origins of humankind. The Revelation says that the first people created by God were free from evil and carried His image in themselves. They were ideal and absolutely perfect beings. Later original sin hurt their humanity and blurred God’s image in their souls. Ever since that moment human beings had been wandering the earth carrying the sad burden of the original fault until the time when the new Star for humankind — the Immaculate Mother of the Savior — appeared; an ideal being, free from sin, endowed with the fullness of humanity “after the image of its creator” (Col 3, 10) and “conformed to the image of His son” (Rom 8, 29). The image of God has never been darkened in her because the “old man,” the man of sin, has never inhabited her. Who else could have repeated, with greater joy than she did, after St. Paul: “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into His likeness” (2 Cor 3, 18). The expression “beholding the glory of the Lord” is probably the best expression of the truth about her Immaculate Conception. She becomes filled and radiant with this glory. It is the glory of Jesus Christ Himself whose Mother she is. It was her very person that so delighted Father Stanislaus Papczynski who always presented her as an ideal and a model to be imitated by all of us. The truth about the Immaculate Conception as presented in his writ- ings has a strong foundation in the Bible. In the liturgy, Mary by acco- modation speaks of herself: “I grew tall like a cedar in Lebanon” (Sir 24, 13). Father Papczynski follows this analogy and says that the Blessed Virgin Mary rightly compared herself to a cedar because: “Just as the cedar is the most precious among other trees, so also is the Blessed