We recently celebrated the feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. I noticed that at the end of the Pope’s encyclical on moral theology, Veritatis Splendor, there is a prayer to Mary. What’s the connection between Mary and moral theology?

You’re right about the connection — this feast is not only a fine opportunity to reflect on and pray to Mary, but an opportunity to think about our own moral lives. The Church’s infallible dogma, in making a profound claim about Mary, also tells us something profound about ourselves. For Mary is an exemplar, a model for us. She is the model of a proper use of freedom, rep

Fiat? My dream car!
Sorry, fiat is the Latin for “Let it be done” — Mary’s wonderfully receptive response to the incredible challenge of becoming the Mother of God. Her fiat indicates that she always used her freedom properly; she lived an integral life. We too, by virtue of our baptism, are capable of living such a life. Our baptism removes original sin and puts us in a pure state.

Wait a minute — if my baptism put me in a pure state, free from original sin, then why do I still commit actual sins? Why am I not like Mary — maybe not immaculately conceived, but made immaculate by baptism?
Although baptism does put us in a pure state, there’s one big hitch. We still have a tendency to do evil. This is called concupiscence, which remains as a tendency accompanying original sin.
Mary did not have that tendency (nor did Jesus). The dogma of the Immaculate Conception means that she was conceived without original sin, and therefore she is immune from the effects of original sin — namely, concupiscence. The rest of us are born with original sin, and although baptism frees us from it, the effects remain. It is analogous to someone who has quit smoking: He is now “pure,” but the tendency to want to smoke still lingers.

Okay, that’s great, but now I’ve got a question I bet will stump you. If Mary is not concupiscent, how can she really be a model for us? For many of our deepest human struggles involve our concupiscence.
Good try, but I’ve thought this one through. The clue is in a word you just used — “struggle” — and your assumption that Mary didn’t have to struggle. But Mary is like us in that she had free will and had to struggle against temptation. On a regular basis, she freely resisted temptation. She could have said a “non-fiat.”

Hold it — good try at my challenge, but you didn’t quite make it. Because I have the concupiscent tendency, I have to struggle — a lot. If Mary has no concupiscence, then she doesn’t struggle. Again, I sure admire her, but how can she be a model for poor pitiful me?
You didn’t let me finish! Concupiscence certainly involves temptation, but there are other kinds of temptation that do not involve concupiscence, as I’ll explain in a sec. First, I get to stump you to prove my point: Think of Adam and Eve before their sin. Were they tempted?

You’ve got me. They certainly were, but similar to Mary, they had no original sin and hence no concupiscence. But please explain — how about one of your brilliant analogies?
Coming right up: my famous “smoking” analogy, to explain how Mary was tempted, without concupiscence, and hence can be a great model for us. Here goes. Three people are going to a party, and they know that people will be smoking there. (Luckily, it’ll be outdoors). You’re the first person, and you haven’t had a smoke for a year. You know you’ll be tempted. I’m the second person, and I’m just like you. The third person, our friend Patrick, has never smoked at all, but is quite the cool dude and susceptible to peer pressure.

Great setup — what happens at the party?
Okay, the point is that we’re all tempted. But Patrick’s experience is different, because he doesn’t have that deep-seated drive within him as you and I do. But the temptation is nonetheless real — in fact, it could easily be a more fierce temptation than ours. And that is how it was with Mary. She was really tempted to do wrong, but without the in-built tendency to do wrong (concupiscence).

Great — let me finish it. You succumb to temptation, and that’s like sinning. I resist temptation, and that’s like a virtuous person.
Sorry, other way around: I resist, you sin. But the point is this. We really admire Patrick. Although our temptation is quite different from his, he knows temptation, and he is the perfect model because he’s done such a good job resisting! And he can truly have compassion for us, although he’s never erred as we have. He knows the ins and outs of temptation, maybe even more than we do.

Apply that last point to Mary a bit — this is really helping a lot.
Listen to what C.S. Lewis says about this: “A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.”1

So Christ and Mary are the ones who really understand temptation precisely because they have fought it so consistently and steadfastly. All of us fall short of that full understanding. But we are called — the vocation to holiness — to get closer and closer to that ideal.
A light just went on: That’s why the saints, as they get holier and more virtuous, say they are such great sinners. They really start to experience the heights of temptation as they get closer to full sanctity.

Great insight. Accompanying such heights of temptation is extraordinary growth in virtue, the habit of resisting the temptations. And we can become virtuous too — we can “get to Mary’s level” in an analogous sense. For virtue means that we act well by habit, without concupiscence getting in the way, though concupiscence is still there as a tendency.
In a word, to say that Mary is a model is to say that virtue really is possible for us. The experience of the virtuous person is very like Mary’s experience of habitually using her freedom properly. The Immaculate Conception is, then, a statement about human nature: We have the capacity, after baptism, for purity, for living integrally, like Mary.
As Frederick M. Jelly, an expert in Marian theology, has noted: “We should be convinced that, even in our sinful world, grace has an absolute priority over guilt. Even we who are conceived and born in original sin come into a world where the power of the Triune God’s revealing love, totally victorious in her who was predestined to be the Theotokos, makes good concretely predominate over evil.”2

And how about those texts in Veritatis Splendor?
There are two key texts in Veritatis Splendor about this. One attests to the power of Christ’s redemption in making it possible for us to live virtuously (par. 103). The other text is about Mary: At the end of the encyclical, the Pope notes: “Nor does she permit sinful man to be deceived by those who claim to love him by justifying his [sinful man’s] sin [namely, the revisionist theologians criticized in the encyclical], for she knows that the sacrifice of Christ her Son would thus be emptied of its power.” Right after that, the encyclical ends with a prayer to Mary.
Speaking of good texts, you’ll also love this one from C. S. Lewis again:

“We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity — like perfect charity — will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul, which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”3

Now Lewis was a master of analogies. Does he have one on this topic that beats your smoking analogy?
I confess he does — though I still have one up on him because he didn’t make all the connections to Mary. But get this one:
“I think [Christ] meant ‘The only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less: but I will give you nothing less.’
“Let me explain. When I was a child, I often had a toothache, and I knew that if I went to my mother she would give me something to deaden the pain for that night and let me get to sleep. But I did not go to my mother — at least, not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this. I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin; but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist the next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more, which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from pain: but I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists; I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth, which had not yet begun to ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie; if you gave them an inch they took [a mile].
“Now . . . Our Lord is like the dentists. . . . Dozens of people go to Him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of . . .or which is obviously spoiling daily life (like bad temper or drunkenness). Well, He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. . . . He will give you the full treatment.”4

Great — but painful — analogy! Lewis sure got Catholic doctrine well for a non-Catholic. Say, I wonder why that bad tooth just started bothering me again!
Sorry about the tooth. Imagine what great things Lewis might have written about Mary!

Well, to change the subject back to your smoking analogy, I wanted to ask if there was any reason why you used the name Patrick for the perfectly virtuous party-goer.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed, yes, it has to do with the editor of Envoy. I have a favor to ask him, and I figured that a prominent place in my column wouldn’t hurt.

1 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 124-5.
2 Frederick M. Jelly, Madonna: Mary in the Catholic Tradition (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1986), 116.
3 Lewis, 93.
4 Lewis, 171.