On November 1, 2025, St. John Henry Newman was officially named the thirty-eighth Doctor of the Church. Then, on November 4, Pope Leo XIV and the Vatican released to the public the document Mater Populi Fidelis.
If I were to tell you that Mary is the cause of our salvation, I would expect you to call me a heretic. Yet that is exactly what Newman did—and so this requires a thorough explanation. Nor did Newman come up with it. Instead, he was quoting the thirty-seventh Doctor of the Church, St. Irenaeus of Lyons.
Irenaeus is not a new saint. He was born around the year A.D. 140 and died around 202. Pope Francis only recently declared him thirty-seventh Doctor of the Church, in 2022. Now, three years later, Newman is the next theologian to be given this extremely rare title. When we consider that both of them called Mary the cause of salvation, we have to explain what they meant by that.
We’ll start with Scripture, lest Catholics be accused of adding to the Bible. From the beginning of the Bible to its end, wherever we find Jesus, we also find (either directly or indirectly) the presence of Mary. From the first moment that sin entered the world, in his merciful love, God promised us a redeemer: his son, Jesus Christ. In the same breath, God also promised to send us Mary, when he said to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15).
From the beginning of the Bible, the prophecy of Jesus’ victory over Satan included Mary. At the end of the Bible, in Revelation 12, we again see Jesus battling it out with Satan. But he isn’t alone. Instead, there Mary is, battling Satan right next to him.
Turning our attention to the Gospels, we continue to see Mary cooperating alongside Jesus in his mission of redeeming humanity from sin.
First, Mary says “yes” to God’s plan when the angel Gabriel appears to her to tell her that she will be the mother of the Messiah. (Luke 1:26-38).
Second, when Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the Temple, Simeon prophesies about Jesus and Mary. Speaking to Mary, he says, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also)” (Luke 2:34-35).
Third, it is Mary who initiates Jesus’ public ministry when she requests that he work his first public miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. Jesus and Mary are at a wedding when the wine runs out. To save the newly wed couple from public humiliation, Mary tells Jesus that they have no more wine. She then turns to the servants and says, “Do whatever he [Jesus] tells you.” The rest is history (John 2:1-12).
Lastly, Mary is there at the foot of the cross. Certainly, that is the moment when her soul is pierced by the sword prophesied by Simeon (John 19:25-27).
Jesus’ crucifixion is a clear example of how Mary cooperated in Jesus’ work of salvation. Mary must have felt every blow that Jesus endured. It wasn’t her body that was crucified, but her motherly heart.
Now that we have seen the biblical roots of Mary’s cooperation in Christ’s act of redemption, we can better understand why the earliest Christians had so much to say about who she was. Three of the earliest Christian writers present Mary as the Second Eve: Tertullian, St. Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus. As Eve had played an active role in causing Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, so too did Mary play an active role in Jesus’ work of redemption.
John Henry Newman observed that these three Church Fathers “do not speak of the Blessed Virgin merely as the physical instrument of our Lord’s taking flesh, but as an intelligent, responsible cause of it” (Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, vol. 2, 35).Regarding Irenaeus, Newman wrote that he “represents St. John [the Apostle], for [Irenaeus] had been taught by the Martyr St. Polycarp, who was the intimate associate of St. John, as also of other apostles” (33). For Irenaeus, Eve was “the cause of death both to herself and to the whole human race,” whereas Mary was “the cause of salvation” (34).
Newman was struck so strongly by Irenaeus’s phrase that in his book Meditations and Devotions, he quotes this same sentence while capitalizing this phrase so we wouldn’t miss it: “the CAUSE OF SALVATION” (85).
Here is where the “correction” from Mater Populi Fidelis comes in. We can see now how Newman took the Eve-Mary parallel and ran with it, attributing an active role to Mary in our redemption paralleled by Eve’s active role in the Fall. It is excesses like this that Mater Populi Fidelis is aiming to restrain. The document subtly warns us not to give Mary’s active participation in redemption equal credit with Christ’s participation: “When we strive to attribute active roles to [Mary] that are parallel to those of Christ, we move away from the incomparable beauty that is uniquely hers” (33).
Admittedly, to refer to Mary as the cause of salvation takes the Eve-Mary parallel to a whole new level. I had thought it was credible because it had been written by the two most recent saints to be named doctors of the Church: Irenaeus and John Henry Newman. But here we are.
Pope Francis acknowledged that it is out of love for Mary that some of us have taken her role in salvation too far. Christ is the source of all graces, not Mary. Mater Populi Fidelis shows this by reflecting on the Immaculate Conception and the infallible definition of the doctrine. It states that Mary, “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ . . . was preserved immune from all stain of original sin” (Ineffabilis Deus). She wasn’t saved by her holiness. She was saved by grace, and grace is a free and unmerited gift from God. After receiving this gift of grace, Mary cooperated with it, whereas Eve did not cooperate with the grace she had been given.
As we bring this article to a close, let’s make sure not to throw Newman under the bus. What did he mean by “the cause of our salvation”? He wrote, “Well as [Mary] rewards her friends, she would deem him no friend, but a traitor, who preferred her to [her son Jesus]” (79). Mary is like the morning star, who does not shine for herself, or from herself, but she is the reflection of her and our Redeemer, and she glorifies him. When she appears in the darkness, we know that he is close at hand. He is Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.
Newman also didn’t mean that Mary is equal to Jesus. For Newman, Jesus is God, and therefore there is an infinite gap between him and Mary. However, Jesus loves his mother so much that he wants us to love and honor her, too. That is why Jesus is so responsive to her prayers and intercession. Mary is deserving of all the honors the Catholic Church has bestowed upon her because it is fitting for her who is truly the Mother of God (72).
Given this, we should reason that if Newman had been given the benefits of the theological advancements that have been made since he died in 1890, he would have corrected the excesses in his Marian theology as well. My final word of caution is that we shouldn’t ignore Newman’s Mariology because of the excesses. If we do, we will miss out on his brilliant defense of the doctrine of the immaculate conception.