Mary's Perpetual Virginity

+Pope St. Siricius

Letter to Anysisus, Bishop of Thessalonica

Surely we cannot deny that Your Reverence was perfectly justified in rebuking him on the score of Mary's children, and that you had good reason to be horrified at the thought that another birth might issue from the same virginal womb from which Christ was born according to the flesh. For the Lord Jesus would never have chosen to be born of a virgin if he had ever judged that she would be so incontinent as to contaminate with the seed of human intercourse the birthplace of the Lord's body, that court of the Eternal King. To assert such a view is to do nothing less than to accept as a basis that Jewish falsehood which holds that He could not have been born of a Virgin. And once the weight of episcopal authority is gained for the view that Mary gave issue to many children, they will strive with even greater zeal to attack the truth of [Christian] faith.

Apologetics Blessed Virgin Mary Church Fathers Siricius

The Virgin Birth

+St. Jerome

Letter to Parmmachius

Christ is a virgin, and the Mother of our Virgin is herself ever a virgin; she is Mother and Virgin. Although the doors were shut, Jesus entered within; in the sepulcher that was Mary, which was new and hewn in hardest rock, no one either before or afterwards was laid. She is a "garden enclosed, a fountain sealed" (Cant. 4:12) .... She is the Eastern gate, whereof Ezekiel speaks, always shut and full of light, which closing on itself brings forth from itself the Holy of Holies; whereby the Sun of Justice, and our High Priest, according to the order of Melchizedek, enters in and goes out. Let them tell me how Jesus entered [the Cenacle] when the doors were shut...and I will tell them how holy Mary is both Mother and Virgin, Virgin after childbirth, and Virgin before she was Married.

Apologetics Blessed Virgin Mary Church Fathers Jerome

Mary's Incorruptibility

Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus

St. Hippolytus

Dialogue, I

The ark which was made of incorruptible timber (Ex. 15:10) was the Savior. The ark symbolized the tabernacle of His body, which was impervious to decay and engendered no sinful corruption...The Lord was sinless, because, in His humanity, He was fashioned out of the incorruptible wood, that is, out of the Virgin and the Holy Ghost, lined within and without as with the purest gold of the Word of God.

[The Ark of the Covenant, as type and figure of Christ, leads Hippolytus to associate the sinless-ness of Christ with that of His Mother, a characteristic form in which the Immaculate Conception is expressed in the early Church. The passage will be used as well to witness to the incorruptibility of Mary's body, the basis for the dogma of the Assumption.]

Apologetics Blessed Virgin Mary Church Fathers Hippolytus

Salvation Through the Second Eve

Tertullian

c. 210 A.D.

On the Flesh of Christ

For into Eve, as yet a virgin, had crept the devil's word, the framer of death. Equally into a virgin was to be introduced God's Word, the builder of life; so that what had been lost through one sex might by the same sex be restored and saved. Eve had believed the serpent, Mary believed Gabriel. The fault which the other one committed by believing, by believing the other emended. "But Eve at that moment conceived nothing in her womb from the devil's word!" Ah, but she did conceive. For her the word of the devil was seed, that she might from the time forth give birth as an outcast, in sorrow give birth.As a consequence, she gave birth to a devil, his brother's murderer. Mary, on the other contrary, bore Him who was one day to save Israel, His own brother according to the flesh, His murderer. God, therefore, sent down into the Virgin's womb His Word, our good Brother, to blot out the memory of that evil brother.

Apologetics Blessed Virgin Mary Church Fathers Tertullian

Mary, Eve's Advocate

+St. Irenaeus
c. 177 A.D.
Against Heresies

For as Eve was seduced by the word of an angel to avoid God after she had disobeyed his word, so Mary, by the word of an angel, had the glad tidings delivered to her that she might bear God, obeying his word. And whereas the former had disobeyed God, yet the latter was persuaded to obey God in order that the Virgin Mary might be the advocate of the virgin Eve. And as the human race was sentenced to death by means of a virgin, it is set aright by means of a virgin. The balance is restored to equilibrium: a virgin's disobedience is saved by a virgin's obedience. For while the sin of the first man was emended by the correction of the First-born, the guile of the serpent was overcome by the simplicity of the dove [Mary], and we were set free from those chains by which we had been bound to death.

Apologetics Blessed Virgin Mary Church Fathers Irenaeus