Austin Suggs, an Anglican who runs the Gospel Simplicity YouTube channel (96,000 subscribers as of 12-6-25), did a video called, “My Honest Concerns About Mariology” (9-19-25). It has 32,110 views and 2,298 comments in 2 1/2 months. Now, of course not all comments represent the thought of the channel where they are posted, and no one could possibly monitor — let alone reply to — more than 2,000+ comments. But these falsehoods I will detail are influencing many thousands of people and ought to be responded to. So here we go. Words of the anonymous Protestant critics / commenters will be in blue.
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Her Son who is the only mediator between God and Man. Christ is all and all in this regard and shares it with no other. How can we not all agree on this???????
We do all agree; so does St. Louis de Montfort, so this is what is called in logic a straw man or a non sequitur (i.e., an irrelevancy). He talks about secondary, non-essential mediators by God’s choice (including Mary), through whom God spreads His grace and salvation, which is a repeated theme in Paul’s letters.
The idea of needing a mediator for Christ makes me deeply uncomfortable.
It literally nullifies the Son of God’s incarnation as a man, since there was already a mediator between God and man.
This distorts what we are saying. It’s not necessary or the only way to approach our Lord. De Montfort wrote:
IF [conditional] we are afraid [i.e., not all are afraid] of going directly to Jesus, who is God, because of his infinite greatness, or our lowliness, or our sins, let us implore without fear the help and intercession of Mary, our Mother.
Being afraid to approach God is a common biblical theme. When Isaiah the prophet saw him, he blurted out, “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips” (Is 6:5). So God in His mercy allows us to approach Him through Mary, “if we are afraid”: as de Montfort puts it. He never states in the book that we “must go through Mary.” I searched it for the term, “must go” and the only time it appears, he says, “To go to God the Father, we must go to Jesus, our Mediator of redemption.” “Must go through” never appears, either.
But there is a theme in the Bible of the Queen Mother: discussed at length in Protestant Bible dictionaries. The Israelite Kings would make their mother the queen. Bathsheba was Solomon’s Queen Mother and he said to her, “Make your request, my mother; for I will not refuse you.” (1 Kgs 2:20). The Queen Mother was treated with high honor alongside the king. This is historical fact. So when Catholics say Jesus won’t refuse to honor a request of Mary, it’s not just goofy stuff pulled out of a hat. It has a parallel in the Bible. Jesus’ first miracle — changing water into wine — was a request of His mother, too.
She was a sinner in need of a savior just like the rest of us are.
All you have exposed is drivel about Mary apparently being the most humble and innocent creature created which isn’t based on anything other than what people who put Mary on a pedestal [say].
The meaning of kecharitomene in Luke 1:28 (“full of grace”) highly suggests that she was sinless, since in Paul’s writings, grace is the antithesis of sin; therefore, to be full of grace is to be without sin. She referred to God as her savior because she would have fallen into the “pit” of sin like all of us, had He not given her a special grace at her conception to prevent her from falling in. And being given extraordinary grace before birth is a common biblical theme: it happened to Isaiah (Is 49:1, 5); Jeremiah (Jer 1:5), John the Baptist (Lk 1:15), and Paul (Gal 1:15).
The human heart is evil and deceitful so no wonder it is doing this, because obviously it wants you to worship ANYONE but Jesus.
We don’t worship Mary, and precisely because we don’t, one never sees anyone who claims that we do, ever document it from our official doctrines.
My guide would be the Bible and the Apostles, as they never actually said or alluded to Jesus having a special or unique love for his mother. . . . he loved like anyone would love their mother. That isn’t special or unique.
They didn’t have to say it directly. Jesus was without sin, and was a good observant Jew. One of the Ten Commandments was “Honor your father and your mother.” Since Jesus was perfect, then He would have done that in an exceptional and “unique” way, like no one else ever has, and honor is a form of love. And His mother is to be highly honored by all of us, since she is the most unique mother in history, having borne the second Person of the Holy Trinity, and also since Jesus said she was John’s mother, and by dual application, the mother of all disciples of Jesus.
Mary herself stated that “henceforth all generations will call me blessed” (Lk 1:48). Who calls her that? And why don’t Protestants who love her do what she predicted would be done all through time?
I have to ask you this honestly but do you see Mary as some type of lesser deity?
No Catholic who understands anything believes that, but I have to ask this person honestly, “if you think we do that, why don’t you find some official statement of our Church where such blasphemous idolatry is taught? And if you can’t find it, why bring it up?” One can always find stray individuals of any group who are ignorant of its stated doctrines. That proves nothing.
You can follow the commandment honoring your Mother without calling her blasphemous things like the Queen of Heaven.
. . . nor is she in Revelation.
The Bible essentially described her as a queen of heaven, and in the book this person claimed she wasn’t in:
Revelation 12:1, 5 (RSV) And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; . . . [5] she brought forth a male child, one who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron, but her child was caught up to God and to his throne,
Love/focus on Mary can definitely detract from our love/focus on Jesus/God/the Holy Spirit. We have limited time, emotional energy, spiritual focus, etc. Spending it on Mary, rather than on God, could easily detract from our devotion to Him.
Not in the slightest, because admiration and love for a masterpiece from an artist is to praise the artist at the same time. Mary is God’s greatest masterpiece of creation. It’s not a dichotomy, nor is spirituality a zero sum game. We can honor Mary without detracting from God because He made her everything she is, starting from her conception, where she had no input at all and it was all God’s grace. I have four children. If I spend a day with one, does this mean I love the others less, or love the child more than I do my wife? I love them all with all my heart.
There’s nothing in scripture that says Mary brings us to Christ. Christ said his Holy Spirit would do that.
The Bible also says that human beings will help to save others. Paul does so (1 Cor 9:22), spouses can save their spouses (1 Cor 7:16; 1 Pet 3:1), Paul said Timothy could save himself and others (1 Tim 4:16), etc. Certainly Mary can help folks get saved, too. It’s perfectly biblical to think so.
It’s certainly possible to love Mary more than you love Jesus, or to worship her as if she was Jesus.
Yes, and some Catholics do that, and it’s blasphemous idolatry, and this is utterly condemned by the Catholic Church. It’s also certainly possible to take no notice of Mary at all or to despise her in some cases (unlike all of the founders and early leaders of Protestantism, who had a very high Mariology). Both things are equally wrong.
According to Jesus the greatest person born of a woman is John the Baptist. Are you calling Jesus a liar?
This person takes the first part of a verse and ignores the second. Here’s the whole thing:
Matthew 11:11 Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.
So there are greater people than John, and it stands to reason that there is a greatest [created] person who ever lived, too. We say it is the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the incarnate God the Son, Jesus. Someone has to be the greatest. The Bible doesn’t forbid someone believing that Mary is that person.
Also, how is Mary greater than David when the only reason she was chosen was because she came from his line? Wouldn’t it logically follow that David is greater?
The Bible never says this is the “only” reason. Secondly, David had a man murdered so he could take his wife. Yes, he repented, but this is a very serious sin. It would keep David out of any seminary, and he would never be a pastor with that on his record (neither would Paul, who was even worse). But Mary was “full of grace”: which means – once one carefully studies the purpose of grace in Paul’s letters – that she was without sin. And that and being Jesus’ mother, who was with Him for about 30 years before the world ever knew about Him, makes her a prime candidate for being the greatest person whom God created.
I understand that theology develops. I understand that understanding deepens. Nevertheless, such a big emphasis on Mary seems so foreign to the New Testament.
In a limited sense it is, because the New Testament necessarily had to focus upon Jesus Christ and the gospel. But after centuries of Bible-based spiritual reflection, Mariology became much more developed. We understand things better as time goes on. But there is a lot about Mary in kernel form in the Bible. The things that are deeply “foreign” to and utterly absent from the New Testament are sola Scriptura and sola fide (faith alone), whereas counter-verses are prevalent, because these are false doctrines invented by men almost 1500 years after Christ The canon of the New Testament is also “foreign” in its pages.
It does not follow that by praising Mary we are therefore praising God. It’s the opposite. By praising Mary we are robbing God of adoration and worship.
Then why does Hebrews devote an entire chapter honoring and praising the heroes of faith? Does that “rob” God too? It praises Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab the harlot (!), Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and “the prophets”. The Bible teaches “both/and.” Hence Paul says, “by the grace of God I am what I am, . . . I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me” (1 Cor 15:10). Therefore, when we talk about how great Paul was, we’re talking about God’s necessary work of grace in Him at the same time. It’s the same with Mary.
Related Video
Biblical Answers to 3 Common Protestant “MARY MISTAKES” [Catholic Bible Highlights, with Kenny Burchard, 28 minutes, 12-1-25]
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Related Web Page
Related Book
“The Catholic Mary”: Quite Contrary to the Bible? (Sep. 2010, 189 pages)
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