Dr. John Bergsma

Yeah, so I actually don't, you know, I read that and I was, I had a different reaction, Matt.

I read that, I thought, actually, the American conception is one of the simplest of doctrines.

It just is that Mary was the normal one.

she was normal, the rest of us are abnormal.

The rest of us are messed up and we've been messed up going back to Adam and Eve.

And she was the one exception that just had a normal, for her it was the way it was supposed to be from the beginning, which is that she had God's presence from her conception.

That's really what original sin comes down to is an absence of the Holy Spirit.

It's a void, it's a lack that leads to our disorder.

There's a famous line in West Side Story, the Broadway musical where, I forget if it's the Jets or the Sharks, but they're talking about how the rest of society views them.

And they say, we're depraved on account of we're deprived.

And that pretty much accurately describes the original sin, which is that we're depraved on account of we're deprived.

So the reason that we tend towards sin is that we're deprived of the Holy Spirit and we're deprived of that by the sin of our first parents who lost it.

But with the Blessed Mother, she had a conception and gestation and so on that was as it should have been for the whole human race, was that the Holy Spirit was present with her from the start.

Because we're unique among creatures that God made.

We're kind of...

we're a sense not complete without God's presence in us.

Being made in the image and likeness of God means that we're made from the beginning with the intention that we would be vessels of the Holy Spirit and that we'd have this special relationship of communion with God.

That's not true of the dogs and the cats and the trees.

They weren't made us.

as potential vessels of the Holy Spirit, but we were.