The 'Immaculate Conception'

Although the Immaculate Conception has come to be viewed by some Anglicans as a theologumenon, a theological opinion or pious belief, its inadmissibility as an acceptable adiaphoron was certainly held by the Tractarians and the early nineteenth-century Anglo-Catholics. The spread of the doctrine amongst Anglicans is a product, not directly of the Catholic Revival or Tractarian Movement, but of the later and, one could convincingly argue, separate phenomenon today described as Anglican Papalism. Beliefs concerning the personal holiness, the sanctification and perpetual virginity, and even the corporeal glorification, of Our Lady (all of which I profess, for they are based on Scripture and the universal Tradition of the Undivided Church) are distinct in nature and origin from that of the Immaculate Conception, as the Eastern Orthodox and Old Catholics will vociferously attest. I for one must fall in with the consensus catholicus shared historically by Anglicans, Orthodox and Old Catholics: the papal dogma of 1854 is not a part of the Catholic Faith, but is a theological novum, a new dogma which has been surreptiously added to Apostolic Tradition by the unilateral action of the Pope of Rome. The very definition of what comprises the Catholic Faith given by St Vincent of Lerins excludes the papal dogmas, of which the Immaculate Conception is absolutely fundamental. The Immaculate Conception is the down-payment on papal infallibility. As was quipped at the time of the I Vatican Council: 'Peter hath said to Mary, "thou art immaculate" and Mary hath said to Peter, "thou art infallible."'

The following quote nicely summarises an historic Anglican position on the matter:

'The proclamation of the [Roman] dogma of the Immaculate Conception [by Pius IX in 1854] is of enormous importance, for two reasons: one of faith, and one of order. It illustrates the method by which the opening made by the Council of Trent, when it set Tradition on a level with Scripture, can be used to introduce any novelty that appeals to popular devotion. Here was a doctrine which was clearly contrary both to Scripture and to the teaching of the Fathers, all of whom held that Christ alone was without sin; unheard of before the twelfth century, condemned by the greatest divines of the Middle Ages, St Bernard and St Thomas Aquinas, and based on the Augustinian theory of "original guilt" (to be distinguished from "original sin"), which had never been formally defined by the Church as necessary, and which is especially difficult for most modern Christians to accept, but without which the Immaculate Conception is meaningless. Yet it was taken up by powerful religious orders [Franciscans and Jesuits] for party reasons, and made popular by means of devotions based upon it, and at last came to be so widely accepted that it could be made into a necessary dogma without serious opposition; the Spanish bishops actually told Pius IX that it had been believed in Spain since the beginning of Christianity there! It was not defined to meet any heresy; it had no connexion with the Catholic dogmatic scheme, which is quite complete without it. There is nothing to prevent any popular superstition from being defined as a dogma in the same way.
As a matter of order, the Bull Ineffabilis [which proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception] was an entirely new departure, and was universally recognised as being so. Never before had any Pope added a fresh dogma to the Faith without a Council. The Bull Unigenitus was the nearest precedent, but that was only the condemnation of a set of propositions, not the definition of a new dogma. Indeed, Dr [John Mason] Neale calls the Ineffabilis "a second and worse Unigenitus".The Bull was inconsistent with the Gallican opinion that the judgment of the Pope is not irreversible until confirmed by the consent of the Church; for the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed as an irreversible dogma, though the consent of the Church had never been asked. Therefore the infallibility of the Pope, by himself and not by the consent of the Church, decreed sixteen years later by the Vatican Council [I], was already implied by the Bull Ineffabilis. The contrast between the long and fierce opposition to the Unigenitus, and the almost universal acceptance of the Ineffabilis, marks the decline of Gallicanism... The Bull Ineffabilis had behind it the vast system of popular devotion to the Blessed Virgin, against which the doubts and difficulties of the theologians counted for nothing.'

-Dr CB Moss, The Old Catholic Movement, pages 179-181