By linking the virginal birth of Jesus and that of the Christians operated through faith and baptism, Saint Irenaeus introduced a close identity between the Mother of God and the Mother of the Church:
"How will man go to God if God did not come to man? How will men depose the mortal birth, if not through a new birth, given against all hope by God as a sign of salvation, which took place in the womb of the Virgin, to regenerate them by the means of faith?"(Against Heresies IV 33, 4 in SC 100).
Saint Irenaeus thus goes from the Virgin Mary to the Church, applying to the latter all that happened to the Virgin Mother.
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