The Orthodox differ on the Theotokos from the Romans in two respects:
1. Since all infants are born sinless, Mary needed no immaculate conception. She did receive the uncreated Grace of the Assimilation to God (Gen. 1:26 in Greek; it had been lost by the first humans through sinning, a loss that has been inherited ever since by newborns) to become God's Mother, to lead a sinless life, and to enjoy a precursive resurrection.
Not to put to fine a point on it, this does not seem in the least coherent to me.
In the first place, we all have available to us an on-line resource with more-or-less definitive answers on what the Catholic Church teaches, and failing that, one can go to the Vatican website itself for the definitive versions of many texts. At least in Orthodoxy there is some excuse for confusion about what exactly is taught; in Catholicism there is no excuse. I have no compunction about wading in and taking up the Roman cause, though by and large I don't have time to do so.
I've looked at the verse in Genesis to which you refer, and, while my Greek isn't that good, it's good enough for me to tell that the LXX, the Vulgate, and nearly every English version translate this passage in the same way, practically word-for-word. It doesn't say anything about "uncreated energies". Indeed, the the very phrase you use is a misleading archaicism. Modern English almost never uses "energy" in the plural, because in modern usage the scientific sense of the word has become the standard. As you use the word, it has become a sort of theological jargon, a bubble terminology floating free from the grey swamp of plain meaning. It seems to me that, as you use the words, the phrase "
created energies" can have no meaning in reference to God.
Unfortunately the phrase "original sin" has suffered the same fate. Even in the Catholic Encyclopedia one can see the phrase losing its juridical sense. In talking about these things, we are entering a world of mysteries. Giving ourselves the liberty of having our own words mean whatever we like, while telling our opponents what they mean with their words, isn't proper.
All words, in this context, slip loose of the bonds of earthly meaning and speak their significances through indirection and rhetorical tropes.
One way or another, one is forced to deal with the fact that infants die, often within minutes or days of birth. The understanding is ancient that this has something to do with the sin of Adam. I do not think Orthodoxy would deny this. But after that the word games begin. From a theological point of view I am not all that interested in whether Mary sinned personally or not. But it seems necessary on your part that attributing some sort of error to Catholicism is necessary. From my very Anglican perspective, the actual differences between Orthodox and Catholic positions aren't all that great. There are differences, to be sure, but what I see are differences of degree, not kind.
Even so thorough an Anglican as Lewis is willing to place Mary in a special position among the saints. But historically this has tended to get out of control. Jesus tends to get turned into a superman, and if anything the process gets taken further with Mary. The idea of a genuinely human birth with its attendant pain and mess and a placenta to dispose of offends, so it is shoved out of the stable. A Jesus who wakes Mary in the night so that he can be fed and his stinky diapers changed is put out of mind.
Indeed, the problem is that we cannot conceive of how a sinless childhood should appear; so instead of admitting this, we erect idols of this childhood which quickly get to be laughable in their hyperpiety. And then the same process gets dumped on Mary. An ordinary woman isn't good enough to be the Theotokos; she has to be extraordinary. So she acquires a life which is fabulous in both senses of the word. I suppose this "precursive resurrection" falls into this, if I believed it actually had some definite meaning.
But beyond that, there seems to be a push to take Mary beyond being merely the vessel of salvation. The (thus far) ultimate expression of this is Co-redemption, an idea which I think is wrong anyway but which is embedded in such outrageously misleading language as to practically constitute a theological fraud. It comes as close as it can to the heresy that Mary is not just a conduit of grace, but is an originator of grace.
Orthodoxy, to its credit, has resisted this excess, but it still falls into gilding the lily, as it were. For instance, we have the legend that Mary lived in the Holy of Holies for some years. Leaving aside the practicalities of such an arrangement, there is the problem that for her to do so would have been a pretty dire sin.
No doubt Protestants as a rule go too much the opther way. But it is easy enough to understand heir overreaction. There seems to be litle restraint in the elevation of Mary; she does seem to be being elevated to a state of such near divinity that she becomes practically a demigod.
