Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mary was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother of Jesus. She is venerated in Christianity, Islam, the Bahai Faith, and the Druze faith, and is considered by the Quran to be the greatest woman in the history of humankind.
The Quran mentions or refers to Mary a total of 50 times, making her the only woman named in the Quran. An entire chapter, sura 19, is titled Maryam after her. The Quran states that Allah selected her, purified her, and chose her above all women of the world.
The four Catholic dogmas are: her status as Theotokos (Mother of God), confirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431; her perpetual virginity, confirmed at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553; the Immaculate Conception, proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854; and the bodily Assumption into Heaven, defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950.
The oldest known prayer to Mary is the Sub tuum praesidium, which dates to the 3rd century, perhaps around the year 270. Its text was rediscovered in 1917 on a papyrus found in Egypt.
Eastern Orthodox Christians reject the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception because their understanding of ancestral sin differs from the Augustinian interpretation used by the Catholic Church. They celebrate the Dormition of the Theotokos, in which Mary dies a natural death before her body is assumed, rather than the Latin Assumption. Orthodox tradition also holds that the brothers of Jesus were Joseph's children from a prior marriage.
Martin Luther revered Mary and wrote that she is full of grace, proclaimed to be entirely without sin. He adhered to the Marian decrees of the ecumenical councils, held that she was a perpetual virgin and Mother of God, and was an early adherent of the Immaculate Conception. However, he came to criticize Catholic intercessory prayer directed to Mary, and his final sermon at Wittenberg, preached only a month before his death, warned against substituting Mary for Christ as the sole mediator.