Why, with these ongoing revelations, would God wait until 1946 to reveal the Assumption of Mary? If she were in heaven bodily, ALL THAT TIME, did HE not see her sitting on the right on of Jesus Christ, and feel the need to LET YOU ALL KNOW SHE WAS THERE, BODILY? That's a LONG wait for THAT revelation, my friend.
This post is for you, so I wanted to make SURE you got it.
The Church declared the Assumption of Mary as infallible in 1946, but that was not the first dialog of it. Beginning with Epiphanius of Salamis in AD 377 apocryphal accounts of the assumption of Mary into heaven have circulated widely since at least the 4th century.
Is it important to pretend questions have not been addressed before?
First, since the end of the Apostles, revelation has stopped. What we have now is unfolding of what it already revealed.
Second, as has been said umpty-ump times, councils and new ‘definitions’ are made when called for — or IMHO, sometimes a little AFTER they are called for.
For both Marian dogma there was mounting popular pressure for a declaration, and there were even (we think) miracles. When Mary appears to Katherine Laboure as “conceived without sin,” — a couple of decades before the relevant encyclical then either the muckety mucks have to say the vision is bogus OR they have a little pressure toward saying, “Okay, she was conceived without sin.”
Your post #4584:
“But THAT IS what your Church teaches isn’t it? That you are receiving revelations from Christ? And that He gives them to the Pope, or the Magsterium, which is why they are “infallible”, and on and on. Throughout the centuries...The revelations just go on and on until the last of the ‘faithful’ remaining is no longer.”
post #4588:
If she were in heaven bodily, ALL THAT TIME, did HE not see her sitting on the right on of Jesus Christ, and feel the need to LET YOU ALL KNOW SHE WAS THERE, BODILY? That’s a LONG wait for THAT revelation, my friend.
and this post:
Why, with these ongoing revelations, would God wait until 1946 to reveal the Assumption of Mary? If she were in heaven bodily, ALL THAT TIME, did HE not see her sitting on the right on of Jesus Christ, and feel the need to LET YOU ALL KNOW SHE WAS THERE, BODILY? That’s a LONG wait for THAT revelation, my friend.
This post is for you, so I wanted to make SURE you got it.
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Oh, I got it alright. Your posts reveal a basic, and all-too-common, misunderstanding about the nature of Catholic Tradition and Revelation. The Pope does not receive “visions” and then decide to create doctrines out of them. No such thing. That’s not how Tradition works in the Church. Private revelations, which are not binding on the faithful nor part of the official teachings, are another matter entirely.
This should help clear things up:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13001a.htm
It remains here to distinguish the Christian Revelation or “deposit of faith” from what are termed private revelations. This distinction is of importance: for while the Church recognizes that God has spoken to His servants in every age, and still continues thus to favour chosen souls, she is careful to distinguish these revelations from the Revelation which has been committed to her charge, and which she proposes to all her members for their acceptance. That Revelation was given in its entirety to Our Lord and His Apostles. After the death of the last of the twelve it could receive no increment. It was, as the Church calls it, a deposit — “the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude, 2) — for which the Church was to “contend” but to which she could add nothing. Thus, whenever there has been question of defining a doctrine, whether at Nicæa, at Trent, or at the Vatican, the sole point of debate has been as to whether the doctrine is found in Scripture or in Apostolic tradition. The gift of Divine assistance (see I), sometimes confounded with Revelation by the less instructed of anti-Catholic writers, merely preserves the supreme pontiff from error in defining the faith; it does not enable him to add jot or tittle to it. All subsequent revelations conferred by God are known as private revelations, for the reason that they are not directed to the whole Church but are for the good of individual members alone, They may indeed be a legitimate object for our faith; but that will depend on the evidence in each particular case. The Church does not propose them to us as part of her message. It is true that in certain cases she has given her approbation to certain private revelations. This, however, only signifies:
* that there is nothing in them contrary to the Catholic Faith or to the moral law, and,
* that there are sufficient indications of their truth to justify the faithful in attaching credence to them without being guilty of superstition or of imprudence.