Statue of the Virgin Mary is Left Miraculously Intact After Fire

Aletelia ^ | August 24, 2015

[Faith Presses On]

-—I wouldn’t necessarily go by what Luther said, especially a snippet.
May I ask on what grounds you so gratuitously dismiss and demean a valid citation as “a snippet?” -—

Snippet is defined as, “a small piece or brief extract.” That is what your quotation is, by com-parison to Luther’s whole works. I’m not very familiar with his works. I’ve only read that and some other snippets, and perhaps some time back, a few longer excerpts. You also don’t pro-vide any perspective on this quote, like giving a sense of the context. So I don’t know what place this snippet holds in his views. When did he write it? And suppose in all he wrote, this short paragraph was all he wrote about Mary?

-—What Christian “doctrines” are Catholics violating to give Mary her “undue place?” -—

Any doctrines about Mary that Protestants don’t share are a good place to start looking. Co-redemptrix, the prayers to Mary that use the same phrases and ideas that Bible-believing Christians use in their prayers to the Father through Jesus, the brown scapular guarantee supposedly made by Mary that the one who dies wearing it will be saved, etc. I’ve already posted at length about all sorts of Mary doc-trines and teachings in the Catholic Church during the past year or so here, and won’t discuss them an-ymore since there are better ways for me to spend the time and resources given to me, I know, and there’s no reason to repeat arguments that are already written about online, here and other places.

[Faith Presses On]

On the flowers, I believe they might have been there beforehand, yet I did “read” a Spanish article, translated by Google, that seemed ambiguous about that. It suggested that there was some mystery about how the flowers got there, and it sounded like that was possibly considered a “miracle,” too, and my impression was that the meaning was they were placed there after the fire by someone unknown, since it’s a military base, but perhaps I was distracted by their suggestion of a flower mystery and missed their meaning. And this was through Google translation, as I said. But either way, and on the statue, too, if the fire didn’t get within some feet of the statue, and flowers, if they were there, then they wouldn’t necessarily have gotten scorched or soot on them.

Things don’t necessarily burn according to assumptions.

For over a decade, I worked in a restaurant with a charcoal grill. The fire had to be started every morning before the store opened, and then kept going, hopefully, all day (by remembering to add charcoal). Getting the fire going involved putting in the charcoal, then lighting a newspaper put in a drawer below it. It was hardwood lump charcoal, and no lighter fluid or anything was used. There were over exhaust fans turned that helped suck air up through the grill, and the door was left part way open. You would be surprised how hard it could be to get that fire going, and how that newspaper fire might go out before the whole paper was anywhere near completely burned. Anyone who has burned any piece of paper knows the fire can sometimes go out with the paper only partly burned. There were quite a lot of little variables to both the paper and the charcoal, and it was a little bit challenging to make sure the fire got started when it should. Not infrequently, the first attempt at starting it didn’t work.

In this case, I see some different reasons why the area around the statue might not have burned easily, due in part to various practices of human tending, while the high grasses would have burned well. The area around the statue seems to have had just a little grass, or perhaps some other plant that was cut down (because right around the statute, something was there that was cut down by human gardening) with quite a bit of exposed earth, while if you look further on, the grass was thicker and the whole earth solidly burned black. The area with a mix of burned and unburned earth, in splotches, would seem to be where the fire would have been dying out because the grass was so short and sparse, with more ground there than anything. And that makes sense, since as I believe this story mentions, this was a site people came to, so there would have been a clearing there of at least some feet.