[boatbums]

Not only, "We're right because we are right.", but:

Rome has changed the meaning of tradition from demonstrating by patristic consent that a doctrine is truly part of tradition, to the concept of living tradition — whatever I say today is truth, irrespective of the witness of history. This goes back to the claims of Gnosticism to having received the tradition by living voice, viva voce. Only now Rome has reinterpreted viva voce, the living voice as receiving from the past by way of oral tradition, to be a creative and therefore entirely novel aspect of tradition. It creates tradition in its present teaching without appeal to the past. To paraphrase the Gnostic line, it is viva voce — whatever we say. Rome's New and Novel Concept of Tradition

[daniel1212]

Rome has changed the meaning of tradition from demonstrating by patristic consent that a doctrine is truly part of tradition, to the concept of living tradition — whatever I say today is truth, irrespective of the witness of history. This goes back to the claims of Gnosticism to having received the tradition by living voice, viva voce. Only now Rome has reinterpreted viva voce, the living voice as receiving from the past by way of oral tradition, to be a creative and therefore entirely novel aspect of tradition. It creates tradition in its present teaching without appeal to the past. To paraphrase the Gnostic line, it is viva voce — whatever we say. Rome's New and Novel Concept of Tradition

Which applies to the Assumption: which examples how Rome can "remember" something which is lacking actual warrant from where it should be found. Ratzinger states (emp. mine),

Before Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven was defined, all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers' answer was emphatically negative. What here became evident was the one-sidedness, not only of the historical, but of the historicist method in theology. “Tradition” was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Wurzburg…had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the 5C; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to the “apostolic tradition. And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared.

How then can Rome make belief in the Assumption a binding doctrine? Why by claiming Rome can "remember" what early historical testimony "forgot:"

But if you conceive of “tradition” as the living process whereby the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could still not grasp (cf. Jn 16:12-13), then subsequent “remembering” (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it has not caught sight of previously and was already handed down in the original Word,” J. Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius, n.d.), 58-59.

But which is specious sophistry, for it abuses Jn. 16:4 which refers to remembering what Christ had already told them ("these things have I told you"), into remembering an event that was rejected as lacking the needed evidence that Christ told them of, and turns this wannabe historical event into something that was too hard to understand - "what previously we could still not grasp" and abuses 16:4,12-13, which refers to the Spirit guiding us into all Truth, into a carte blanche provision to effectively call things that were not as if they were, making a tradition that progressively developed into a something that a RC is mandated to believe, over 1700 years after it allegedly occurred.

What then is the basis for such required belief? Not the weight of evidential warrant like as with the resurrection of Christ an d His life, (cf. Lk. 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-3; 2:22; 17:31; 1Co. 15:1-8), but the novel and unScriptural premise of ensured perpetual magisterial infallibility:

“Still, fundamentalists ask, where is the proof from Scripture? Strictly, there is none. It was the Catholic Church that was commissioned by Christ to teach all nations and to teach them infallibly. The mere fact that the Church teaches the doctrine of the Assumption as definitely true is a guarantee that it is true.” — Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), p. 275.