The Dormition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God [2007]

Today the Church remembers with thanksgiving the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. Historically, this day was understood to mark her dormition, or "falling asleep," which was most anciently regarded as her natural death and burial. From early on, however, the Church considered that she who conceived and gave birth to the very God of very God, by His Word and Holy Spirit, was also resurrected and ascended into heaven, in both body and soul, soon after her death. There is no word of Holy Scripture to teach these traditions as doctrine, but we should not be too quick to dismiss them as merely pious devotion. Such piety, at its heart, is a confession of that which is the Church's faith in Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary's Son, our Savior and our God.

St. Mary is uniquely honored among all the saints of God in Christ, not only by the Church, but first of all by the Lord God Himself. He has had mercy upon her, blessed her with His grace and favor, and chosen her above all other women to bear the almighty and eternal Son of God. She is rightly called, and truly is, the Mother of God; for her own dear Son, the Fruit of her womb, is indeed the one true God, begotten of the Father from all eternity. It is from her flesh and blood that the Lord has taken for Himself a true and natural body, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, so that henceforth He is true Man, the perfect second Adam, our elder Brother, our kinsman Redeemer, the promised Seed of the Woman, by whom we are reconciled to God. As the ancient fathers of the Church confessed, God thus became like us, in order that we become like Him, by grace. It is that great salvation that we celebrate in commemorating any of the saints, and in particular the Blessed Virgin Mother of God, St. Mary.

She is an icon of the Church, a living Sacrament of Christ, and a beautiful example of faith, of all the true children of father Abraham. Her body was comprehended by the Word and Spirit of God to become the tangible means by which the Son of God became flesh and was given to us, and not only for us, but for the life of the world. It is His body, conceived and born of St. Mary, that our sins and sorrows did carry. It is a human body, like our own in every way, save without sin, because He was born of this woman (born under the Law to redeem us). Thus do we recognize in her an archetype of the Blessed Sacrament of our Lord's body and blood.

What is more, in conceiving and giving birth to the Son of God, she is a type of the Church, the holy mother who surely gives birth to the sons of God in Christ. We too have been conceived and given new birth by the same Word and Spirit of the same Holy Triune God that overshadowed the Blessed Virgin Mary and knit within her womb the incarnation of the only-begotten Son. Thus are we, like Him, "born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God" (St. John 1:13).

Along with her vocation as the woman by whom the Son of God was given to and for the world, St. Mary also stands with us as a living member of the Church, the Body of Christ. When the Word of the Gospel was announced to her, she received that Word in faith, obtained in her by the mercies of God, and meekly bowed her head in humble trust: "Let it be to me according to Thy Word." Blessed is she who has heard the Word of God and kept it, who treasured it in her heart, who believed that there would surely be a fulfillment of all that God had spoken to her. In all of this, St. Mary is one of us, a faithful disciple of her own dear Son, and among that great cloud of witnesses with which we are surrounded, of that blest communion, fellowship divine.

When the Church in pious tradition has considered St. Mary to be resurrected and ascended to heaven, already in both body and soul, it is a confession of faith in that which Christ Jesus our Lord has accomplished for us and for all by His victorious Cross, Resurrection and Ascension. We may indeed contemplate that she by whom the Lord became like us, should exemplify the way in which we all become like Him, recreated in the glorious Image of the Man from heaven. Of course, we do not rest faith upon the tradition of St. Mary's dormition and assumption into heaven; faith clings to Jesus Christ alone and finds true peace and Sabbath rest forever in Him. But what we envision concering St. Mary, we understand to be the Church's hope precisely in Christ our Lord, our Savior and our God. For we know that He is the Resurrection and the Life, and that she who believes in Him will live even if she dies; yes, and everyone who lives and believes in Him will never die.

We believe, teach and confess with the absolute certainty of faith that St. Mary is the Mother of God; that the almighty and eternal Son of the living God was born of this woman, born under the Law, to redeem us who were under the Law. In celebrating that marvelous incarnation of God the Son, in which He died and rose again for us men and our salvation, we may also celebrate proleptically the resurrection of the body that all His saints share with Him by grace through faith in the Gospel. And in that glorious light, we sing: "O higher than the cherubim, more glorious than the seraphim, lead their praises: 'Alleluia!' Thou bearer of the eternal Word, most gracious magnify the Lord: 'Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!"

Origen (d. 254) is often cited...

This is what you were waiting on?

I said in post #375:

"Mother of God" was commonly used before the 4th council [in 451] and is referenced in previous council records.

After you denied that was true, I posted several quotes from the 3rd council [in 431] to prove my claim.

Then you said something to the effect that's only once council.

Now you've posted this citation about Origen which in no way negates my claim and the evidence I provided.

"Mother of God" was indeed used commonly before the 4th council and was used in the 3rd council I cited, which is previous to the 4th council. As I claimed.

Can you not see this?

You can start by tossing that idol of a scapular from around your neck and burning the thing.

Once again, I am a Catholic; you are not, neither is the rest of your protestant posse. If you think I will listen to you or any of your compadres, you are sorely mistaken.

As far as burning the scapular:

4 – The scapular that saved a house from the fire
In May 1957, a Carmelite priest published an astonishing account of an entire neighborhood of row houses that had burned down in Westboden, Germany. In one of them lived two pious families, who, upon seeing the fire, immediately hung a scapular at the entrance door.

In five hours, 22 houses were reduced to ashes – but, amid the general destruction, a single one remained intact: the one with the scapular attached to the door. Hundreds of people were eyewitnesses to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary in that residence.

P.S. I'm so sorry to see Mary's scapular irritates you protestants so much. It irritates Satan also. Did you know that?

Among the prophecies of His coming is the name meaning God With Us. When a teenager asked how the God who created the Universe could be a man, just a man, the following was given for sharing with others on How God The Almighty could be born a human being ... this is the extremely short version:

Here is a sort of Physics lesson found in John 14, as Jesus responded to Philip's request to be shown The Father so he could believe Jesus was The Messiah:
In John's Gospel, chapter 14, Jesus tells His disciples that if they have seen Him they have seen The Father, for He is in the Father and the Father in Him. All they could see of The Father was Jesus, God with them.
If you were a being who was created with only length and width spatial variability, you could not perceive a sphere of length, width, and height, except where that sphere was in your length x width plane. If I want to show a sphere to these flatlanders (from the short novel, Flatland) I would have to pass the sphere through their plane, making a series of expanding circles then shrinking circles.
There are two axioms which can help with understanding, regarding anything of the Universe, the Universe, and anything in the Universe God has created/is creating:

axiom 1 = without time, events do not occur
axiom 2 = without space a thing does not exist

All things in the Universe God created have some variability of space and time, even a photon. A photon passes or 'events' inside the Universe never going out of the present of its creation, thus it arrives at your eye, for instance, and imparts data of the source at the moment the photon is created, even if it takes a billion years (perceived from our position in the temporal field) to reach your eye. The photon remains in the present of its creation. Photons are a mix of a pinch of space, a moment in time, and energy. Photons carry 'present moment data'.
God made Man to have a physical body, a behavior mechanism or soul, and a third aspect, the spirit, into which God put His Spirit life but which was forfeited in Adam; the human spirit remained but the life on a spirit level was removed, and that is what God puts back into the spirit of a believer in Jesus, a saved person.
The soul is real, it exists in time and space, but in a different coordinate system from the physical body, though it interfaces with same. In the same fashion, spirit is real, having some variability of time and space, though existing in a different coordinate system from the soul yet interfacing with same. When one is 'born from above' (John 3), God puts the earnest of a greater existence into the human spirit. (That is important to comprehend if we are to comprehend what will happen at the Rapture.)
One more clue: the being who wrote upon the wall in Palace Party central (Daniel 5) exists in a spacetime coordinate system un sensible to the partiers, so He reached 'down' into the Palace spacetime coordinate system and wrote on the wall, while the portion not the hand writing remained in a different spacetime coordinate system un sensed by the partiers.
Well, maybe one more: when Stephen was close to death, he looked and saw Jesus standing at the right hand of the throne of The Father; God allowed Stephen to have the ability to see more than the coordinate system in which he was about to die, physically. What Stephen saw was real, had real space and time variability, but was un sensible to those who would be throwing rocks.

Now ebb, is The Lord Christ in the Universe God created? God created the first, second, and third Heavens so where did Stephen see the Lord Christ just before he was stoned to death in Saul's presence? And, well you should get the gist by now.

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