Protestant converts: How did you deal with the Church's Marian doctrines?

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I am a convert and Our Lady of Fatima is what brought me to Catholicism. I was watching a show about unexplained events and it talked about Fatima. I always liked Mother Mary when I was protestant and when I was pagan so I decided to research it which led me to different books about Catholicism and I realized it was the one true faith and I crossed the Tiber last Easter Vigil night 🙂 . I have had a feeling about some of the prayers that I pray might honor her too much but I figure that is my southern baptist background trying to get at me and I just remind myself that Mother Mary deserves as much honor as I can give her for her Fiat and to give worship and adoration to the Lord alone. Just have to think of the difference between hyperdulia and latria.
 
Greetings brother,
I would like to respond to some of your reasoning in a spirit of Christian charity and hope you find no offense in my words.
You will notice that in framing Jesus as the new Adam who will rectify Adams transgression any mention of eve and/or Mary is missing, and for good reason. This wasn’t simply an accidental omission or oversight. All authority as head of the household was designated by God to the Husband. The ultimate responsibility of transgression falls upon the head of the household and as the head the husband is responsible for paying restitution, whatever form this may take. Should the wife of the household transgress in some manner, though she may be punished personally and in this way make restitution to the husband, it is the husbands duty to make restitution separately for the family of which she is a part. You are making an unwarranted correlating assumption in relating eve with Mary by not taking into account the position and authority within the household that God has delegated to each person this being reflected in the culture of Paul’s day. There’s another very good reason not to make the leap from Jesus and Adam to Mary and Eve. This should be blatantly obvious to anyone who would equate the two. This leap would have equated, in some manner, Mary as Jesus’s wife. To have your mother equated in some manner to being your wife would have been abhorrent to Paul and his culture. I suspect God called for a Virgin to give birth because it was to be the miraculous sign the prophets spoke of not because Eve was a virgin when she transgressed. All women start out as virgin this is not an amazing concept and it is not to be held against Eve that she happened to possibly be a virgin when she transgressed. It is possible that she wasn’t of course. Refamiliarize yourself with Genesis. In Gen. 26-28 God blessed them both and told them to be fruitful…there is absolutely no reason to assume they hadn’t had relations before they transgressed. You are trying to fit assumptions to a particular viewpoint. Also it doesn’t correlate that Eve’s free choice should be equated to Mary’s being chosen. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the woman in Gen. 3:15 should be equated to Mary. Contrarily its more fitting as I’ve shown that Mary should not be equated to Eve. It is clear that the verse is not meant to be prophetic for some future generation. The enmity between the “offspring” of God and the “offspring” of the serpent began at this point in history. You pick and choose arbitrarily when correlating these things. The woman in verse 15 was the woman who was deceived by the serpent into transgression. By equating this woman with Mary as well your saying that Mary will be deceived by the serpent and transgress in some manner. Do you believe this to be true? None of the Apostles make this conjecture even fleetingly while referencing Adam and the fall of man. This is merely a developed conjecture after a mythos of Mary had built up a century after Christ left the earth.
God bless you and may you find the truth we all need.
 
Do you not find it obvious that Jesus the Christ is exceptionally different from the normal conception of a King in early Jewish culture?
The Jews were expecting a King who would crush their enemies and usher in a period of unparalleled piece for the kingdom. Instead they got a crucified Christ and many could not accept this. You cannot equate the cultural traditions of the Jews with the Kingdom of God which Jesus will establish. There is no Queen in comparison to Jesus’s Kingship simply because there is no “Mother” of GOD in the same sense as an earthly mother would give birth to a King. This last is a separate and more in involved argument should you wish to disregard it for now.
Blessings be with you always…
 
If you have a moment, Read Mathew 22:41-45 and tell me what you understand Jesus to mean by this.
God bless.
 
My problem with the apparitions is that the statements made by the apparition don’t match up with the reality of the experience. For instance she often says something to the effect that she is appearing so that all may see and believe and be saved yet not everyone present sees. Not even most believers present see, they simply hope its true and confuse this internal feeling with external truth. Why? Why don’t the apparition appear unambiguously for all present to see as the apparition itself says she has come to do? Could this all be a self reinforced projection of a desired reality?
 
The fact that Jesus’ actions as a King might differ from ‘early Jewish conception’ (and why are you limiting it to ‘early’, might I ask? has nothing to do with the relationship of King and Queen.

The Queen is the Mother of the King.

Mary is the Mother of the King, Jesus.

You do believe Christ IS King, do you not?
 
Kei said:
Jesus is King, and the mother of the King is queen. It is really that simple.
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This argument doesn’t do it.

The mother of a king would be a Queen, not because she is the mother of the King but because she was married to the father of a King who was most likely also a king.

None of which is the case here if equated to the OT kingdoms.
 
No problem with Marian doctrines, devotions, etc. as I came from a branch of the Anglican church which believed it all anyway (often more so than the average cradle catholic) lol :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:
 
How do you explain the fact that King David had several wives, but none of them were addressed as Queen during his kingship? It was after he died that the mother of the king (Solomon, who was not the ‘oldest’ son and whose mother was not the ‘most senior wife’) was addressed as Queen.
 
Others have already given great replies. I’ll just add that the Queenship of Mary can be shown from the bible.

Matthew 1 speaks on the geneology of Jesus Christ, the “son of david”.

In the Davidic Kingdom it was known that the Queen was not the King’s wife, but rather his mother. It follows then that in Christ’s kingdom (being of the line of David) that His Mother will be Queen. And what is Christ king of? Heaven. Therefore Mary is Queen of Heaven through the kingship of her Son.

Hope this helps.
 
NewJourney said:
Could anybody explain to me how they got past these objections?
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Once I realized that Jesus promised that His Church would never teach false doctrine, things got a lot easier and less stressful.

Funny thing, after I made an act of the will to trust Her as I trust Christ and entered the Church, within a week or so all things that bothered me simply melted away into a realization that “of course the Church has it right, how could I not have seen this before? It makes perfect sense!”
 
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No, in the Middle East, where kings had many different wives, the queen was not one of the many wives but the mother of the he king.
It is not like European monarchies.
 
You would probably find Scott Hahn’s book, Hail Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God helpful.
 
So the Kingdom of Heaven is fashioned after middle eastern kingdoms?
 
Well I see it this way.
As I struggled with it as well and I’ve been Catholic my whole life.

The Church decided on the Canon of the New Testament in the fourth century. Many texts which were circulating as scripture were not ultimately put in the Bible.
If the Church has the authority to decide what belongs in the Bible, I also believe it knows how to interpret it.
I would recommend you read some other early Christian writings such as the Apostolic Fathers. Just because it isn’t in the Bible doesn’t mean it wasn’t held as tradition from the early days of the Church.
 
I’m a convert and don’t have any problems with Marian dogma, and The miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one that resonates with me and really prompted me in my conversion. Once I came to realize that the church teaches the Truth and is protected by the Holy Spirit, the rest was easy to accept. Plus to me at least, it is common sense once you really consider it. Mary is the Ark of the New Covenent, the mother of God, so she would have to be sinless. God would only be contained in a spotless vessel, right? And also her ascension…we know where all of the apostles are buried, but not Mary. Even in the early church she was highly venerated, so if she were here on earth I’m sure her burial spot would be where everyone made a pilgrimage to, and we would all know about it.
 
God specifically chose the Jews for a reason.

It is rather kingdoms which are supposed to mimic Heaven, I’d imagine. If course they don’t succeed.
 
Greetings my fellow truth seeker.
I have read some of the early statements on Mary from the church fathers. My statement wasn’t meant to be understood that the Mythos created about Mary has a direct lineage from the pagan cultural history previous to its development. I merely meant there is a possible psychological remnant which has contributed to Mariology’s development causing a dangerous confusion in understanding Mary. Goddess worship in ancient Israel promulgated by Jezebel and at her urging King Ahab. The mythos built up over the ages about Mary simply cannot be supported by scripture or even the early Christian Church to the extent it has been taken. Mary simply disappears from history after her last appearance in the upper room with the Apostles until seemingly out of nowhere she begins to reappear in various conjectures and statements over a century later, but never to the extent we see in the Church today. Mary is gone from the record even to the extent that according to scripture Jesus doesn’t even meet with her after his resurrection something the Church has to contend with by manipulating conjectures into answers…
As for the development of the concept of the trinity, it was little more than a desperate attempt at making the ineffable definable through dense and meaningless theological verbiage. The trinity in my opinion is an indefinable meditative exercise which cannot be used to prove any understandable truth. Anyone that claims to understand the dogma of the trinity doesn’t know the trinity. St. Athanasius and St. Antony had to go to great lengths because no one understood it and they still don’t and what’s more its not necessary to understand the trinity or promote an understanding of the trinity for our salvation. Far from evolving from ignorance to understanding over time these things have instead evolved from a none issue to a misunderstood stumbling block for many.
Of course the woman who bore the messiah would be special in their eyes but realize the Jewish conception of the time about who the messiah would be was not the same as the Christian understanding. He would not be a divine son of God…continued
 
I believe you have a misconception about cults. Early Christianity itself was considered a cult. Where cults go wrong is when its adherents give unquestioned authority into the hands of a few in spite of the fews failure to adhere to and consequently prove their own fitness to lead. Jesus proved himself by being a living embodiment of his words. Its not that many in cults are uneducated or incapable its that they’ve delegated their own abilities to another and sometimes pay the price in being lead astray. Its this mentality that has, since at least the eleventh century, let the endemic clergy sexual abuse within the Church continue without proper solution.
I said if it feels bad it just may well be. I meant that one should be mindful of what ones gut impressions tell us. Intuition is a gift from God. It is intuitive in every son of God that they are informed by a universal moral conception. You cannot teach intuition. Experience informs reason which may override intuition and dictate what action is taken but only at the expense of a disunity in the soul. Intuition is not equated to emotion. Even a psychopath can intuit that murder is wrong. They simply lack the associated emotions which would allow them to act upon their intuition and not commit murder. Intuition is what informs one that abortion is wrong not reason. Abortion can certainly be shown appropriate through reason. There are logical arguments for why abortion is appropriate in some cases and even good for society as a whole. It is our intuitive grasp of morality that tells us no reasonable argument is acceptable for abortion. What makes a person intuitively uncomfortable toward Catholic Mariology is not that their intuition is wrong if anything it would be that what we grasp intuitively as wrong has been mistakenly applied to how Catholics view and treat Mary religiously.
Blessings follow you all you days…
 
It is not simply his actions as a “king” its the conception of an earthly king as it applies to Jesus that we are dealing with. I reference “early” Jewish culture because that is the time frame we are dealing with when these scriptures formulated their conceptions of Kingship.
You are getting your titles mixed up. The Mother of the King was always referenced as the Queen “Mother” not as simply the Queen. To reference the mother as the Queen would equate her with his wife which would have been unthinkable to Jews.
I believe Jesus is King of Kings…a divine reference not an earthly one. You cannot equate an earthly King with Jesus. You can only reference their metaphorical qualities. Ask yourself…who is it that Jesus actually said was his mother? Here’s a clue, it wasn’t limited merely to Mary.
God be with you.
 
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