Seeking a common ground.

[Bennie_P]

I do not subscribe to raising her to a divine level. I never once insulted her. Mary is a saint and foremost of all saints. That means that she is alive and well in Heaven and can pray with us and for us to God. That however does not mean that she can perform miracles or act in part with Christ to save us. You seem to be interested in only rubber stamping someone dead wrong if they question or do not believe a teaching of the RC.

That’s the point The Catholic Church doesn’t put Mary on a divine level nor says she is divine nor do we say she “performs” miracles. Only God can perform miracles. So please quit accusing the Church for teaching what the Church doesn’t teach.

"We know the false rejoinder of those who say that Catholics “adore” Mary or make her a “goddess,” but that is a lie. Since no reader of these pages would be guilty of such nonsense, it shall be ignored. " Fulton Sheen

Please take time and read this article by Bishop Sheen, a Catholic scholar well like and respected by Catholics and non-catholics alike.

All Mothers Are Alike—Save One
by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

 

[Allweather]

It just absolutely slays me how you accuse me of throwing dirt on Mary because I do not subscribe to raising her to a divine level. I never once insulted her. Mary is a saint and foremost of all saints. That means that she is alive and well in Heaven and can pray with us and for us to God. That however does not mean that she can perform miracles or act in part with Christ to save us. You seem to be interested in only rubber stamping someone dead wrong if they question or do not believe a teaching of the RC.

Ron, when you make statements like the parts that I bolded in the quote above, you reveal a fundamentalist mindset with which I am very familiar. It borders on hatred. It is an illogical hatred, and flows out of indoctrinations that don’t correspond with the teachings of Christianity since the era during which the Bible was being written. They’re insulting, and I know they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Besides your mistaken beliefs about Mary, I have no doubt that there are other mistaken beliefs that you have regarding the Catholic Church and the teachings it has given the world for 2,000 years. Of course, I could be wrong. So, with that in mind, let me apologize if I’ve mistaken your motives and said things that offend you. Why don’t we proceed from here.

I’m happy to see that you can bring yourself to admit that “she is alive and well in Heaven, and can pray with us and for us to God.” When I was a fundamentalist, I had no such notion at all, and none of my fundamentalist partners did, either. We had no concept of Mary, except that she was a sort of surrogate mother, that God needed her to grow and feed the baby Jesus, but after that she was discarded. In fact, one of my earliest Catholic notions was this: God could’ve produced Jesus any ol’ way He wanted to. If he’d wanted to, he could’ve just had Jesus descend from heaven, fully grown, ready to go to the cross. But he didn’t do it that way. He did it the way the Bible tells us. And since God never does anything by accident, and since everything God does is chock full of meaning, surely the method of Jesus coming into the world, born of a woman, protected, fed, taught, urged on to the cross by her, is full of meaning for us. So, rather than figure out ways to diminish Mary’s role, why not find ways to understand what God meant by doing things the way He did them?