Speculation vs. Faith

[Mannyfit75]

Some CAF members in here have said that many beliefs of the Catholic faith concerning Mary is based on speculation. I strongly disagree. Our belief in all Marian beliefs are based on faith because the Catholic Church have declare them to be true, and requires all the faithful to believe in them. They are also part of Divine Revelation.

The CAF insist many times in this forum that these beliefs are speculation. They aren’t. We believe them to be true because the Church affirms them. This is faith not speculation. If he continues to persist that our belief are speculation, atheists in this forum have the same right to call our belief in God as speculation as well.

 

[Tomster]

Some CAF members in here have said that many beliefs of the Catholic faith concerning Mary is based on speculation. I strongly disagree. Our belief in all Marian beliefs are based on faith because the Catholic Church have declare them to be true, and requires all the faithful to believe in them. They are also part of Divine Revelation.

The CAF insist many times in this forum that these beliefs are speculation. They aren’t. We believe them to be true because the Church affirms them. This is faith not speculation. If he continues to persist that our belief are speculation, atheists in this forum have the same right to call our belief in God as speculation as well.

“Behold, henceforth all generations shall call me blessed; because he who is mighty has done great things for me,” proclaimed the Virgin Mary when her cousin Elizabeth greeted her as “the mother of my Lord.” In the gospel itself we find only two of “these great things” clearly stated: her miraculous virginity and her divine maternity. At present the faith and love of the Church attribute to her a great number of others: her Immaculate Conception, her perfect sinlessness, her fullness of grace, her Assumption, her mission as Co-redemptrix and Distributrix of all graces, etc. The faithful are as convinced of the certitude of these latter as they are of the first two. But the problem is to see how the latter truths are contained in the gospel revelation.

 

[Tomster]

Before He left His disciples, Christ, in promising them the Holy Spirit, declared: “Many things yet I have to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when he, the Spirit of truth, has come, he will teach you all the truth. For he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he will hear he will speak, and the things that are to come he will declare to you. He will glorify me, because he will receive of what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:12-14) On Pentecost the Holy Spirit revealed to the Apostles the most immediately important among the things our Lord had tried in vain to make plain to them; namely, the mystery of the Passion and of the Resurrection, the true nature of the Redemption and its extension to the whole world, the necessity of suffering and of being persecuted. The others he would reveal to the Church later on as the need arose, because the Holy Spirit remains with the Church to enlighten and guide her to the end of time. He does this very remarkably with regard to those glories of Mary not explicitly mentioned in Scripture.

 

[Tomster]

But how does the Holy Spirit lead the Church “to bring forth from her store-room” the “old things” concerning the Mother of Jesus and those “new things” that the Church attributes to her in the course of time? (Summa II-II, q.45, a.2, c. also I, q.1, a.6, ad 3.)

Is this effected through the speculation of her theologians? No. The history of the various Mariological beliefs shows that the faithful - simple Christians with their pastors - have professed each one of these long before the theologians busied themselves with them; in many instances the theologians at first rejected them and admitted them only gradually, under the compulsion, as it were, of the simple faithful. This, precisely, was the process in regard to belief in the total absence of actual sin in Mary, in her Immaculate Conception, in her Assumption. The fact is that the infallible assistance of the Holy Spirit is guaranteed to the faithful as a whole, not to a group of scholars even though there be saints among them.

But how have the faithful discovered the different privileges of the Virgin? Have they reasoned better than the theologians? They have not reasoned at all; they have contemplated.