Cat Herder,
You have some nice arguments there, and I don’t want to try for a point-by-point rebuttal. There are a couple of items I do want to respond to, though:
The Blessed Virgin Mary never suffered death. She was assumed into Heaven at the end of her life like Enoch and Elijah before her.
You do realize that most of the early accounts of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption have her actually, properly dead for at least some period of time, right? And that several of the Church Fathers even gave homilies based on these accounts and had no issue with saying she had died?
pages.uoregon.edu/sshoemak/texts/dormitionL/dormitionL3.htm
Also, Enoch and Elijah are considered by some to be the “two faithful witnesses” from Revelation who return to witness in the end times and then be slain and rise 3-1/2 days later (so as not to one-up the Son of God, who rose on the 3rd day). And if Enoch & Elijah’s being resurrected before the Son of God would not have been fitting, how could Mary’s rising earlier than 3 days have been considered fitting? (Indeed, at least one dormition account has her dead 3-1/2 days.)
As you can see, there was a great discord involving several of the Apostles on this issue. But then PETER, i.e. the Pope, gets up and settles the matter.
Well, no, as a matter of fact not, because after Peter spoke, then Paul and Barnabas gave their testimony, and then
James delivered “my sentence” (i.e., not Peter’s, but his) on the matter. The idea that Peter “settled the matter” when he neither finished out the discussion nor rendered the verdict is rather ludicrous.
Show some evidence that the whole Church believed that Mary was sinful.
Why does anyone have to show you that the whole Church believed this? If it were true, I’d be more suspicious of the fact that the whole church
didn’t believe it, because it’s kind of hard to get something like that wrong. None of the heresies concerning Christ ever called him a sinner. That Mary’s sinlessness was up for grabs for 1800 years past the death of Christ shows how inconsequential it was to the faith. Indeed, one of the saints and doctors of the Church, St. John Chrysostom, explicitly said Mary was a sinner. I’d have to dig up the reference, but it was so explicit that St. Thomas Aquinas had to address it in his Summa Theologica simply by saying, “Chrysostom goes too far.”
How about Paul going back to Jewish ritual in Acts 21:20-26 and 24:10-12, and then turning around and saying those rituals had been abolished in Eph. 2:14?
That wasn’t Paul “getting things wrong”. That was Paul behaving as a Jew to the Jews, even as he behaved as a Gentile when with Gentiles.
