The death of the Virgin in RCC imagery

[godisreal36]

Its probably time i go as well. Peace everyone. We all belong To Him that we Praise.

 

[Optimax]

Who are the RC's?

Its a soda.

RC Cola.

Royal Crown Cola

All this argument over a soda pop.

 

[godisreal36]

I'm sure in reality that neither of us have the slightest clue as to the maintenance costs.



Well, no, children are very definitely present during the Liturgy....



I have no idea what you are talking about here.

You never do brother. But i'll love you anyways.

Don't worry about me, just have faith in our Lord that He loves us all and wishes that we all be saved.

It's HIS will and may HIS will be done in JESUS name

 

[PilgrimToChrist]

Caucasian Mary and Jesus FTL

Would you prefer Japanese?

Our Lady of Akita, pray for us!

 

[PilgrimToChrist]

^^^Haha...no.

Matthew 6:24
“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other."

I know that's in the context of God vs money...but seems so applicable here too...

You do realize that the Bible says to obey your bishops, right? What about secular rulers, St. Paul says that it is a grave sin to disobey them or rebel. What about those in the military? or even just as a civil job, do you obey your boss? The only time when these things come into conflict is if a superior orders you to commit a sin. Even in civil law, being ordered to do something is no excuse for doing it if is objectively criminal (such as massacring a village or cooking the books). But in all other cases, we must obey those in authority over us because all authority comes from God.

Take heed to yourselves, and to the whole flock, wherein the Holy Ghost hath placed you bishops, to rule the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood.

Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same. For he is God's minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain. For he is God's minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doth evil. Wherefore be subject of necessity, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake.

 

[LittleLambofJesus]

Would you prefer Japanese?

Our Lady of Akita, pray for us!

http://www.christianforums.com/t7058376/
Marian Apparitions...

Our Lady of Akita - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Our Lady of Akita is the title of Marian apparitions reported in 1973 by Sister Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa in the remote area of Yuzawadai, near the city of Akita in Japan. The messages emphasize prayer and penance. Sister Sasagawa stated that the Virgin Mary told her: "Pray very much the prayers of the Rosary. I alone am able still to save you from the calamities which approach."[1][2][3][4]

 

[godisreal36]

Who's bishops are you referring to though? Maybe he has his bishops and you have yours. Does this mean you must obey each others bishops? Maybe I just misunderstand what you mean. And what does Military have to do with it? I missed that part.

Some people follow a bishop or leader but serve money instead of God, this makes the bishops authority mean nothing then. And what if the Bishop doesn't follow the Lord? And what of Women speaking in church or having her head covered in prayer? What if the Mans head is covered, does the women need to still keep hers covered? It keeps getting more complicated doesn't it? Love is hard but not complicated, unless too many rules and teachings are enforced, then love becomes complicated.

Just my opinion, not saying anyones right or wrong, that doesn't work so well, complicates things.

Mary was a women right?

 

[PilgrimToChrist]

How many children starve while we look upon this image? I Don't ask for your Gold and precious buildings or valuable works of art that are costly to maintain as well and are not worth more as the our Masters words i think, i will not be Judas. But will you show the one who Comes in HIS name no respect?

Forgive me for putting My Lord above all. Although sometimes My pride can make me fall.

John the baptist had nothing at all yet he is greater than any man...or is He?

I'm still waiting for you to sell your computer and your house and live on the street so you can sell all you have and give to the poor... feel free to become a monk, a friar or a hermit -- they are all very important roles in the Church.

Anyway, didn't Judas say the same thing? "To what purpose is this waste? For this might have been sold for much, and given to the poor." (Mt 26:8b-9). Nothing in the service of God is a waste.

Msgr. Hugh Benson who I mentioned recently (I don't recall what thread) was not only a novelist but an essayist. His insights are particularly interesting as he was a high profile convert (son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury). He takes apparent contradictions in the Gospels and tries to reconcile them. Here he discusses wealth and poverty, based on the apparent contradiction in Chapter XVI of the Gospel of St. Luke:

Make to yourselves friends of the Mammon of iniquity.
You cannot serve God and Mammon.-LUKE XVI. 9, 13.

Now, I cannot reproduce the entire chapter on here but you can read the whole book via Project Gutenberg here. Here are some choice quotes:

The charge is a very common one: "Look at the extraordinary wealth and splendour that this Church of the Poor Man of Nazareth constantly gathers around her and ask yourself how she can dare to claim to represent Him! Go through Holy Rome and see how the richest and most elaborate buildings bear over their gateways the heraldic emblems of Christ's Vicar! Go through any country which has not risen in disgust and cast off the sham that calls herself 'Christ's Church' and you will find that no worldly official is so splendid as these heavenly delegates of Jesus Christ, no palaces more glorious than those in which they dwell who pretend to preach Him who "had not where to lay His head"!
...
In a word, then, the Church is too worldly to be the Church of Christ! "You cannot serve God and Mammon." Yet in another mood our critic will tell us that we are too otherworldly to be the Church of Christ. "The chief charge I have against Catholicism," says such a man, "is that the Church is too unpractical. If she were truly the Church of Jesus Christ, she would surely imitate Him better in that which, after all, was the mark of His highest Divinity—namely in His Humanity towards men. Christ did not come into the world to preach metaphysics and talk forever of a heaven that is to come; He came rather to attend to men's simplest needs, "to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked," to reform society on better lines. It was not by His dogma that He won men's hearts; it was by His simple, natural sympathy with their common needs. He came, in a word, to make the best of this world, to use the elements that lay ready to His hand, to sanctify all the plain things of earth with which He came in contact.
...
But, surely, this is a little hard upon Catholics! When we make ourselves at home in this world, we are informed that Jesus Christ "had not where to lay His Head." When we preach the world that is to come, we are reminded that Jesus Christ after all came down from that world into this to make it better. When we build a comfortable church, we are told that we are too luxurious. When we build an uncomfortable one we are asked how we expect to do any good unless we are practical.
...
Now, of course, both these charges were also objected against our Blessed Lord. For He too had His double activities. It is true that there were times when He gave men earthly bread; it is also true that He offered them heavenly bread. There were times when He cared for men's bodies; there were other times when He bade them sacrifice all that makes bodily life worth living; times when He sat at meat in the house of a rich man, and times when He starved, voluntarily, in the desert.

And the world found Him wrong whichever He did. He was too worldly when He healed men on the Sabbath; for is not the Law of God of more value than a man's bodily ease? Why can He not wait till to-morrow? He was too worldly when He allowed His disciples to rub corn in their hands; for does not the Law of God forbid a man to make bread on the Sabbath? He was too worldly, too unpractical, too sense-loving when He permitted the precious ointment to be spilled on His feet; "for might not this ointment have been sold for much and given to the poor?" Is not spirituality enough, and the incense of adoration?
...
The solution, then, of this Catholic Paradox is very simple. (i) First, the Church is a Heavenly Society come down from above—heavenly in her origin and her birth. She is the kingdom of God, first and foremost, and exists for His glory solely and entirely. She seeks, then, first the extension of His kingdom; and compared with this, nothing is of any value in her eyes. Never, then, must she sacrifice God to Mammon; never hesitate for one instant if the choice lies between them. For she considers that eternity is greater than time and the soul of man of more value than his body. The sacraments therefore, in her eyes, come before an adequate tram-service; and that a man's soul should be in grace is, to her, of more importance than that his body should be in health—if the choice is between them. She prefers, therefore, the priest to the doctor, if there is not time for both, and Holy Communion to a good breakfast.
...
"And all these things shall be added" to her. For she is Human also, in that she dwells in this world where God has placed her, and uses therefore the things with which He has surrounded her. To say that she is supernatural is not to deny her humanity any more than to assert that man has an immortal soul is to exclude the truth that he also has a body. It is this Body of hers, then—this humanity of hers which enshrines her Divinity—that claims and uses earthly things; it is this Body that dwells in houses made with hands and that claims too, in honour to herself and her Bridegroom, that, so long as her spirituality is not tarnished, these houses shall be as splendid as art can make them. For she is not a Puritan nor a Manichee; she does not say that any single thing which God has made can conceivably be of itself evil, however grievously it may have been abused; on the contrary, she has His own authority for saying that all is very good.

She uses, then, every earthly beauty that the world will yield to her, to honour her own Majesty. It may be right to set diamonds round the neck of a woman, but it is certainly right to set them round the Chalice of the Blood of God. If an earthly king wears vestments of cloth of gold, must not a heavenly King yet more wear them? If music is used by the world to destroy men's souls, may not she use it to save their souls? If a marble palace is fit for the President of the French Republic, by what right do men withhold it from the King of kings?

But the world does withhold its wealth sometimes? Very well then, she can serve God without it, in spite of her rights. If men whine and cringe, or bully and shout, for the jewels with which their forefathers honoured God, she will fling them back again down her altar stairs and worship God in a barn or a catacomb without them. For, though she does not "serve God and Mammon", she yet "makes to herself friends of the Mammon of iniquity". Though she does not and never can serve God and Mammon, she will and can, when the world permits it, make Mammon serve her. For the Church is the Majesty of God dwelling on earth. She is there, in herself, utterly independent of her reception. If it is "her own" to whom "she comes, and her own do not receive her," they are none the less hers by every right. For, though she will use every earthly thing to her honour, though she considers no ointment wasted, however precious, that is spilled by love over her feet, yet her essential glory does not lie in these things. She is "all glorious within," whether or not her vesture is "of gold", for she is a "King's Daughter." She is, essentially, as glorious in the Catacombs as in the Roman basilicas; as lovely in the barefooted friar as in the robed and sceptred Vicar of Christ; as majestic in Christ naked on the Cross as in Christ ascended and enthroned in heaven.

Yet, since she is His Majesty on earth, she has a right to all that earth can give. All "the beasts of the field are hers, and the cattle on a thousand hills," all the stars of heaven and the jewels of earth; all the things in the world are hers by Divine right.

"All things are hers, for she is Christ's." Yet, nevertheless, "she will suffer the loss of all things" sooner than lose Him.

 

[PilgrimToChrist]

Children should be seen and not heard maybe?

LOL. I guess you haven't been to Mass where there are a lot of babies and young children!

 

[LittleLambofJesus]

LOL. I guess you haven't been to Mass where there are a lot of babies and young children!

Not in about 40+yrs I haven't.
I seen enuf of 'dem in non-RC churches

 

[PilgrimToChrist]

Not in about 40+yrs I haven't.
I seen enuf of 'dem in non-RC churches

So not all of the Protestant churches have caught onto utilizing Sunday school and nurseries to keep children out of the liturgy/sermon. I stand corrected.

 

[JacktheCatholic]

Not in about 40+yrs I haven't.
I seen enuf of 'dem in non-RC churches

Is it because you have not been to an RC church in 40 years?

 

[bbbbbbb]

There is a difference between dogmatic and binding. We can be bound (obliged) to obey something which is not dogmatic. A dogma is a teaching which is contained within the Deposit of Faith. A dogma may be formally defined and promulgated in the documents of an Ecumenical Council or by a papal bull or encyclical or it may have never been formally defined at all. For example, in the encyclical Munificentissimus Deus the definition of the dogma is found near the end, which I have emboldened:



The rest of the document regards the dogma but is not part of the dogma, nor is it considered to be infallible.

Thus a papal bull (in this case an encyclical), to use your example, may contain a definition of a dogma but they are not dogmatic in and of themselves because they are not a single teaching. You may be confusing "dogmatic" with "infallible", of course all dogmas are defined infallibly but not all infallible statements are dogmas nor are papal encyclicals considered infallible by their very nature (though they may contain infallible statements already defined, of course, or define new statements as with the encyclical above).

So I'm not really sure what you are trying to get at here.

Thank you. I was not actually trying to get at anything other than to clear some of the confusion in my own mind. You have helped a great deal.

One of the difficulties with the dogma of the Assumption is that there are sincere Christians who do not believe it for no other reason than they have never heard of it. It is agreed that the Bible contains no references to it. If one only had the Bible, then one could remain innocently ignorant of it. Perhaps that would not be such a bad state if ignorance does not result in judgement.

 

[bbbbbbb]

Those Christians are always making great buildings for their God. Some get it and some do not.

To keep this On Topic, does anyone know the oldest Church and has something regarding Mary after her Assumption?

Hint: it has a story regarding one of the Apostles and it still stands today.

Hmmmmm. Would that be the Antiochan Orthodox Church or the Mar Thoma Church?

 

[bbbbbbb]

I was talking about Catholicism which has One God and not any other. Maybe you are referring to the Greeks?

Ooooohhhh, I see. I guess the Antiochan Orthodox Church the the Mar Thoma Church are the Johnny-come-latelys to the conciliar table.

 

[bbbbbbb]

I was born in a Protestant church and as a teenager became Agnostic and then in my twenties started soul searching for God. I was 30 when I was baptized and confirmed as a Roman Catholic. My searching for God led me to the Roman Catholic Church where I studied scripture and then the history of Christianity where I found an enjoyment in being confirmed with my beliefs through the writings of the ECFs. The reason I sharfe this is because I once thought and spoke much like you and so I think I was where you are now when I was younger.

I am not offended though I know some will be offended.

For me these Basilicas are testaments to God's Church here on earth. When I see the White House in the USA I see a huge building for it's time and know it is because the President is given great honor and so too his home is one of reflection of such honor.

A Basilica is the House of the Lord and so to me deserves greater honor than any other building in the world because it is where we house the Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. And yes, I once did not believe the Eucharist was the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of our Lord Jesus. But my readings and prayers have confirmed the Real Presense to be Real. It has also allowed me to honor Jesus Christ's mother, Mary.

But you disagree... that is fine. But if you have a contention it is best understood and accepted with an X, Y, and Z argument.

I hope this is not too Off Topic.

I was born in a hospital. You are the first person I have met who was born in a church. Did that make you a Christian? My birth did not make me a nurse or a doctor (perhaps a bed pan). I will let you take it from here - or not.

 

[LittleLambofJesus]

I was born in a hospital. You are the first person I have met who was born in a church. Did that make you a Christian? My birth did not make me a nurse or a doctor (perhaps a bed pan). I will let you take it from here - or not.

Does he really have to

 

[LittleLambofJesus]

Originally Posted by JacktheCatholic I was talking about Catholicism which has One God and not any other. Maybe you are referring to the Greeks?

Ooooohhhh, I see. I guess the Antiochan Orthodox Church the the Mar Thoma Church are the Johnny-come-latelys to the conciliar table.

As the ole saying goes..better late than never

 

[laconicstudent]

YouTube - Dormition Stichera

O strange wonder great and marvelous, for the font of life is laid within a sepulcher. A ladder to heaven's heights, thus the small grave becomes. Be glad, O Gethsemane, the sanctuary of her that gave birth to God. Ye faithful, let us cry out, those that sing art of manner great Gabriel.

Maiden full of grace rejoice now, with thee is the Lord our God! Who doth fondly granteth, his great mercy to the world through thee.

 

[JacktheCatholic]

Here we go again.

Don't hand me that Catholic word again sister. You're Catholic not me and many others also, you insult us all who're not catholic but are Christians. And with your unnecessary pushing of the pope you shown us no mercy.

I did show you mercy by jumping in the boat with you so you would not feel sad and alone, maybe you do have a problem after all.

Do you wish to anger me so i can badmouth your pope again? Where is the wisdom in that?

Cover your head sister or shave it.

Christian was not what Jesus' followers first went by. They went by Jewish. I believe Christian was first used to seperate those that believed in the Messiah from those that did not. The term, as far as we know, was coined in Antioch around the same time that Christians started to refer to their church as catholic. You can see this with early Christian writings.

Ignatius of Antioch wrote:

"Let no one do anything of concern to the Church without the bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop or by one whom he ordains [i.e., a presbyter]. Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church" (Letter to the Smyrneans 8:2 [A.D. 110]).

What "Catholic" Means

See the link for more.

And Mary, the mother of God or Theotokos, was held high from the beginning with (dare I say) Jesus himself.

Maybe read a little on the Council that declared the Theotokos?

But to get us back On Topic:

The Assumption


The doctrine of the Assumption says that at the end of her life on earth Mary was assumed, body and soul, into heaven, just as Enoch, Elijah, and perhaps others had been before her. It’s also necessary to keep in mind what the Assumption is not. Some people think Catholics believe Mary "ascended" into heaven. That’s not correct. Christ, by his own power, ascended into heaven. Mary was assumed or taken up into heaven by God. She didn’t do it under her own power.

The Church has never formally defined whether she died or not, and the integrity of the doctrine of the Assumption would not be impaired if she did not in fact die, but the almost universal consensus is that she did die. Pope Pius XII, in Munificentissimus Deus (1950), defined that Mary, "after the completion of her earthly life" (note the silence regarding her death), "was assumed body and soul into the glory of heaven."

The possibility of a bodily assumption before the Second Coming is suggested by Matthew 27:52–53: "[T]he tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many." Did all these Old Testament saints die and have to be buried all over again? There is no record of that, but it is recorded by early Church writers that they were assumed into heaven, or at least into that temporary state of rest and happiness often called "paradise," where the righteous people from the Old Testament era waited until Christ’s resurrection (cf. Luke 16:22, 23:43; Heb. 11:1–40; 1 Pet. 4:6), after which they were brought into the eternal bliss of heaven.

And more: Immaculate Conception and Assumption