Mary Mother of God

[Bill the Cat]

1) As He was especially with the Eleven, who were the first BISHOPS of the Catholic Church.

No they weren't. Bishops were settled in one area, leading that area's church. The 12 traveled extensively.

2) We are not infallible individually, but either all bishops or when the Pope intends to bind all the other bishops.

Wrong. Only Christ Himself is infallible.

3) An individual bishop should not be opposed without a good reason.

And claiming a personal visit from a dead saint qualifies as needing opposition.

While the Apostles lived, it was impossible that all of the apostles were wrong - that you know, I suppose.

I'm not sure what your point is.

It was also impossible that St Peter remained wrong when corrected. If you didn't know that, read up in the Bible.

Oh, I'm sure he figured out that he was wrong.

If you say this collective infallibility of the Church ceased to function when last Apostle died, how do you know which books belong to NT canon?

Lacking infallibility does not mean that they don't know anything.

There were disputes about certain books centuries after that, and if the Church that settled the dispute was already fallible, how can the settlement be infallible?

Which is why we do not dogmatically idolize the Bible. We believe in the ability of the early church to know who wrote which books. Infallibility has little to do with that.

But if it was still infallible, why was its Mariology not so?

Because the embellished stories attributed to her after the second century have no basis in Apostolic teachings.

Ask the Greek Orthodox Bishop of Corinth what he has to say about St Clement's Letter to the Corinthians. He may deny (as we Catholics affirm) that the second letter, even more Papist, is genuine, but he will not deny that at a certain point in time the Church of Corinth asked the Church of Rome, that is the Pope, to settle a dispute.

Sorry, but no. The Bishop of Rome was not "the Pope" at the time Clement wrote. He held no more authority than the Bishop of Corinth. That he wrote to another bishop for guidance shows they were working together.

But neither is your bishop, if you have one.

I never claimed he was.

Therefore your bishop who is NOT the one over Fatima is even more likely to be wrong than the one who was bishop over Fatima.

Sorry, but that simply does not follow. Fallible is fallible.

And am I "starting" or was the bishop of Fatima "starting" anything?

You? No. The Bishop of Fatima? Absolutely!

We are continuing sth and so are you.

What is "sth"?

Here is the rub. We claim that what we continue was always there.

And there is simply no evidence that it was there prior to the late 200's

You claim that at first it wasn't, but then it was there in the Church and later someone had to start "cleaning it up". And the one or the ones who claimed to be "cleaning up" came along and started a new thing - a very clearly new thing for the time, even if they claimed it was just the renewal of the old thing : Reformation.

Cryptic messages don't cut it. The reformation was not a "new thing". It was a demand to reject the additional pieces of Roman invention.

Totally at variance with Matthew 28:20.

No it isn't.

Mine that visions happen?

No. Yours that dead human saints visit the living.

Acts 2:[16] But this is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel: [17] And it shall come to pass, in the last days, (saith the Lord,) I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

As far as I know, the Spirit which was poured out that Day is still with the Church.

But that has nothing to do with Mary supposedly appearing in the sky demanding Russia be "consecrated" to Mary's "immaculate heart".

Necromancy?

Communing with the dead. Mary is dead. Direct two-way communications with her.

Don't widen terms as to possible meanings, please! It's as annoying as when Mathematicians claim zero is a number!

No one is widening anything. It's only slightly different from Saul communing with Samuel.

Necromancy is when you are curious about a particular dead person or dead persons in general and you start doing stuff to summon the spirit of that dead person to where you are, like summon the person to appear or summon the person to accept a medium as channeling. That is a very great evil.

That's one definition, but it has been used in broader circumstances.

Even so, on one occasion, a real spirit of a real saint appeared when Saul was going to a witch who practised necromancy : if the demons had been appearing, the witch would not have been afraid since she was used to them. Also the text says that it was the spirit of Samuel who appeared.

And God had explicitly forbade it.

Therefore, spirits of dead people appearing is clearly not against Holy Scripture, since it is clearly stated by Holy Scripture.

It's evil. You admitted it yourself.

Also, Moses has died, and the spirit of Moses appeared for Transfiguration of Our Lord, together with Elijah who has, however, not yet died and who appeared bodily.

To the Lord Himself!! Not to us. Did Moses or Elijah utter a word to the Apostles that were there? No. For a reason!

So, necromancy is hardly the issue, even if it had been about a saint who actually died and hadn't risen appearing, as St Catherine of Alexandria (or of Siena, but I think of Alexandria) appeared to St Joan of Arc.

Again, not biblical, but a nice bedtime story to make the faithful feel good.

As for listening to seducing spirits, that is what non-Catholics are doing over and over again, whether they come in apparitions, as with Joseph Smith or by bad exegesis as with Luther.

Guilt by association. Fallacies never get old, do they?

[hansgeorg]

@ Bill the Cat's words to One Bad Pig:

The invented stories about her being immaculately conceived herself, her being sinless, her being assumed bodily into heaven, her being another mediator, etc.

OK, you say the story - indeed in this case story and not analysis - of Her being received bodily into Heaven is made up.

We have it from Apostolic tradition, universal among the Churches who have Apostolic succession.

Not strictly speaking. Communing with the dead qualifies.

1) The Blessed Virgin is no more dead than Christ, Her Son.
2) Communing with the dead only qualifies if it is on wayward terms, it does not qualify if on God's exceptional terms.

But creating entire dogmas based on silence is quite dangerous.

A dogma based on tradition and suppported indirectly by typological and other mystical reading of OT is not based on silence.

No doubt. That's why I have no problem with petitioning the saints to pray for us.

OK, a bit original for a Protestant, but ok ...

And watching hans defend them with oversimplifications is an even bigger red flag.

While neither of you has made any attempt to show anything wrong in the demands.


@ Bill the Cat's words to myself:

No they weren't. Bishops were settled in one area, leading that area's church. The 12 traveled extensively.

You are confusing "bishop of a see" or "ordinary bishop", which you get by election (papal or popular or some in between, usages have varied) with "ontologically bishop" which you should be if bishop in a see, and can be in other circulstances too. You become it (if you become it at all) by imposition of hands going back to the eleven first of these, namely the Apostles.

Wrong. Only Christ Himself is infallible.

The Church is His body, ergo it is taken as a whole infallible.

And claiming a personal visit from a dead saint qualifies as needing opposition.

1) No. See the rest.
2) Apart from the fact that with your take on what necromancy is, how would you answer Jewry if they claimed that Christ appearing at Resurrection for forty days was a kind of necromancy?

I'm not sure what your point is.

The point is, you need to have a Church which was infallible, at least during the Apostolic era. Otherwise no even individual Church could have infallibly known that such an such a book written in it was the inerrant word of God.

Oh, I'm sure he figured out that he was wrong.

Good. Meaning, he was not an exception from the collective and habitual infallibility of the Church. And you need that too, you can't have him remaining wrong while writing the 2 Epistles.

Lacking infallibility does not mean that they don't know anything.

You could historically argue they historically knew which books had been written by whom.

But there is some historical evidence St Paul received an Epistle of Corinthians to St Paul and wrote them a III Corinthians, which is not canon.

This means, apostolic authorship, even if historically guaranteed, does not mean a book is canonically the word of God. So, for a certainty going beyond historic authorship about human author and involving certainty it is really also the Word of God, you need the Church to be infallible.

Which is why we do not dogmatically idolize the Bible. We believe in the ability of the early church to know who wrote which books. Infallibility has little to do with that.

As said, doesn't solve the problem.

You can have a certainty St Peter wrote a hand book in how to construct sudokus, or a kosher cook book - in that case the book, even if of undoubted apostolic authorship would most certainly NOT be the canonic word of God, since human art is sufficient to know how to construct sudkous or how to cook.

Ergo, in order to affirm a book is indeed the word of God, we need beyond historic certainty the certainty which implies doctrinal infallibility.

Because the embellished stories attributed to her after the second century have no basis in Apostolic teachings.

I don't know where you get your exclusive list of "apostolic teachings" from.

From the Bible? Invalid, since Bible says itself it is not exhaustive.

From the Church before 200? Well, you also get the books of NT, individually, from that Church, but through the Church AFTER 200 collecting the canonic ones.

This means, you are poisoning your own well.

Sorry, but no. The Bishop of Rome was not "the Pope" at the time Clement wrote. He held no more authority than the Bishop of Corinth. That he wrote to another bishop for guidance shows they were working together.

A "working together" often involves someone having some kind of superiority over one or several others.

I never claimed he was.

Then it is at least not from your bishop's infallibility that you impugn the decision of the bishop of Fatima.

Sorry, but that simply does not follow. Fallible is fallible.

Even within fallible, there are degrees.

There is such a thing as "the grace of the office".

A bishop is likely to give better advice or even strictly obliging rulings over his own flock than over someone else's.

That is one reason why it is remarcable on your theory of no early papacy that the bishop of Corinth asked Pope St Clement.

You? No. The Bishop of Fatima? Absolutely!

No, he was not starting a thing, he responded to sth which God had started after ruling out the possibility it could be the devil, and using criteria from a tradition which he did NOT start.

What is "sth"?

We are continuing something and so you also are continuing something.

And there is simply no evidence that it was there prior to the late 200's

Except for our claim.

A claim made historically credible by continuity of tradition.

Cryptic messages don't cut it. The reformation was not a "new thing". It was a demand to reject the additional pieces of Roman invention.

According to their claim NOT to have found the original Church in the one they were baptised in.

Also disagreeing within themselves what were additions and what wasn't.

No it isn't.

Briefly:
1) Our Lord promises to be with His Church, with its rulers of His choice, the eleven, to the end of days;
2) an addition which compromises His teaching cannot therefore remain unchallenged in it even for a day, unless unchallenged only because not noted by anyone except the one adding it in his own head only, in other words, an addition which compromises the teaching of Christ cannot gain upper hand in His Church;
3) but the Reformers claimed that additions:
a) had been made;
b) were compromising the Christian faith;
c) were being challenged by themselves after so many centuries of noone seeing anything wrong with them;
d) and were admittedly not themselves bishops.

Totally, as said, at variance with the clear teaching of Matthew 28:20.

No. Yours that dead human saints visit the living.

Samuel did.

But that has nothing to do with Mary supposedly appearing in the sky demanding Russia be "consecrated" to Mary's "immaculate heart".

Except that this is a vision.

Communing with the dead. Mary is dead. Direct two-way communications with her.

1) Not dead.
2) Even if dead, not summoned.

No one is widening anything. It's only slightly different from Saul communing with Samuel.

Saul communing with Samuel when he actually came himself was not sinful. The sinful thing was his seeking such contact by going to a witch, who would normally have summoned a demon pretending to be Samuel - sth God would not suffer the honour of His own prophet to be sullied by.

That's one definition, but it has been used in broader circumstances.

When used so as to reject either saints appearing to people or people praying to saints (not your version, but other Protestants say that too), these broader circumstances come neither from the Bible nor from the definitions of the Church.

And God had explicitly forbade it.

No, it was not spirits appearing which God forbade. It was trying to summon them which He forbade.

It's evil. You admitted it yourself.

I did not. You twist one half of what I said into a denial of the other part.

Enjoy, you seem to need it.

To the Lord Himself!! Not to us. Did Moses or Elijah utter a word to the Apostles that were there? No. For a reason!

To the Lord and to Apostles.

Plus, Our Lord followed ALL of the law and He was in the human flesh, so, if it had been forbidden to, for instance, the children at Fatima, it would have been forbidden to Him and He would have been sinning.

Again, not biblical, but a nice bedtime story to make the faithful feel good.

I am not sure you noticed, but neither Fatima nor St Joan of Arc happened in Biblical times, so, if you noticed, is everything which happened later "a nice bedtime story"?

Especially considering the English Inquisition burnt her on the stake for it?

Enjoy, you seem to need it.

Guilt by association. Fallacies never get old, do they?

OK, you tried guilt by association just before or you didn't?

If YOU can say what YOU think constitutes listening to seducing spirits, then I can say what I consider so. Such are the rules of debate. And if you think you are trying to be my pastor, think again. I submitted to Pope Michael shortly after rejecting (very vehemently) Bergoglio.

[Bill the Cat]

Did you check my answers to that tract?

Yes. It was all post-apostolic apocrypha.

Mariology is indeed very Biblical.

No, it really isn't. Not to the extent the Roman church takes it.

From the name of Eve, over Genesis 3:15,

I understand this one. It's vague and metaphoric, and breaks down if we examine it too close, which is the purpose of midrashic analogies.

by the Fleece of Gideon and the Arc of the Covenant and the Love interest of King Solomon ...

Same with above. Vague generalities drawing extremely loose parallels to Old Testament stories. Midrashic. That's not even close to what I am talking about though.

[hansgeorg]

Yes. It was all post-apostolic apocrypha.

Well, in that case the canon of the NT is all a post-apocalyptic apocryphon.

You said sth about infallibility not being needed, Church would have known anyway who wrote what book, but why not what happened to the Blessed Virgin?

No, it really isn't. Not to the extent the Roman church takes it.

See next one.

I understand this one. It's vague and metaphoric, and breaks down if we examine it too close, which is the purpose of midrashic analogies.

I can do it lots stricter.

1) 5 women in all of the Bible were called "blessed", only 3 of these "blessed among women", with qualifications of limiting nature in the earlier two cases, without such the two times it was said to the Blessed Virgin;
2) Her own words "henceforth all generations shall call me blessed" (how many times a day do you do that?) can be compared to the reasons why Ruth and Abigail were called blessed.
3) The words adressed to Herself of "blessed among women" twice over in OT references refer to military very total victory.

When they were only adressed to Her, she didn't get it.

When they were adressed to Her and to the Fruit of Her womb, she got it.

Why? Well, any Jewish child would have gotten the reference to Genesis 3:15.

But apart from this rather strict demonstration, your general view on exegetics is faulty. It is the view used by Jews in attacking Christian OT exegetics of which Mariology is a very integral part.

Same with above. Vague generalities drawing extremely loose parallels to Old Testament stories. Midrashic. That's not even close to what I am talking about though.

Too bad for you. In that case you will hardly believe Christ when He said Moses and the Prophets were all over the text just talking about Him.

Meaning you are missing the exegesis which He gave His apostles after Resurrection - the one which Catholic Church remains faithful to and which includes, as said, Mariology.

You find prayers to the Blessed Virgin EARLIER than a mention of the NT canon which now all (?) agree on.

If the Church about 200 could have been wrong about what earlier Christians had believed about Her, why could the Church in 394, sorry, 397, in Carthage, not be wrong about which books belonged to the NT?

If you agree that the decision of 397 must have built on earlier still accessible and reliably so knowledge, otherwise the Church after 397 would not have accepted it, why not same thing about an even earlier prayer to Mary from 200?

[Bill the Cat]

And forgot to mention, while at my previous answers which Bill seems not to have read, that the Blessed Virgin is very much not a "dead person".

And here we go with the 200 years late made-up nonsense.

She is either like Enoch a person who was just taken up, or, more likely, as Her Son, a person who died and resurrected and is in Heaven and whose tomb is empty.

Q.E.D.

If I believe the tradition of the Church about the Gospels being written as serious accounts by eyewitnesses or by people having access to them, I'll believe the tradition of the Church on this one too.

That's the problem. The traditions of the church on authorship of the canon is not the same as a tradition that appeared 200 years later out of whole cloth.

What exact demands at Fatima would be "pretty off"?

Claiming the rosary (a 13th century invention) as a mandatory thing, wearing the Brown Scapular as a mandatory thing, the invention of the "Five First Sundays". She promised that Heaven would grant peace to all the world if Her requests for prayer, reparation and consecration were heard and obeyed.


Sorry, but Jesus said there would be war and rumors of war until the end. World peace has never been in God's plan.

Praying the Rosary?

If I were against the Rosary, I would be against Fatima. Can anyone here say sth against the Rosary?

It's unnecessary and extra-biblical. I am not against the rosary if you choose to recite it, but you should always remember Jesus' command to not use a rehearsed prayer. Fatima on the other hand ...

Source: http://www.fatima.org/essentials/facts/story1.asp

In all Her appearances at Fatima, the Blessed Mother repeatedly emphasized the necessity of praying the Rosary daily, of wearing the Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel...

© Copyright Original Source

takes it way too far.

Consecrating Russia to Her Immaculate Heart? Would have been better if it had been done!

How about consecrating them to Christ and not taking the focus off of Him? Devotion to Mary is completely unnecessary any more than devotion to David, Isaac, Jacob, or any other person God used.

Putin lost quite a lot of sympathy when after he had asked "Pope Francis" if he was consecrating Russia, and after the latter had answered "let's not talk about Fatima", Putin just dropped the subject. I consider that on that same day he betrayed Russia.

That has nothing to do with the absurdities this apparition claimed.

[hansgeorg]

That's the problem. The traditions of the church on authorship of the canon is not the same as a tradition that appeared 200 years later out of whole cloth.

You seem to have some cognitive dissonance. Sorry for using this word. But you do.

The traditions of the Church on authorship are attested later than the Mariological ones.

This means you cannot dismiss the Mariological stuff as later invention and claim authorship traditions as pure gold.

Either the Church was capable of transmitting sth from facts to 200 correctly or not. If so, then we accept Mariology. If not, it wasn't able to transmit correctly to 397 either.

Either the Church was capable of transmitting sth from facts to 397 correctly of not. If not, you aren't Christian. If yes, she was also able to transmit facts correctly to 200, and so you accept Mariology too.

Claiming the rosary (a 13th century invention) as a mandatory thing, wearing the Brown Scapular as a mandatory thing, the invention of the "Five First Sundays". She promised that Heaven would grant peace to all the world if Her requests for prayer, reparation and consecration were heard and obeyed.

Neither Rosary nor Brown Scapular are absolutely speaking mandatory, but they are very recommendable, and her requestiing them is no fault. Same as with Five First Saturdays (!).*

Her promise has not proven ineffective, since Her condition has not been fulfilled. The world was not consecrated by the Pope with all the bishops of the world.

Pope Michael tried, but there are very few bishops (if any except himself by now) who accept him.

She said sth about a short period of peace, not sth about a scenario totally other than what Her Son gave to know.

She gave a possibility of avoiding the threatening prophecies, but a possibility which was not taken. That is in fine not contradicting them. And if they had been taken, Christ would have had sth other to say.

It's unnecessary and extra-biblical. I am not against the rosary if you choose to recite it, but you should always remember Jesus' command to not use a rehearsed prayer.

No where said anything against a rehearsed or a repeated prayer.

He said sth about babbling or "many words", that does not mean a few well chosen words repeated over and over again.

If you want to know what He had in mind, there is a Pagan from precisely around that time who ended a Roman History with a Pagan prayer:

CXXXI
Let our book be concluded with a prayer. O Jupiter Capitolinus, O Jupiter Stator! O Mars Gradivus, author of the Roman name! O Vesta, guardian of the eternal fire! O all ye deities who have exalted the present magnitude of the Roman empire to a position of supremacy over the world, guard, preserve, and protect, I entreat and conjure you, in the name of the Commonwealth, our present state, our present peace, [our present prince[104]!] And when he shall have completed a long course on earth, grant him successors to the remotest ages, and such as shall have abilities to support the empire of the world as powerfully as we have seen him support it! All the just designs of our countrymen * * * *

That was chapter CXXXI and last of his second book of Roman History.

It does NOT look like a Rosary. It looks like giving the gods a grand speech.

How about consecrating them to Christ and not taking the focus off of Him? Devotion to Mary is completely unnecessary any more than devotion to David, Isaac, Jacob, or any other person God used.

Was Christ a devout Son to His Mother? If He wasn't when He grew in wisdom, perhaps we needn't either when we grow in wisdom, if we do. But if He was, we need to to.

He was also devout enough to David to use the situation which David described in Psalm 21 (or you might number it 22) as a total summing up of His own situation.

So, no devotion to the Saints is NOT an unnecessary superfluous thing.

Your take is a bit as if you were to use US Constitution without taking any heed of Supreme Court decisions.

The lives of the saints, approved by God through miracles or through inclusion in the Bible, are supreme court cases for Heaven. If we want the law written in the Bible, we want the law lived by the saints as they are individually known. And more than anyone else Our Lady.

That has nothing to do with the absurdities this apparition claimed.

Alas "Pope Francis" seems to agree with you. And as a result, we might rather soon be seeing Putin doing worse and worse until he and Bergoglio go to the lake of fire alive together.

* Those who get saved using the scapular or the rosary or both are obviously helping the other souls who aren't, so they can also get saved.

[hansgeorg]

Re, five first Saturdays.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is honoured more, since the First Fridays are done for nine consecutive months, not just three.

[Bill the Cat]

@ Bill the Cat's words to One Bad Pig:



OK, you say the story - indeed in this case story and not analysis - of Her being received bodily into Heaven is made up.

We have it from Apostolic tradition, universal among the Churches who have Apostolic succession.

https://oniehlibraryofgreekliteratur...-fide-2013.pdf

1) The Blessed Virgin is no more dead than Christ, Her Son.

Fiction. Her body is still dead. Her spirit is no more alive than the other saints.

2) Communing with the dead only qualifies if it is on wayward terms, it does not qualify if on God's exceptional terms.

Circular argument.

A dogma based on tradition and suppported indirectly by typological and other mystical reading of OT is not based on silence.

The doctrine was non-existent until after 400AD

OK, a bit original for a Protestant, but ok ...

I try to be reasonable and understand why my bretheren believe what they do. And in the spirit of disclosure, I was excommunicated from the RCC in the 90s for telling my bishop to stuff it because he was willing to allow my adulterous ex-wife to lie her way back into taking communion and getting remarried in the church by claiming she "didn't understand what she was getting into" when she married me for those 2 1/2 years. So, forgive me if I have a less-than-stellar opinion of modern bishops.

While neither of you has made any attempt to show anything wrong in the demands.

Making the rosary mandatory is wrong.

You are confusing "bishop of a see" or "ordinary bishop", which you get by election (papal or popular or some in between, usages have varied) with "ontologically bishop" which you should be if bishop in a see, and can be in other circulstances too. You become it (if you become it at all) by imposition of hands going back to the eleven first of these, namely the Apostles.

There's no confusion. A bishop is a bishop. There is no distinction. Clement and Ignatius explained what a bishop did.

The Church is His body, ergo it is taken as a whole infallible.

No. That doesn't follow.

1) No. See the rest.
2) Apart from the fact that with your take on what necromancy is, how would you answer Jewry if they claimed that Christ appearing at Resurrection for forty days was a kind of necromancy?

He is alive. He was raised to life forever more. One can not be both dead and alive.

The point is, you need to have a Church which was infallible, at least during the Apostolic era.

No. Just authoritative.

Otherwise no even individual Church could have infallibly known that such an such a book written in it was the inerrant word of God.

The authors of the canon and the contents of their writing were infallible because of the special and unique guidance of the Holy Spirit and their proximity to the Lord Himself and His teachings. It was a special time that has not been repeated. Tertullian stated:

Source: Against Marcion chapter 21

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth respecting the belief of God suffered corruption, but it is equally certain that during the life of the apostles their teaching on this great article did not suffer at all; so that no other teaching will have the right of being received as apostolic than that which is at the present day proclaimed in the churches of apostolic foundation.

© Copyright Original Source

Good. Meaning, he was not an exception from the collective and habitual infallibility of the Church. And you need that too, you can't have him remaining wrong while writing the 2 Epistles.

But you seem to be arguing that all decrees from the Church are infallible solely because they come from the church.

You could historically argue they historically knew which books had been written by whom.

Because of the testimony of their students.

But there is some historical evidence St Paul received an Epistle of Corinthians to St Paul and wrote them a III Corinthians, which is not canon.

Actually, my best friend's dad is an authority on Paul, and it is his professional belief that 2 Cor is actually 2 and 3 Cor.

This means, apostolic authorship, even if historically guaranteed, does not mean a book is canonically the word of God.

No it doesn't. It means it was either lost or combined in another book.

So, for a certainty going beyond historic authorship about human author and involving certainty it is really also the Word of God, you need the Church to be infallible.

No. Just authoritative.

As said, doesn't solve the problem.

Sure it does.

You can have a certainty St Peter wrote a hand book in how to construct sudokus, or a kosher cook book - in that case the book, even if of undoubted apostolic authorship would most certainly NOT be the canonic word of God, since human art is sufficient to know how to construct sudkous or how to cook.

Scripture is for instructing in righteousness, not for cooking.

Ergo, in order to affirm a book is indeed the word of God, we need beyond historic certainty the certainty which implies doctrinal infallibility.

No we don't.

I don't know where you get your exclusive list of "apostolic teachings" from.

New Advent and CCEL typically.

From the Bible? Invalid, since Bible says itself it is not exhaustive.

Then you have no reason to reject the Book of Mormon. When can we expect your baptism?

From the Church before 200? Well, you also get the books of NT, individually, from that Church, but through the Church AFTER 200 collecting the canonic ones.

Exactly. And nothing added after the Apostles all died.

This means, you are poisoning your own well.

family-feud-board-x.jpg

A "working together" often involves someone having some kind of superiority over one or several others.

And in the realm of the Church, at the time of the Apostles, it was the Council of Jerusalem, led by the Bishop of Jerusalem. After the Apostles died, it was each Bishop over each area. None had authority over the others in their territory. Clement and Ignatius wrote of the hierarchy of the church and stopped with "Bishop". No cardinal, and certainly no pope.

Then it is at least not from your bishop's infallibility that you impugn the decision of the bishop of Fatima.

It is from the infallibility of the Apostles and their writings.

Even within fallible, there are degrees.

There is such a thing as "the grace of the office".

No there isn't.

A bishop is likely to give better advice or even strictly obliging rulings over his own flock than over someone else's.

Maybe. Maybe not.

That is one reason why it is remarcable on your theory of no early papacy that the bishop of Corinth asked Pope St Clement.

Why? Clement had no authority over the people of Corinth. But he did have the benefit of being a student of Peter and Paul, and thus more direct knowledge of the teachings of the Apostles on a given subject. Submitting to wisdom is not evidence of any papacy.

No, he was not starting a thing, he responded to sth which God had started after ruling out the possibility it could be the devil, and using criteria from a tradition which he did NOT start.

Source: http://www.fatima.org/essentials/facts/story1.asp

She also asked that the Faithful practice a new devotion of reparation on the first Saturday of five consecutive months ("The Five First Saturdays")

© Copyright Original Source

A new thing. Q.E.D.

Except for our claim.

A claim made historically credible by continuity of tradition.

No it isn't. It was an unknown at the time of Epiphanius, but appeared 100 years later.

According to their claim NOT to have found the original Church in the one they were baptised in.

Also disagreeing within themselves what were additions and what wasn't.

You are ignorant on what Luther proposed...

Briefly:
1) Our Lord promises to be with His Church, with its rulers of His choice, the eleven, to the end of days;

And He was and still is with them.

2) an addition which compromises His teaching cannot therefore remain unchallenged in it even for a day, unless unchallenged only because not noted by anyone except the one adding it in his own head only, in other words, an addition which compromises the teaching of Christ cannot gain upper hand in His Church;

Sure it can. Or are you unaware that the church was decidedly Arian for a brief time?

3) but the Reformers claimed that additions:
a) had been made;
b) were compromising the Christian faith;
c) were being challenged by themselves after so many centuries of noone seeing anything wrong with them;
d) and were admittedly not themselves bishops.

Then explain an indulgence.

Totally, as said, at variance with the clear teaching of Matthew 28:20.

Wrong. God never promised to keep every leader in His church from error. He showed how to identify it in the Word.

Samuel did.

Against God's command to not speak with the dead.

Except that this is a vision.

So, it could have actually NOT been Mary, as Jesus isn't really a lamb, right?

1) Not dead.
2) Even if dead, not summoned.

Dead. Like everyone else who lived before, with the exception of Enoch and Elijah (who will have their death in the Great Trib).

Saul communing with Samuel when he actually came himself was not sinful.

Yes it was.

The sinful thing was his seeking such contact by going to a witch, who would normally have summoned a demon pretending to be Samuel - sth God would not suffer the honour of His own prophet to be sullied by.

sorry, but that's pure speculation. From what I read in scripture, the dead were still under the domain of satan before Jesus defeated him, and only appealing to satan could raise someone's spirit from hades.

When used so as to reject either saints appearing to people or people praying to saints (not your version, but other Protestants say that too), these broader circumstances come neither from the Bible nor from the definitions of the Church.



No, it was not spirits appearing which God forbade. It was trying to summon them which He forbade.

And none ever appeared except when summoned by the witch.

I did not. You twist one half of what I said into a denial of the other part.

You are dancing on silence and half-truths.

Enjoy, you seem to need it.



To the Lord and to Apostles.

No. They appeared and spoke to the Lord Himself. They did not utter a word to the Apostles. And only in the presence of the Lord's unveiled glory.

Plus, Our Lord followed ALL of the law and He was in the human flesh, so, if it had been forbidden to, for instance, the children at Fatima, it would have been forbidden to Him and He would have been sinning.

Wrong. The Lord was transfigured into His glory. As such, He was able to speak to Elijah (who was not dead) and Moses (who was no longer dead since his body was taken by an angel)

I am not sure you noticed, but neither Fatima nor St Joan of Arc happened in Biblical times, so, if you noticed, is everything which happened later "a nice bedtime story"?

Then you have no recourse to deny Joseph Smith's vision.

Especially considering the English Inquisition burnt her on the stake for it?

Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered, and later murdered for his vision. You'll have to do better than that.

OK, you tried guilt by association just before or you didn't?

No I didn't. Until this post.

If YOU can say what YOU think constitutes listening to seducing spirits, then I can say what I consider so. Such are the rules of debate. And if you think you are trying to be my pastor, think again. I submitted to Pope Michael shortly after rejecting (very vehemently) Bergoglio.

"pope" Michael is a charlatan. A self-appointed leader no better than Joseph Smith.

[Faber]

OK, you say the story - indeed in this case story and not analysis - of Her being received bodily into Heaven is made up.

We have it from Apostolic tradition, universal among the Churches who have Apostolic succession.

There's a reason they call it the assumption of Mary.

[Bill the Cat]

You seem to have some cognitive dissonance. Sorry for using this word. But you do.

The traditions of the Church on authorship are attested later than the Mariological ones.

No they aren't. The Muratorian fragment predates the Assumption of Mary by 200 years.

This means you cannot dismiss the Mariological stuff as later invention and claim authorship traditions as pure gold.

When there is evidence directly contradicting the existence of a Mariological claim that she never died, yes it can be dismissed. I gave that evidence.

Either the Church was capable of transmitting sth from facts to 200 correctly or not. If so, then we accept Mariology. If not, it wasn't able to transmit correctly to 397 either.

Either the Church was capable of transmitting sth from facts to 397 correctly of not. If not, you aren't Christian. If yes, she was also able to transmit facts correctly to 200, and so you accept Mariology too.

Man, can you fundy any more than you are now?

Neither Rosary nor Brown Scapular are absolutely speaking mandatory, but they are very recommendable, and her requestiing them is no fault. Same as with Five First Saturdays (!).*

I'll cite AGAIN...

Source: http://www.fatima.org/essentials/facts/story1.asp

In all Her appearances at Fatima, the Blessed Mother repeatedly emphasized the necessity of praying the Rosary daily, of wearing the Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel and of performing acts of reparation and sacrifice.

© Copyright Original Source

Her promise has not proven ineffective, since Her condition has not been fulfilled. The world was not consecrated by the Pope with all the bishops of the world.

Her promise contradicts the Lord's statement in Matt 24:6.

Pope Michael tried, but there are very few bishops (if any except himself by now) who accept him.

Which means his self-appointment is illegitimate.

She said sth about a short period of peace, not sth about a scenario totally other than what Her Son gave to know.

No it didn't. All it said was "I shall come to ask for the Consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart...If people attend to My requests, Russia will be converted and the world will have peace."

She gave a possibility of avoiding the threatening prophecies, but a possibility which was not taken. That is in fine not contradicting them. And if they had been taken, Christ would have had sth other to say.

There will not be world peace. The Lord Himself said that. Therefore, what it said was a lie.

No where said anything against a rehearsed or a repeated prayer.

He said sth about babbling or "many words", that does not mean a few well chosen words repeated over and over again.

Droning on and on chanting the same words with no intent other than to drone on was what He was talking about.

If you want to know what He had in mind, there is a Pagan from precisely around that time who ended a Roman History with a Pagan prayer:



That was chapter CXXXI and last of his second book of Roman History.

It does NOT look like a Rosary. It looks like giving the gods a grand speech.

I never said the rosary was bad. In fact, I said the opposite. I said we should take care that our prayers don't end up droning repetitions.

Was Christ a devout Son to His Mother?

Ex. 20:12
"Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

Obedient to the Torah. Not because of Mary's righteousness, but because of His. Has she acted wickedly, then He would still have obeyed her in righteous requests to fulfill the Torah.

If He wasn't when He grew in wisdom, perhaps we needn't either when we grow in wisdom, if we do. But if He was, we need to to.

Yes. We should obey our own parents. But she is HIS mother, not mine. and not yours.

He was also devout enough to David to use the situation which David described in Psalm 21 (or you might number it 22) as a total summing up of His own situation.

He quoted the Psalms. How was that "devout to David"?

So, no devotion to the Saints is NOT an unnecessary superfluous thing.

Yes it is.

Your take is a bit as if you were to use US Constitution without taking any heed of Supreme Court decisions.

And yours is as if the Roman church is the only member of that Supreme Court. It isn't.

The lives of the saints, approved by God through miracles or through inclusion in the Bible, are supreme court cases for Heaven. If we want the law written in the Bible, we want the law lived by the saints as they are individually known.

Many have claimed miracles. Joseph Smith claimed miracles, as did Brigham Young. And BTW, EVERY Christian is a saint.

And more than anyone else Our Lady.

No. She is no better or worse than you or me. She received an immeasurable earthly honor by bearing the Lord, but her status in the Church is not higher than anyone else's. Only the Apostles stand as pillars of heaven. I owe her no more fealty than I owe Polycarp

Alas "Pope Francis" seems to agree with you. And as a result, we might rather soon be seeing Putin doing worse and worse until he and Bergoglio go to the lake of fire alive together.

Francis' ordination was far more legitimate than the self-appointed charlatan you follow.

* Those who get saved using the scapular or the rosary or both are obviously helping the other souls who aren't, so they can also get saved.

Salvation is by the name of Jesus alone.

[hansgeorg]

https://oniehlibraryofgreekliteratur...-fide-2013.pdf

Epiphanius of Salamis was certainly less sure than you that "her body is still dead".

In other words, clearly or less clearly, his words reflect the tradition on her Dormition and Assumption or Assumption even without previous Dormition.

Fiction. Her body is still dead. Her spirit is no more alive than the other saints.

You don't have the support of St Epiphanius, as I just read.

Circular argument.

No, merely a clarification that you are giving a false definition which I don't subscribe to.

The doctrine was non-existent until after 400AD

Not what the words of St Epiphanius suggest to me at least ...

I try to be reasonable and understand why my bretheren believe what they do. And in the spirit of disclosure, I was excommunicated from the RCC in the 90s for telling my bishop to stuff it because he was willing to allow my adulterous ex-wife to lie her way back into taking communion and getting remarried in the church by claiming she "didn't understand what she was getting into" when she married me for those 2 1/2 years. So, forgive me if I have a less-than-stellar opinion of modern bishops.

Oh, that was not a Portuguese bishop of 1930, that was a bishop of the Vatican II Sect.

Making the rosary mandatory is wrong.

She has not made it exactly mandatory, she has made it known as a good and sure way of salvation, which it is.

There's no confusion. A bishop is a bishop. There is no distinction. Clement and Ignatius explained what a bishop did.

Yes, but not how one became one. Nor did they state the local bishop they described were the only kind. You are requiring of very short texts an exhaustiveness they cannot have.

The texts were admonishing, presuppoing readers already knew technical details, not catecfetical.

No. That doesn't follow.

Precisely as His mystical body cannot all of it be involved in one crime, so His mystical body cannot all of it be involved in one error.

That remains true also for each period of it.

He is alive. He was raised to life forever more. One can not be both dead and alive.

Same being true of the Blessed Virgin - unless one shall with St Epiphanius doubt she even died.

But if YOU say that she was dead, why should the Jew not say Jesus is dead?

And if the Jew is wrong, why shouldn't you be wrong?

No. Just authoritative. The authors of the canon and the contents of their writing were infallible because of the special and unique guidance of the Holy Spirit and their proximity to the Lord Himself and His teachings. It was a special time that has not been repeated. Tertullian stated:

Source: Against Marcion chapter 21

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth respecting the belief of God suffered corruption, but it is equally certain that during the life of the apostles their teaching on this great article did not suffer at all; so that no other teaching will have the right of being received as apostolic than that which is at the present day proclaimed in the churches of apostolic foundation.

© Copyright Original Source

For the Church to have infallible knowledge the NT texts are infallible word of God, we need to have not just authors infallible, but also Church knowing infallibly the authors were using their infallibility.

So, if St Peter had written a letter while he was reprehensible, as St Paul said, would that letter have been infallible, I think not. He was not using the guidance he had.

Furthermore, Tertullian is not a Church Father, but an author. Each word is not to be taken as gold, since he died outside the Church.

What he is saying is ALSO not an argument for Bible only, but for - he says so very dirfectly - tradition of certain Churches which were founded by Apostles.

Apostolic see of Rome comes to mind and came to his mind as well as to St Irenee's too.

But you seem to be arguing that all decrees from the Church are infallible solely because they come from the church.

If the decree comes from an authority which is to be respected by the Church, and if that authority intends to bind all of the Church, yes, the decree is infallible.

Because of the testimony of their students.

Which is one historical knowledge of the historical authorship, but not in itself a guarantee of the metahistorical, divine, authorship over and above it.

Actually, my best friend's dad is an authority on Paul, and it is his professional belief that 2 Cor is actually 2 and 3 Cor.

He is not a Catholic saint or bishop or Pope speaking on St Paul ex cathedra.

No it doesn't. It means it was either lost or combined in another book.

According to the "authoritative" opinion of your best friend's dad, who might have seen the implication I gave and tried to come around it.

No. Just authoritative.

Since the Blessed Virgin's tomb being empty is a historical fact, a Church being authoritative is in a sense good enough for that too.

Sure it does.

Not unless it solves the one you try to pose me too.

Scripture is for instructing in righteousness, not for cooking.

So, are you saying the Apostles never ever wrote a line outside instructing for righteousness, or are you saying if they should have written a book on cooking, it would not have been canon?

No we don't.

We do.

New Advent and CCEL typically.

I don't think New Advent is actually providing an exclusive list.

Then you have no reason to reject the Book of Mormon. When can we expect your baptism?

We have an excellent reason in rejecting the book of Mormon, since it presupposes that the Church was gone and then restored.

Exactly. And nothing added after the Apostles all died.


[ATTACH=CONFIG]19994[/ATTACH]

And since Dormition and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin were before that, that was not an addition either.

And in the realm of the Church, at the time of the Apostles, it was the Council of Jerusalem, led by the Bishop of Jerusalem. After the Apostles died, it was each Bishop over each area. None had authority over the others in their territory. Clement and Ignatius wrote of the hierarchy of the church and stopped with "Bishop". No cardinal, and certainly no pope.

And Irenaeus and Tertullian reintroduce the concept of Pope, by means of Apostolic Churches.

Cardinals just means "clergy below the bishop" in Rome, precisely as canons mean "clergy below the bishop" in Carthage or Salzburg or whereever.

And there was clergy below St Peter in Jerusalem.

It is from the infallibility of the Apostles and their writings.

No where either in the Bible nor in the earliest Church traditions do you find that infallibility was that of Apostles only.

Besides, two books were by non-Apostles, namely Sts Luke and Marc.

Possibly a third, namely Hebrews if you consider it as by St Barnabas.

No there isn't.

Yes, there is.

If the post-Vatican II bishop was as bad on your case as you say, this means that, since he did not have the grace of the office, he did not have the office validly either.

Why? Clement had no authority over the people of Corinth. But he did have the benefit of being a student of Peter and Paul, and thus more direct knowledge of the teachings of the Apostles on a given subject. Submitting to wisdom is not evidence of any papacy.

The bishop of Corinth was probably not non-plussed, he probably had the right solution himself (I think so as how I recalled the case, which I read superficilally on years ago), but invoked St Clement because he had, precisely, more authority.

Source: http://www.fatima.org/essentials/facts/story1.asp

She also asked that the Faithful practice a new devotion of reparation on the first Saturday of five consecutive months ("The Five First Saturdays")

© Copyright Original Source

A new thing. Q.E.D.

Even so, the bishop admitted, not started, the new thing. In that case

No it isn't. It was an unknown at the time of Epiphanius, but appeared 100 years later.

Since Epiphanius said he did not know whether she died, it is clear the tradition was NOT unknown to him, but he knew some had a preference of her simply being raised to Heaven like Henoch or Elijah.

Since he was in Salamis, in Greece, where victories were won against the Persians, he was not near the Grave Church of Our Lady which is in Jerusalem or just outside.

You are ignorant on what Luther proposed...

As a former Lutheran, I don't think so.

He did have a subterfuge of a sequence of secret Lutherans isolated from each other, but that subterfuge is hardly very helpful, considering the Church is visible.

And He was and still is with them.

Now you have just contradicted the position you gave about the Blessed Virgin and of the Saints who are departed.

You know how St Jerome spoke about the verse "they follow the lamb whereever he goes"?

Sure it can. Or are you unaware that the church was decidedly Arian for a brief time?

The Church - no. An overwhelming amount of bishops deviating from the faith of their predecessors means an overwhelming amount of bishops have ceased to be part of the Church.

The Church continues infallible in those who remain faithful.

Then explain an indulgence.

Tobit 4:[18] Lay out thy bread, and thy wine upon the burial of a just man, and do not eat and drink thereof with the wicked.

II Maccabees 12: [43] And making a gathering, he sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection, [44] (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead,) [45] And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them.

Wrong. God never promised to keep every leader in His church from error. He showed how to identify it in the Word.

You are strawmanning me.

Matthew 28:20 does not promise to keep EVERY SINGLE Church ruler from error, but to do so with their collectivity, sometimes (as in the Arian crisis) surviving in a minority. He showed precisely the Church leaders how to idnetify error.

Against God's command to not speak with the dead.

God had commended Samuel to appear.

Hearing what Samuel had to say, on behalf of God, was no sin, the sin was already committed in going where he would normally not have met Samuel's soul.

So, it could have actually NOT been Mary, as Jesus isn't really a lamb, right?

A vision of Mary is Her words, Her message.

In the case of a physical vision, one must count on Her being there.

Dead. Like everyone else who lived before, with the exception of Enoch and Elijah (who will have their death in the Great Trib).

Your own source for "novelty" of my tradition, St Epiphanius, did not agree with you.

Yes it was.

No. When Saul said "I am in great distress: for the Philistines fight against me, and God is departed from me, and would not hear me, neither by the hand of prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest shew me what I shall do," he was confessing a sin already committed and perhaps not repented, a sin damning him, but he was not adding to it, since answering what the man of God was asking of him.

Also note that he avoided directly asking the truth of Samuel.

The sin was committed when Samuel was disturbed. Which he was because of a summonning and because God judged the summoning should be punished by the real Samuel.

sorry, but that's pure speculation. From what I read in scripture, the dead were still under the domain of satan before Jesus defeated him, and only appealing to satan could raise someone's spirit from hades.

They were in captivity of Satan, but that does not mean he could bring them forth.

And none ever appeared except when summoned by the witch.

Samuel stands with Moses on Transfiguration, here.

You are dancing on silence and half-truths.

No.

No. They appeared and spoke to the Lord Himself. They did not utter a word to the Apostles. And only in the presence of the Lord's unveiled glory.

Even with His unveiled glory, He was still obliged to the law.

Wrong. The Lord was transfigured into His glory. As such, He was able to speak to Elijah (who was not dead) and Moses (who was no longer dead since his body was taken by an angel)

Moses no longer being dead is speculation.

If true that would add weight to anyone saying the Blessed Virgin can no longer be dead.

Then you have no recourse to deny Joseph Smith's vision.

Excvept that they presuppose an era when Apostolic Church was stone dead and later had to be resurrected.

Joseph Smith was tarred and feathered, and later murdered for his vision. You'll have to do better than that.

My point was that St Joan of Arc is hardly a nice bedtime story.

Neither is Joseph Smith.

No I didn't. Until this post.

All your gliding back and forth around what necromancy means?

"pope" Michael is a charlatan. A self-appointed leader no better than Joseph Smith.

He is not self appointed, but elected.

When the conclave arrived he could be sure to be so, since very few came, but when he convoked, he made a serious effort to invite higher placed Church men to get someone else elected.

[Bill the Cat]

Epiphanius of Salamis was certainly less sure than you that "her body is still dead".

And if there was an existing tradition, he would not have expressed lack of knowledge. But there wasn't one.

In other words, clearly or less clearly, his words reflect the tradition on her Dormition and Assumption or Assumption even without previous Dormition.

No they don't. They reflect a SPECULATION based on silence and an extra-biblical fascination with elevating her past what history and scripture said about her.

You don't have the support of St Epiphanius, as I just read.

It's you who lacks support for the extra-biblical fiction of 400 years later.

No, merely a clarification that you are giving a false definition which I don't subscribe to.

Yes. It is a circular argument. With a healthy dash of special pleading.

Not what the words of St Epiphanius suggest to me at least ...

If you take it for more than one man's speculation based on something he had no clue about...

Oh, that was not a Portuguese bishop of 1930, that was a bishop of the Vatican II Sect.

So? Humans are fallible and make mistakes.

She has not made it exactly mandatory, she has made it known as a good and sure way of salvation, which it is.

Salvation does not come by plastic beads or cloth. It comes by faith.

Yes, but not how one became one. Nor did they state the local bishop they described were the only kind. You are requiring of very short texts an exhaustiveness they cannot have.

Yes, they did.

The texts were admonishing, presuppoing readers already knew technical details, not catecfetical.

Exactly. And there was never any "hierarchy" in the bishops, nor were there "types" of bishops.

Precisely as His mystical body cannot all of it be involved in one crime, so His mystical body cannot all of it be involved in one error.

Correct. When it relates to doctrines especially. And when Rome strayed, the faithful still existed, as you admit below.

That remains true also for each period of it.

And why Luther was necessary.

Same being true of the Blessed Virgin - unless one shall with St Epiphanius doubt she even died.

He did not doubt. He stated he didn't know, and that it was not written about.

But if YOU say that she was dead, why should the Jew not say Jesus is dead?

Because Jesus is God. Mary isn't. That you seem to be elevating her to that level is sickening. You should reconsider your words.

And if the Jew is wrong, why shouldn't you be wrong?

Because it was witnessed by hundreds of people, attested to a mere decade later by eyewitnesses and disciples of eyewitnesses. Mary's supposed dormition was witnessed by a grand total of zero people and not attested to until 400 years later.

For the Church to have infallible knowledge the NT texts are infallible word of God, we need to have not just authors infallible, but also Church knowing infallibly the authors were using their infallibility.

No we don't. Just the church knowing that the actual authors were the Apostles or their students themselves writing to the Church on matters of Christian living.

So, if St Peter had written a letter while he was reprehensible, as St Paul said, would that letter have been infallible, I think not. He was not using the guidance he had.

If Peter had written a letter claiming that Gentiles should have been getting circumcised as an act of salvation, then no, it would not have been infallible because it would have directly contradicted the Lord's words. But he didn't, so speculating is an exercise in futility. Anyone with a browser can see what canonical requirements were for writings.

Furthermore, Tertullian is not a Church Father, but an author. Each word is not to be taken as gold, since he died outside the Church.

When he wrote that part, he was not a heretic.

What he is saying is ALSO not an argument for Bible only, but for - he says so very dirfectly - tradition of certain Churches which were founded by Apostles.

He was talking about why we should trust the writings of the Apostles over those who came later should they contradict.

Apostolic see of Rome comes to mind and came to his mind as well as to St Irenee's too.

No.

If the decree comes from an authority which is to be respected by the Church, and if that authority intends to bind all of the Church, yes, the decree is infallible.

No it isn't. at the very basest level, Pious IX taught that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church while Vatican II said otherwise.

Which is one historical knowledge of the historical authorship, but not in itself a guarantee of the metahistorical, divine, authorship over and above it.

That's exactly what it is!


[quote]
He is not a Catholic saint or bishop or Pope speaking on St Paul ex cathedra.[/qote]

He's a saint just like you and me. All Christians are saints. And he's spent his life dedicated to learning about Paul.

According to the "authoritative" opinion of your best friend's dad, who might have seen the implication I gave and tried to come around it.

You're not that important.

Since the Blessed Virgin's tomb being empty is a historical fact, a Church being authoritative is in a sense good enough for that too.

No it isn't. It was a story from the 4th Century.

So, are you saying the Apostles never ever wrote a line outside instructing for righteousness, or are you saying if they should have written a book on cooking, it would not have been canon?

The latter.

We have an excellent reason in rejecting the book of Mormon, since it presupposes that the Church was gone and then restored.

Based on a vision purported to be from God. And according to them, the Apostle John was still alive in the time of Jo Smith, so the whole church didn't disappear, but was silently underground. Kind of like your claim during the Arian crisis.

And since Dormition and Assumption of the Blessed Virgin were before that, that was not an addition either.

No they weren't before that. They were invented hundreds of years later.

And Irenaeus and Tertullian reintroduce the concept of Pope, by means of Apostolic Churches.

No. Irenaeus lists the succession of Roman bishops because there was disagreement on who was the presiding bishop of the church at Rome. He did not "reintroduce" primacy.

Cardinals just means "clergy below the bishop" in Rome, precisely as canons mean "clergy below the bishop" in Carthage or Salzburg or whereever.

The office did not exist in the earliest church until population centers became too large for a single bishop to address.

And there was clergy below St Peter in Jerusalem.

James the Just was in Jerusalem, not Peter.

No where either in the Bible nor in the earliest Church traditions do you find that infallibility was that of Apostles only.

I know, and they were not infallible, as seen with Peter's error. But what they wrote under the influence of the Holy Spirit is. If you'd like to call into doubt the scriptures as being "God-breathed", then we have a larger problem.

Besides, two books were by non-Apostles, namely Sts Luke and Marc.

As students of the Apostles Peter and Paul. Reporting the facts.

Possibly a third, namely Hebrews if you consider it as by St Barnabas.

Barnabas was called an Apostle too in Acts 14:14

If the post-Vatican II bishop was as bad on your case as you say, this means that, since he did not have the grace of the office, he did not have the office validly either.

The Vatican certified his decree. She is now a fully functioning member of the Catholic faith, married to her lover in the Catholic Church, taking communion, child baptized, etc.

The bishop of Corinth was probably not non-plussed, he probably had the right solution himself (I think so as how I recalled the case, which I read superficilally on years ago), but invoked St Clement because he had, precisely, more authority.

If you are referring to the occasion for the letter to the Corinthians from Clement, there WAS no bishop at that time. The leaders had been deposed by a group of Christians, and Clement wrote to them to tell them that they had behaved badly. In that letter, there is no mention of a bishop at Rome--the letter is sent as from the Church at Rome collectively, and Clement's name does not appear.

Even so, the bishop admitted, not started, the new thing. In that case

The Fatima residents started the new thing. STILL a new thing.

Since Epiphanius said he did not know whether she died, it is clear the tradition was NOT unknown to him,

Saying he didn't know means he really DID know?

but he knew some had a preference of her simply being raised to Heaven like Henoch or Elijah.

No. That is not what he said. He said he didn't know, but if it were true that she died, he SPECULATED that her body would have been treated differently than others.

Since he was in Salamis, in Greece, where victories were won against the Persians, he was not near the Grave Church of Our Lady which is in Jerusalem or just outside.

The "grave church" didn't come into existence until the 12th century.

As a former Lutheran, I don't think so.

He did have a subterfuge of a sequence of secret Lutherans isolated from each other, but that subterfuge is hardly very helpful, considering the Church is visible.

Yet you think the hidden church during the Arian situation was not subterfuge. The victor gets to write history, I guess...

Now you have just contradicted the position you gave about the Blessed Virgin and of the Saints who are departed.

No I haven't. When the Holy Spirit indwells us, He is "with us", but does not keep us from sinning.

You know how St Jerome spoke about the verse "they follow the lamb whereever he goes"?

But were capable of making mistakes.

The Church - no. An overwhelming amount of bishops deviating from the faith of their predecessors means an overwhelming amount of bishops have ceased to be part of the Church.

Victors. History.

The Church continues infallible in those who remain faithful.

Then it is faith that is infallible, not a collection of people.

Tobit 4:[18] Lay out thy bread, and thy wine upon the burial of a just man, and do not eat and drink thereof with the wicked.

That's not an indulgence. That's an admonition to not give to the wicked.

II Maccabees 12: [43] And making a gathering, he sent twelve thousand drachms of silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice to be offered for the sins of the dead, thinking well and religiously concerning the resurrection, [44] (For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should rise again, it would have seemed superfluous and vain to pray for the dead,) [45] And because he considered that they who had fallen asleep with godliness, had great grace laid up for them.

Nor is that. And in my opinion, indulgences make a mockery of the power of the blood of Christ.

You are strawmanning me.

Matthew 28:20 does not promise to keep EVERY SINGLE Church ruler from error, but to do so with their collectivity, sometimes (as in the Arian crisis) surviving in a minority. He showed precisely the Church leaders how to idnetify error.

So, again, it is the truth that is infallible, not any person, or collection of people. As long as we are in the truth, we are infallible because truth is infallible. Right?

God had commended Samuel to appear.

No He didn't. The Lord refused to answer Saul by prophet. Samuel was a prophet, even when dead.

Hearing what Samuel had to say, on behalf of God, was no sin, the sin was already committed in going where he would normally not have met Samuel's soul.

Yes it was a sin.

A vision of Mary is Her words, Her message.

That contradicted Jesus' words. Therefore, not Mary.

In the case of a physical vision, one must count on Her being there.

Impossible. The resurrection has not yet happened.

Your own source for "novelty" of my tradition, St Epiphanius, did not agree with you.

Yes he does. You keep building a strawman of what he claimed.

No. When Saul said "I am in great distress: for the Philistines fight against me, and God is departed from me, and would not hear me, neither by the hand of prophets, nor by dreams: therefore I have called thee, that thou mayest shew me what I shall do," he was confessing a sin already committed and perhaps not repented, a sin damning him, but he was not adding to it, since answering what the man of God was asking of him.

God refused to answer him. He took matters into his own hands and was forcing a dead prophet to answer him. That's a sin.

Also note that he avoided directly asking the truth of Samuel.

He didn't need to.

The sin was committed when Samuel was disturbed. Which he was because of a summonning and because God judged the summoning should be punished by the real Samuel.

Communicating with him when God had refused was sinful.

They were in captivity of Satan, but that does not mean he could bring them forth.

The witch called him forth by the power of the enemy. God does not employ witches.

Samuel stands with Moses on Transfiguration, here.

No he didn't. Elijah did.

Even with His unveiled glory, He was still obliged to the law.

It's not against the law for God to talk to the departed. Or are you saying God breaks the Law?

Moses no longer being dead is speculation.

Perhaps. But it is an option to eliminate the charge of necromancy.

If true that would add weight to anyone saying the Blessed Virgin can no longer be dead.

Not even a little. Once Jesus resurrected and ascended, He said the next time a resurrection unto eternal life happened would signal the end times, and would be ALL dead saints (See Rev 20)

Except that they presuppose an era when Apostolic Church was stone dead and later had to be resurrected.

But there were 4 immortal believers still alive who held the keys to the priesthood. So, no . Not stone dead. Learn a little bit before you challenge me on this one.

My point was that St Joan of Arc is hardly a nice bedtime story.

Her seeing dead saints is. Her getting burned at the stake isn't.

Neither is Joseph Smith.

Mormons tell of Joseph's First Vision to their kids at bedtime all the time. It's a nice bedtime story for them. Doesn't make it true.

All your gliding back and forth around what necromancy means?

I've been consistent.

He is not self appointed, but elected.

He called his own conclave and 5 people attended. Him, his parents, and 2 laypeople with no authority to vote on a Pope. The other 2 have since left him and formed their own sect.

When the conclave arrived he could be sure to be so, since very few came, but when he convoked, he made a serious effort to invite higher placed Church men to get someone else elected.

He called it himself with the intent to be elected.

[hansgeorg]

And if there was an existing tradition, he would not have expressed lack of knowledge. But there wasn't one.

He did not doubt. He stated he didn't know, and that it was not written about.

There can very certainly have been by his time conflicting versions.

No they don't. They reflect a SPECULATION based on silence and an extra-biblical fascination with elevating her past what history and scripture said about her.

You are very eager to overanalyse into details beyond your ken the exact Sitz im Leben of his ignorance.

Conflicting versions can have been there in his time.

Plus you are very eager showing off how you know better than he not to SPECULATE on the Blessed Virgin. How many times a day do YOU praise Her blessed? I do so each time I pray a Hail Mary. As She prophecied all generations of the faithful should be doing.

It's you who lacks support for the extra-biblical fiction of 400 years later.

Except the support of the tradition of the Church.

Yes. It is a circular argument. With a healthy dash of special pleading.

Neither circular nor special pleading, see below.

If you take it for more than one man's speculation based on something he had no clue about...

I take it for his admission he was facing conflicting traditions, one identic to the Dormition-Burial-Resurrection tradition and one identic to Assumption-Without-Dormition Tradition.

Since those are the precise two options we see side by side later.

I was actually unaware of St Epiphanius not subscribing directly to the tradition about Dormition, which made me criticise certain words of Pius XII "privilegius prorsus unicum" ... like a) he's saying She didn't die at all in anyway? But that is against tradition or b) he's saying all other saints have rotted, that is against observation!

Well, if he personally believed and supported in explanations to the dogma he proposed that she never died and was buried, he at least has the support of St Epiphanius, by now.

At least a half ways support.

Thank you for bringing me that.

So? Humans are fallible and make mistakes.

Humans are indeed fallible, but certain kinds and degrees of fallible would not make sense in a bishop of the Catholic Church.

Salvation does not come by plastic beads or cloth. It comes by faith.

And faith is upheld, like all solemn human loyalties, by prayer - the plastic or wood or metal beads are there to count them, so we stop each decade in time - and by symbolic gesture, like that of symbolically putting a light yoke on your shoulders.

Yes, they did.

OK, they actually stated there was nothing like any chorepiscopoe under the local bishop?

They actually stated that Apostles travelling were nothing like bishops in any way shape or form?

I'd like to see the proof text for that one, but I don't think you have it.

Exactly. And there was never any "hierarchy" in the bishops, nor were there "types" of bishops.

Since the texts were admonishing, they are not the kind of texts in which a hierarchy of bishops or different types of bishop would show, even if there. Anyone, even if fully aware that Apostles were the first bishops, even if fully aware that there were chorepiscopoe under the local bishop, would also be aware the text in context referred to the particular type who was then adressed "episcope" and who would now be described as an ordinary.

Dito about bishops higher than the local one, like patriarchs, if any, and like papacy.

Correct. When it relates to doctrines especially. And when Rome strayed, the faithful still existed, as you admit below.

I have not said that the apparent bishops of Rome can never be false ones, nor that the indefectibility of the Church at every moment passes through the indefectibility in a slightly lower degree of the Bishops of Rome. After all, Pope Michael considered he was the first bishop of Rome since 32 years back.

And why Luther was necessary.

But the problem is that Luther did not show himself as a para-Roman traditionalist.

He showed himself as a restorer of what had been lost everywhere.

Because Jesus is God. Mary isn't. That you seem to be elevating her to that level is sickening. You should reconsider your words.

The Jews don't believe He is God either.

I am saying you are buying one half of their necromancy charge, while ignoring the other possible one.

Because it was witnessed by hundreds of people, attested to a mere decade later by eyewitnesses and disciples of eyewitnesses. Mary's supposed dormition was witnessed by a grand total of zero people and not attested to until 400 years later.

"Mary's supposed dormition was witnessed by a grand total of zero people"

12 Apostles are zero people?

"and not attested to until 400 years later."

And not attested in scriptures you know of except one which you take to be a 400 years later forgery.

No we don't. Just the church knowing that the actual authors were the Apostles or their students themselves writing to the Church on matters of Christian living.

If Peter had written a letter claiming that Gentiles should have been getting circumcised as an act of salvation, then no, it would not have been infallible because it would have directly contradicted the Lord's words. But he didn't, so speculating is an exercise in futility. Anyone with a browser can see what canonical requirements were for writings.

What about the Apocalypse of Peter?

Should it be NT canon if it were probable that St Peter had written it?

When he wrote that part, he was not a heretic.

Even so, he was not the most stable Catholic.

He was talking about why we should trust the writings of the Apostles over those who came later should they contradict.

As I saw the Against Marcion quote a little page back, he said nothing about writing, he said sth about Churches:

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth respecting the belief of God suffered corruption, but it is equally certain that during the life of the apostles their teaching on this great article did not suffer at all; so that no other teaching will have the right of being received as apostolic than that which is at the present day proclaimed in the churches of apostolic foundation.

No.

Well, that was precisely what he was saying in quote just above.

No doubt, after the time of the apostles, the truth respecting the belief of God suffered corruption, but it is equally certain that during the life of the apostles their teaching on this great article did not suffer at all; so that no other teaching will have the right of being received as apostolic than that which is at the present day proclaimed in the churches of apostolic foundation.

Restating it, lest you should forget.

No it isn't. at the very basest level, Pious IX taught that there was no salvation outside the Catholic Church while Vatican II said otherwise.

Did I say "Vatican II is a council of the Catholic Church" in this discussion? No.

Did Pius IX make a decree about extra ecclesiam nulla salus absolute? I don't think so.

I think he made one with extra ecclesiam nulla salus, as generally understood.

If you have a daughter of five, baptised, she could still be on her way to heaven, despite not being Catholic.

That's exactly what it is!

No.

The epistle to Philemon could have been not canon. If it was received as canon due to St Paul writing it, and St Paul being an apostle, it was an infallible discernment in the Church, not just in St Paul.

[hansgeorg]

He is not a Catholic saint or bishop or Pope speaking on St Paul ex cathedra.

He's a saint just like you and me. All Christians are saints. And he's spent his life dedicated to learning about Paul.

He is not what I call an authority in the Church. His arguments have no extra weight as coming from him.

You're not that important.

The question wasn't me. The question was "the implication" (in and of itself occurring to him, namely the one which) "I gave".

My own person has nothing to do with it, I very much hope the implications I see are seen by lots of others, and I think this includes both gthose who react bona fide to them and those who try to get around them, as I think is the case with your best friend's dad.

No it isn't. It was a story from the 4th Century.

Or one which you prefer to date to then.

The latter.

Ah, had an Apostle written a book on cooking, it would not have been canon.

That means that there was a discernment on part of the Church whether it was canon or not. Even if only the words of the Apostle (or of Sts Mark and Luke) saying he meant it as word of God and the Church hearing that. Or the Church testing by taking the autograph as a relic and seeing if it would work a miracle.

Based on a vision purported to be from God. And according to them, the Apostle John was still alive in the time of Jo Smith, so the whole church didn't disappear, but was silently underground. Kind of like your claim during the Arian crisis.

There is no reasonable parallel.

St Athanasius' consecrating bishops without the permission of the intruder George of Alexandria (bishops should not be called George, I suppose and George's should not become bishops, especially not Bergoglio!) and at a certain time even despite being excommunicated by Pope Liberius, that is perhaps a thing which required some kind of secrecy, but it is not a lost secret of history.

Luther's claim however does depend on a series of lost secrets of history, which contradicts the Bible verse "a city which is built on a mountain cannot remain hidden".

No they weren't before that. They were invented hundreds of years later.

You have no credible trace of a time at which they could have later been invented.

No. Irenaeus lists the succession of Roman bishops because there was disagreement on who was the presiding bishop of the church at Rome. He did not "reintroduce" primacy.

The word "reintroduce" was chosen tongue in cheek in reference to your view of tradition, in which only the doctrines exist which openly appear.

That there was at the time a disagreement is not what my historian and Catholic friend Yvonne Marie Werner said about them.

https://www.facebook.com/yvonne.m.werner

She read Contra Haereses, all books, a few decades ago, around the time when I converted.

The office did not exist in the earliest church until population centers became too large for a single bishop to address.

That is precisely for Rome at least contradicted by the very catacomb Churches which some of your scholars are abusing to pretend there was no unitary bishop over Rome back then.

James the Just was in Jerusalem, not Peter.

That is two different times. Peter ruled there with the other eleven before James the Just ruled there as bishop.

I know, and they were not infallible, as seen with Peter's error. But what they wrote under the influence of the Holy Spirit is. If you'd like to call into doubt the scriptures as being "God-breathed", then we have a larger problem.

I am not calling into doubt that the Scriptures are breathed by God. I am however stating that to know this, we need more than just Peter to have been infallible as an Apostle, we need to have had a Church which infallibly received 1 and 2 Peter as the word of both Peter and of God.

As students of the Apostles Peter and Paul. Reporting the facts.

And of the Blessed Virgin Mary too.

But reporting facts is an activity which by itself is not always infallible.

For instance, supposing Homer correctly reported the facts about Ulysses' return, he was nevertheless wrong to say it was decided by the gods holding a conference on Olympus.

So, we have an acticity which is not of itself infallible, namely reporting facts, and persons who on your view were not infallible persons.

How is their works then infallibly the word of God? Well, because the Church infallibly accepted it as precisely such.

Barnabas was called an Apostle too in Acts 14:14

That is (or rather the memory of "70 apostles" is) the reason why I used the word "possibly".

The Vatican certified his decree. She is now a fully functioning member of the Catholic faith, married to her lover in the Catholic Church, taking communion, child baptized, etc.

If your side of the story is correct, if there was no reason to consider your marriage as invalid in the first place - a) this means the wife by which you had three pregnancies with cerclage is not your wife, I suppose, and b) that the Vatican which confirmed the decree does not have the grace of office, meaning, whoever was supposed to be "Pope" back then ("JP-II"?) was not Pope.

If you are referring to the occasion for the letter to the Corinthians from Clement, there WAS no bishop at that time. The leaders had been deposed by a group of Christians, and Clement wrote to them to tell them that they had behaved badly. In that letter, there is no mention of a bishop at Rome--the letter is sent as from the Church at Rome collectively, and Clement's name does not appear.

If there was no bishop because the bishop had been sent away, there was a bishop.

If those illegally having chased a bishop away seeked the approbation of St Clement, that shows they were well aware of Roman Primacy.

And if Clement's name does not appear, tradition still has it, it is the letter of St Clement.

The Fatima residents started the new thing. STILL a new thing.

The Blessed Virgin started the new devotion.

A much better one than your devotion to "experts" claiming "we have no such tradition before 400 AD", which is not only new, but heretical.

Saying he didn't know means he really DID know?

A tradition being known to him does not automatically mean he knew that one to be the right one.

And since the alternative he offers by implication is Her not even dying at all, it is clear he had some hunch that she did not just die normally as normal people.

No. That is not what he said. He said he didn't know, but if it were true that she died, he SPECULATED that her body would have been treated differently than others.

Well, that means he had a hunch she did not die normally as normal people.

The "grave church" didn't come into existence until the 12th century.

But it contains a grave.

Are you suggesting the Crusaders forged it during the 12th century, when Dormition tradition was strongest in the East?

I was not a Lutheran for a very long time, but I had to discuss with Lutherans who had been so.

Yet you think the hidden church during the Arian situation was not subterfuge. The victor gets to write history, I guess...

With St Athanasius consecrating bishops without approval from the "Church authorities" approved by the Emperor is a KNOWN fact.

Even if he had sometimes to hide, it is not hidden from us.

Luther's invisible Church is an "invisible Church" in a very much more drastic sense which is simply not comparable. One soul here thinking his deeds did not matter, since salvation is by faith alone, one soul there doubting whether he did the right thing to become a monk, and the chain of them all only being visible to God connecting them to a Church before Him, without them constituting in any way a visible witness (before Luther's time or before Huss' time) against "the corrupt Papist" Church.

The claims of a definite underground Church and Luther's "invisible" Church are very simply NOT comparable.

No I haven't. When the Holy Spirit indwells us, He is "with us", but does not keep us from sinning.

As long as He is well indwelling, He keeps us from sinning mortally. When we sin mortally, we chase Him from our souls. When we sin venially, we are asking Him to loosen the grip - meaning we lose protection needed not to commit mortal sin.

This indwelling in individuals is therefore sometimes only temporary, and some who had the Holy Spirit indwelling are thereafter lost.

The same thing can not hold true on the level of the Church as a collective.

But were capable of making mistakes.

The 144000 in Heaven still capable of making mistakes? You are joking!

The point is, saints in Heaven have a freedom which souls in Sheol did not have.

Victors. History.

Where is your alternative history of the Church you consider the real one?

Then it is faith that is infallible, not a collection of people.

If you define "collection" as collection of those people, yes.

But if you define collection as collection adhering to that faith, no.

It is at each moment a visible collection. At no moment can all of it cease to be the Church, if Matthew 28 holds true.

At no moment can the Church remain only as silent voices of interior doubt against the false visible Church, without even a recent memory of a true visible Church.

If you want to say the Apostles are in Heaven and so Jesus is with them, sorry, He said "all days". Heaven has no succession of days, hence this must refer to the Church on Earth.

That's not an indulgence. That's an admonition to not give to the wicked.

It is an admotion not to give indulgenced alms to wicked whose prayers for your deceased one would not be efficacious.

Nor is that. And in my opinion, indulgences make a mockery of the power of the blood of Christ.

Your opinion is worthless.

Your opinion is against II Maccabees, and against the Church of God.

A sacrifice made for the deceased is an indulgenced act. Back then, a temple sacrifice. Now, Holy Mass.

So, again, it is the truth that is infallible, not any person, or collection of people. As long as we are in the truth, we are infallible because truth is infallible. Right?

The point is, there always IS a collection who remains identic to previous collection by extensive (or at worst sufficient) overlap who remains in the truth as a collection and that visibly on Earth.

Meaning, the individual believer is to accept the explanations and corrections of this collection, because it is infallible and he is not.

No He didn't. The Lord refused to answer Saul by prophet. Samuel was a prophet, even when dead.

The Lord had refused.

Then the Lord sent the soul of Samuel.

Yes it was a sin.

It was no new sin to adress the quoted words, since Samuel had specifically asked.

That contradicted Jesus' words. Therefore, not Mary.

If Jesus says "a" and if Mary says "if b, non-a" and events show "non-b", Mary has not contradicted Her Son.

On the other hand, that She could change His plans, if Her instructions had been heeded, is not impossible, see Cana.

Impossible. The resurrection has not yet happened.

Hers has.

Yes he does. You keep building a strawman of what he claimed.

You say you are sure she died. He said he was not sure whether she died or not.

You are refusing to see evidence that is clearly there.

God refused to answer him. He took matters into his own hands and was forcing a dead prophet to answer him. That's a sin.

He had taken the matter in his own hands by going to the witch. He was not adding another sin by answering Samuel.

He didn't need to.

But if so, he did not directly go against the Deuteronomy passage relevant to necromancy either.

Communicating with him when God had refused was sinful.

God had given the apparition.

The witch called him forth by the power of the enemy. God does not employ witches.

Not so.

The witch would have called forth a demon pretending to be Samuel.

God confounded and punished the witch by bringing forth the real ghost of him.

No he didn't. Elijah did.

I was lacunary, I shall repeat what I said with more explicitation.

[In my account of dead people shown biblically] Samuel [who came himself despite what summoning by the witch would normally bring] stands [as one item] together with Moses [as another item] on Transfiguration.

It's not against the law for God to talk to the departed. Or are you saying God breaks the Law?

He was God and Man. Even with His transfiguration, He remained man and remained bound to the law.

Which means that speaking to Moses appearing - without any summoning - was not an act of necromancy and would not have been sinful in a mere man either, if God had granted the visit of a holy departed one.

Perhaps. But it is an option to eliminate the charge of necromancy.

A charge which you have not credibly supported anyway.

Not even a little. Once Jesus resurrected and ascended, He said the next time a resurrection unto eternal life happened would signal the end times, and would be ALL dead saints (See Rev 20)

1) The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin happened before Christ appeared on Patmos to St John
2) Would you mind quoting the exact words which you take as "ruling out" either the blessed Virgin or St John dying and resurrecting before the general resurrection?
3) and explain how they are not ruling out the resurrection of the two witnesses?

But there were 4 immortal believers still alive who held the keys to the priesthood. So, no . Not stone dead. Learn a little bit before you challenge me on this one.

The Apostolic Church needed to have mortal believers holding the keys to priesthood, not immortal ones.

Her seeing dead saints is. Her getting burned at the stake isn't.

Her seing St Catherine is not a bedtime story.

She was martyred for it.

It should be told to children but earlier in the day so they can ask relevant questions.

You may bring up Mormons in the context, since Joseph Smith was lynched, but he was in a bad matrimonial situation, and not lynched for his visions.

Plus, whether someone becomes a martyr for a true revelation from God or an untrue one from the devil, in either case it is more serious stuff than nice bedtime stories.

Mormons tell of Joseph's First Vision to their kids at bedtime all the time. It's a nice bedtime story for them. Doesn't make it true.

His first vision could have been truly a vision, just not truly from God. As Mohammed's from "Jibreel".

I've been consistent.

I think you should go back a bit and check, for inconsistencies you didn't notice.

He called his own conclave and 5 people attended. Him, his parents, and 2 laypeople with no authority to vote on a Pope. The other 2 have since left him and formed their own sect.

As I heard it, they were six people. Him, his parents, and 3 laypeople.

He called what he considered a licit emergency conclave, and according to his words invited lots of people who didn't come, who didn't bother to answer.

If a sede bishop had come, a sede bishop could have been elected, as happened later in both Argentina and Elx, and the claimant from Elx took over the papal claim in Argentina too.

His name is Alexander - Alejandro Greijo (?) or Alejandro IX. I briefly considered him before submitting to Pope Michael, after definitely rejecting Bergoglio. He is a Feeneyite. On his view, even if your five year old daughter is baptised, she is going to Hell because not Catholic (excuses in advance if I should have mischaracterised their Feeneyite view).

He called it himself with the intent to be elected.

You can contact him on FB and ask if that is the case:

https://www.facebook.com/PopeMichael1

[Bill the Cat]

There can very certainly have been by his time conflicting versions.

Oh, I'm sure there were considering he was a few decades after Chalcedon. But there is no mention at all of the controversy, so claiming that it existed at the time of the Apostles is pure and unadulterated wishful thinking.

You are very eager to overanalyze into details beyond your ken the exact Sitz im Leben of his ignorance.

And you are very eager to believe something that is complete silence.

Conflicting versions can have been there in his time.

Then you should have no trouble proving it. Cite ONE church father before 300 AD that said Mary was assumed into heaven.

Plus you are very eager showing off how you know better than he not to SPECULATE on the Blessed Virgin.

Because I don't worship her as co-mediatrix like you do. I have but ONE mediator, as scripture demands.

How many times a day do YOU praise Her blessed?

Where is it required of me to do so?

I do so each time I pray a Hail Mary.

Good for you.

As She prophecied all generations of the faithful should be doing.

No she didn't. She never said "SHOULD".

Except the support of the tradition of the Church.

After 400 AD. Or perhaps you can come up with some more evidence other than cricket.gif

I take it for his admission he was facing conflicting traditions, one identic to the Dormition-Burial-Resurrection tradition and one identic to Assumption-Without-Dormition Tradition.

Good for you. And your evidence for those can be cited as... what again? Because 1600 years later, a schismatic following a rogue "pope" says so?

Since those are the precise two options we see side by side later.

Again, a manufactured honor for the Lord's mother became a tradition, yet it had absolutely no foundation in the Apostles' teachings, nor their students.

I was actually unaware of St Epiphanius not subscribing directly to the tradition about Dormition, which made me criticise certain words of Pius XII "privilegius prorsus unicum" ... like a) he's saying She didn't die at all in anyway? But that is against tradition or b) he's saying all other saints have rotted, that is against observation!

Well, glad to have educated you partially. Now if you can only take the blinders off of your unhealthy devotion to unscriptural "inerrant traditions", you can see that sometimes, leaders make mistakes, and that's ok.

Well, if he personally believed and supported in explanations to the dogma he proposed that she never died and was buried, he at least has the support of St Epiphanius, by now.

At least a half ways support.

Thank you for bringing me that.

It's good that you seem to realize that there was no set tradition before Epiphanius, 400 years after Christ. Acknowledgment is a positive step to recovery.

And faith is upheld, like all solemn human loyalties, by prayer - the plastic or wood or metal beads are there to count them, so we stop each decade in time - and by symbolic gesture, like that of symbolically putting a light yoke on your shoulders.

Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner. THAT is a prayer the Lord commends. As I said, I have no issue if you want to pray the rosary. Just don't act like it is somehow better than the prayer in Luke 18:13. If you require a symbol to pray, then by all means, use it. But for this apparition to act like it is somehow THE way to pray, and is "necessary" is complete claptrap.

Let me ask you a question... if you were to go a full year just praying Luke 18:13 and not once pray a rosary, would you be sinning?

OK, they actually stated there was nothing like any chorepiscopoe under the local bishop?

They actually stated that Apostles travelling were nothing like bishops in any way shape or form?

I'd like to see the proof text for that one, but I don't think you have it.

Your fundy is showing again...

Since the texts were admonishing, they are not the kind of texts in which a hierarchy of bishops or different types of bishop would show, even if there. Anyone, even if fully aware that Apostles were the first bishops, even if fully aware that there were chorepiscopoe under the local bishop, would also be aware the text in context referred to the particular type who was then adressed "episcope" and who would now be described as an ordinary.

Dito about bishops higher than the local one, like patriarchs, if any, and like papacy.

Oh, but that's right... scholars hold no interest to you except where they confirm your bias...

I have not said that the apparent bishops of Rome can never be false ones, nor that the indefectibility of the Church at every moment passes through the indefectibility in a slightly lower degree of the Bishops of Rome. After all, Pope Michael considered he was the first bishop of Rome since 32 years back.

He's a fruit loop.

But the problem is that Luther did not show himself as a para-Roman traditionalist.

Sure he did. That's why it is called the REFORMATION, not a revolt or a schism. Luther wanted to reform the Roman church back to what it was before it became a political entity.

The Jews don't believe He is God either.

Doesn't make it untrue. And that's not at all accurate. SOME Jews believe.

I am saying you are buying one half of their necromancy charge, while ignoring the other possible one.

No I am not.

"Mary's supposed dormition was witnessed by a grand total of zero people"

12 Apostles are zero people?

That was a rumor that has no evidence of historicity.

"and not attested to until 400 years later."

And not attested in scriptures you know of except one which you take to be a 400 years later forgery.

I don't take it to be 400 years later. Scholarship, Catholic and non-Catholic say Epiphanius was the first to write about the supposed dormition.

What about the Apocalypse of Peter?

Should it be NT canon if it were probable that St Peter had written it?

"IF"... If a frog had wings...

Even so, he was not the most stable Catholic.

Yet you see little problem accepting him where he confirms your own bias...

Did I say "Vatican II is a council of the Catholic Church" in this discussion? No.

It is a council of the Catholic Church. That you and Friar Tuck don't like it is inconsequential.

Did Pius IX make a decree about extra ecclesiam nulla salus absolute? I don't think so.

You have proof it wasn't?

If you have a daughter of five, baptised, she could still be on her way to heaven, despite not being Catholic.

My daughters are 21 and 19 and both are saved children of God. So is my 15 year old son.