www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life The Christian East & West Catholic 2010 Lay Orthodox Survey on Attitudes Toward Reunion

That's pretty much a crock, you know.

And, if you really knew Catholic Church history, you would recognize that the hierarchy is usually pulled, not pushed, by popular devotions.

The Virgin Mary described her Immaculate Conception to Saint Bridget [d. 1373].

“And it is a truth that I was conceived without original sin, and not in sin; because, as my Son and I never sinned, so no marriage was more holy than that from which I was born.” [14]

Here the Virgin Mary is telling us that she was preserved free from all sin and all tendency to sin. She adds the phrase “and not in sin” because her Immaculate Conception was completely virginal, occurring solely by a miracle of God and within her parents’ complete purity of body, heart, mind, and soul. The Virgin Mary says that she was born from the marriage of her parents, because both Saint Joachim and Saint Ann are her true, biological parents and her immediate ancestors, even though she was conceived solely by a miracle of God.

The Virgin Mary also said to Saint Bridget:

“A golden hour was my conception, for then began the principle of the salvation of all, and darkness hastened to light. God wished to do in His work something singular and hidden from the world, as He did in the dry rod blooming. But know that my conception was not known to all, because God wished that as the natural law and the voluntary election of good and bad preceded the written law, and the written law followed, restraining all inordinate notions, so it pleased God, that His friends should piously doubt of my conception, and that each should show his zeal till the truth became clear in its preordained time.” [15]

This century of Marian devotion has also in a certain way woven close bonds between the See of Peter and the shrine in the Pyrenees, bonds which We are pleased to acknowledge.
The Virgin Mary herself desired this tie. "What the Sovereign Pontiff defined in Rome through his infallible Magisterium, the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, blessed among all women, wanted to confirm by her own words, it seems, when shortly afterward she manifested herself by a famous apparition at the grotto of Massabielle. . ."[5] Certainly the infallible word of the Roman Pontiff, the authoritative interpreter of revealed truth, needed no heavenly confirmation that it might be accepted by the faithful. But with what emotion and gratitude did the Christian people and their pastors receive from the lips of Bernadette this answer which came from heaven: "I am the Immaculate Conception!"
It is therefore not surprising that it should have pleased Our Predecessors to multiply their favors toward this sanctuary.
In 1892 Leo XIII granted the proper Office and Mass of the feast "In apparitione Beatae Mariae Virginis Immaculatae," which his successor was to extend to the Universal Church a short time later.

When it does act on them, it is usually to restrain excesses of enthusiasm among the laity.

See your own statement above regarding the role of Marian visions in Latin theology.

I'm quite aware of that: hence why I find no solace that poll after poll that I see of followers of the Vatican show the majority oppose this "fifth Marian dogma" of "Co-Redemptrix." That history you allude to shows time and again how the teaching condemned as heresy yesterday, through today's popular devotions, becomes tommorrow's dogma.

And then

http://www.newadvent.org/library/docs_pi12lp.htm

All you are doing is proving my thesis that some Orthodox cannot accept the legitimacy of any theological or spiritual expression that is not explicitly Byzantine.

All you are doing is proving my thesis that some Orthodox cannot accept the legitimacy of any theological or spiritual expression that is not explicitly Byzantine.

It doesn't even have to Latin--it could be Syrian, Coptic, Armenian or Assyrian. Whenever it had the chance, the Byzantine Church, aided and abetted by the Byzantine Empire,

did its damnedest to impose theological, spiritual and liturgical uniformity in a manner that would have done Innocent III proud.

Forget comparing the Vatican to the Orthodx East: compare it to Orthodox Rome. What Fatima existed before 1054? Who was the Bernadette of the first millenium in the West? What promises did the cults the like of the Sacred Heart make while the pope of Old Rome were in the Orthodox diptychs of the Catholic Church?

Stuart, you are right about some of us. Does that mean that if some one takes a western position and slaps a Byzantine label on it that we will accept it? I doubt it..

I'm quite aware of that: hence why I find no solace that poll after poll that I see of followers of the Vatican show the majority oppose this "fifth Marian dogma" of "Co-Redemptrix." That history you allude to shows time and again how the teaching condemned as heresy yesterday, through today's popular devotions, becomes tommorrow's dogma.

So far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a Marian dogma, since dogma only pertains to matters affecting theology proper. In that sense, any Marian doctrine that is "dogma" is actually a Christological doctrine expressed through beliefs about Mary. And of those, there is only one dogmatic statement about Mary: that she be known as Theotokos, affirmed by the Council of Ephesus (431).

That is old news, Stuart, and I was talking in the abstract. Blame peter the Great for that one.

I do blame him. Yet his baleful influence lives on, and the reaction in some "traditionalist" Orthodox circles to "modernists" like Meyendorff, Schmemann, Lossky, and more contemporary theologians like John Zizoulis and Olivier Clement indicates that not all Orthodox are actually receptive to a fully Byzantine approach to theology.

Read Meyendorff's Byzantine Theology, Schmemann's Introduction to Liturgical Theology, and Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church, and find out for yourself.