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Gary Knight PhD's avatar

The separation of East and West has been a painful scandal felt even by our blessed Mother (who reposed, remember, in Ephesus) and I continue to pray it may be healed by God's miraculous intervention. The situation is not helped by the Wheltons of this world leaving the Catholic church for spurious - and essentially emotional reasons fuelled by other scandals within. It is more troubling still to read of his contrived and mostly old and essentially protestant repudiations of the primacy of Peter or authority of the apostolic see. Thanks for your heroic efforts to tackle his long diatribe: you're doing a better job than I ever mustered when I read Pusey's desideratum contra Newman's treatise on Mary. The aded irony there was that Newman himself thought the declaration of the Immaculate Conception to be inopportune, but never demurred from the authority of the pope and council to make that declaration. Indeed he was fully obedient to it, even if he could never embrace the sort of consecration to Mary that de Montfort composed, given very understandable trouble with the implied theology of spiritual slavery in conflict with lifelong freedom of will. For my part, I am in Newman's camp on the latter score (though I would not have thought the pope, after having declared on papal infallibility, should have delayed any longer to declare this universal belief of the Church in Mary's immaculate conception.) My own approach is to relate myself to Mary as "bondservant" in the same way she regards herself as "willing handmaid" , for clearly she had no concept of a mere will-less slave since God was awaiting her decision and fiat. I still tend to oppose public endorsements of de Montfort's specific wording (though in translation); but even so, if papal authority ever required it (as pope John Paul nearly did with 'Totus Tuus' ) I would not leave the Church because of that.

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