I had another interesting question posed to me:
"...my husband and I
exploring Catholicism. My husband and I
have been doing much reading and research into the Catholic Church. My
husband was raised catholic and so he has a love for the Catholic
Church but wandered away in his youth. I was raised non denominational but I have attended mass and I
do enjoy it. My husband is like 98% sure he wants to join the Catholic
faith. I have some hang up though. I’ve looked through the dogmas and, I
can accept most of them, however I am getting hung up on the last two
Marian dogmas. Her assumption and her being sinless. I am under the
impression that if I become catholic and do not believe in these things I
will be guilty of sin. We are looking into starting classes this fall
and my husband thinks all my questions will be answered then. In the
meantime I would like some insight on these two things from converts.
Just accepting them is not enough for me. How did you come to believe
these things?"
The
best advice I can give you is in two parts. Firstly, to your question,
you do need to eventually be on board on some level with the Dogmas of
the Church. Unlike matters of prudential judgment in implementing Church
doctrine where there is a spectrum of respectable disagreement, dogmas
are not optional. You really need to be okay with the dogmas for several
reasons.
Firstly,
there is the Truth itself that is found in the Dogma. There is a long
and extensive theological pedigree to the discernment the Church put in
for years, centuries even, to pronounce a dogma. Pronouncements of a
dogmatic nature are truly essential and central to the Catholic faith.
These are basically the highest form of Truth that the Church can
proclaim outside the Bible and things like the Nicene Creed, which is a
collection of proclaimed dogmas about the Trinity.
So,
the Marian dogmas are as central to the Catholic faith as the lines of
the Nicene Creed in a sense. Just as you can't pick and choose what
lines of the Creed you accept or don't accept. You are obliged to accept
it all as received Truth and do your best to accept it. If you can't in
conscience do that, you really need to rethink whether you want to be
Catholic.
Now,
having said that, do you have to fully understand all the nuances and
meanings of these dogmas? Truthfully, no one can. We are talking about
infinite mysteries here. We can believe in the Trinity as it is
discussed in the Nicene Creed, but do we ever fully understand the
entirety of the Trinity? No, of course not. To do so, would be to
understand the entire mind, machinations, and essence of God, which is
not possible for our little brains.
Applying
that logic to Marian doctrines is basically the same. How God chose to
work in and through Mary is something of a mystery. We believe these
Marian dogmas are true. We can understand parts of it, but will we ever
truly understand the full gravity and mystery of Mary and her
relationship to the Son, as the theotokos (the God bearer)...probably
not. Perhaps we may get much closer to understanding all that one day
when we are up in heaven at the end of linear time, and God can explain
it all in ways we can understand, perhaps. Mary in herself is not
infinite, unlike the Trinity. We will never understand the Trinity as it
is an infinite mystery.
So,
what does that mean in your case? You do need to get to the point of
accepting the Marian dogmas as dogmatic Truth, just as we try and
understand and get our minds around the lines of the Nicene Creed. Will
you are I ever have the complete understanding of these doctrines? No.
And that's okay.
I
know that my parents love me. I can't begin to explain how or why. I
often don't understand my parents to this day, but I know that to be the
truth. In the same way, you do have to understand and believe that the
dogmas are Truth. You don't have to fully understand them or how they
work. You may not be able to enunciate the how's or the why's, but you
have to know that they are the Truth as proclaimed by the Church.
All
this comes with time and prayer and discernment, and a great amount of
humility. I think one of the dark sides of both Protestantism and to an
extent Medieval Catholic scholasticism is that we very much want to
understand everything about God. This is why theology is called the
mother of all sciences. But at the end of the day, God cannot be fit
into a linear equation. God will never factor out to a 1=1 equation by
human mathematics.
In
the end, I think CS Lewis said it best in the original Narnia book:
"One day you'll see Him and another you won't. He doesn't like being
tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite
all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild,
you know. After all...He's not like a tame lion."
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