Dogma and Fact The statement of the Archbishops of Canterbury
and York on the impending enunciation by the Pope of the dogma of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven was very necessary. It was essential to dispel immediately any suspicion that the Church of England could have a vestige of sympathy with what is little less than a proclamation of the complete divorce of the Christian religion from intellect and reason. For what is to be issued in the year 1950 is a statement of alleged fact about something that happened in the second or third quarter of the first century A.D. But facts must rest on evidence. What is the evidence here ? It is completely non- existent. All that is known about the Mother of our Lord—and it is very little—is derived from the four Gospels and a single reference in Acts. There is not a shadow of a suggestion anywhere that her death (about the time and place of which nothing is known) was in any way different in nature from the death of Mary Magdalene or of the mother of the sons of Zebedee. Yet today, with an almost incredible indifference to historical evidence, belief in the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary is to be prescribed as an essential part of the faith of all Roman Catholics. That, it may be said, after all, concerns only Roman Catholics themselves. It is not so. The common man does not draw distinctions that ought to be drawn. The whole Christian faith is brought into discredit if not derision by such action as this. Jesus said, " Feed my sheep." Is fabricated history to be their sustenance ?
Previous page
