Please people, once again I reiterate , we DO NOT worship the Blessed Virgin but we implore her to intercede on our behalf, nothing more nothing less
I do not attempt to make claims for the whole of the Roman Church, but it is written fact that many well regarded theologians in the Baroque and Post-Tridentine periods of the Roman Church engaged in practices elevating Our Lady to such pedestals.
I think our point is that it's far too easy to go from something relatively benign, to being in enormous guilt and error, in how the Roman system has set things up here... There is worship of something other than God right before our eyes, and many people could be in grave sin without even knowing it, and the Church is feeding people a stone when they ask for bread
Something that has always bothered me is the Roman Catholic approach to apparitions. On the one hand, they teach that no Catholic is required to accept any apparition, as they are private, yet they obviously encourage acceptance of many, for example, the Diving Mercy, Fatima, Lourdes etc. By saying that a person is free to reject any apparition they are behaving in an illogical manner. For example, what would be the grounds for rejecting an apparition? 1. The person made it up; 2. the seer was mentally unstable and imagined it; 3. It was a false apparition, i.e., of the devil. These are the only viable reasons that I can determine for rejecting an apparition. By allowing anyone to reject any apparition, the Church is tacitly admitting that one of these three reasons is a possibility. And if that is the case, shouldn't they err on the side of caution and not promulgate any of them?
I would not say that the Church "admits" that one of these reasons is a possibility. The RCC just wants to decide if an apparition is coming from God or caused by something else. Furthermore, the believe in apparitions is not necessary for salvation. But I agree with you that the approach is a bit strange: If Mary indeed appeared for instance in Fatima, one cannot simply say "I don't care." She would certainly not appear for fun!
And even that way of stating it isn't free from issues, for how can she, even if she's Mary, appear in the sky? She's just a frail woman, no worse or better than any of us, people forget that! When we talk of Mary or prayers to the Saints we so swiftly slide into a discussion where they appear to be Demigods, capable of appearing and disappearing, having their own potency, spirits... it quickly becomes a Pantheon of divine beings, and we lose sight of God, other than maybe the highest of such divine beings, instead of who he really is, the ONLY divine being God is not on a chain of being, from lowest to microbe, to man, to Mary, to Angels, to God. If we think that, it is highly problematic... there is only God, and then there is Creation
Our Blessed Mother is loved by so many, not worshiped, because of her humanity and the fact that she was chosen to gestate and give birth to the Son Of Man. A further example of Gods love for us that He would chose a most humble human being to bring the Christ child onto the world.She was and is the mother of mothers who not only witnessed her baby boy die a most horrible brutal death, but also her God.
I don't see any problem here at all. Of course there is a distinction between God and creation. Apparitions do not contradict that. In fact, we can find apparitions in the Bible. After the ascension of Our Lord two angels appeared (cf. Acts 1:9-11). And two angels visited Lot in Sodom (cf. Gen. 19). I think it was God's will that the angels appeared in these and other situations. God sent them. As far as I understand you, you are worried that it might appear as if angels and saints could appear whenever they want to. They cannot. If they appear, God is using them.
Except no one attributes an independent agency to the angels, whereas they do to Mary... When the angels are said to appear, people bow down to God, but when Mary is said to appear, people bow down to Mary...
Actually Catholics pray to (not worship) their guardian angels. I've talked to many Catholics recently and invoking saints or guardian angels isn't as complicated as people make it sound.
That's the basic point... Roman Catholics can claim that they're not committing idolatry, but when they bow to a statue of Mary, close their eyes fervently, fold their hands, and make prayers to her, who knows what takes place in their hearts? Who knows when (during that prayer) they do, or don't, fall into heresy? Perhaps they fall in and out of heresy, on and off, in the space of a few minutes? It is just not a good/safe place to be in..., and I wouldn't take the standard Roman apologetic at face value
Mary was also an observant Jew who obeyed the Torah which is still in many ways the foundation of Christian morality for which Jesus served as high priest (in his atonement) and by which many will still be judged who do not repent. What is it about Jesus turning away Mary in scripture at the wedding that is so hard for her followers to understand? Mary saw her son resurrected and ascended, and therefore now knowing who he was, she then submitted to the new covenant and obeyed God, not the other way around. Jesus broke the sabbath law to heal a man to fulfill the commandment of his forefathers and God himself which was of a more important matter than what the Pharisees were interested in. Mary never did this. Mary then must be wholly submitted to Jesus and not the other way around. I'm surprised, with all this said, that prosperity theology isn't more prevalent in the Roman Catholic church, since the idea that asking Mary to ask Jesus for what we want guarantees an answer would logically end up that way, but it doesn't happen. Mary still must make a decision based on the Torah and other Judeo-Christian moral decrees. An informed Christian can study these and get an idea of what would be a godly thing to ask for on these terms, which, in the end, means that the kind of results one would get from Mary would be no different than Jesus alone, since she also had to not violate these laws herself in order to answer godly prayers. To say otherwise results in something more akin to Santeria, an occultic religion where they believe they can put spells and curses on people in the name of Jesus and Mary.
I'm fascinated by arguments that say "our prayers to the saints are just like asking a friend to pray for you." If it was, all well and good. I do that to. But I do not bow down reverently to my friends, light candles to them, and make "devotions" to their persons in life and bodies in the afterlife. That sounds like a relevant disanalogy to me. They also talk of dulia hyperdulia, and latria. They honor and venerate the saints, but worship God, they say. But in what way is the different manifest in their practice? Their dulia is indistinguishable from their latria, not to mention their hyperdulia. I do not myself reject the distinction in a certain sense, but I reject that they make the distinction in anything more than in their heads, and not in their hearts and practice.
Dulia and Latria are distinguishable. For example a novena of St Martin , the dulia is the prayer which is recited as for his intercession, the Latria is the Mass where God is worshiped by carrying out a bloodless sacrifice, according to Roman Catholicism