Is the Assumption of Mother Mary true?

Answer 1

It depends on who you ask. Protestants would say the doctrine is false, entirely made up by the Roman Catholic Church becasue Catholics worship Mary.

Catholics would say indeed, it is true. Mary was assumed into heaven body and soul. The pope in defining the doctrine did not create the doctrine. The pope in defining the doctrine did not make the doctrine true. Rather the pope defined the doctrine becasue it is true.

Catholics see a threefold reality present and reflected in the women of Revelation 12: Israel, The Church, and Mary. Thus Revelation 12 would be where Catholics see Scripture reflecting the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary, not to mention the Church.

AnswerFor Catholics, the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is true because Pope Pius XII, speaking ex cathedra, defined it in terms generally believed to mean infallibility. Of course, the Assumption of Mary might be true even if the pope did not speak infallibly, but once he did define this as an infallible doctrine a Catholic who disputes the truth of the Assumption of Mary is excluded from the Church and no longer a Catholic.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Munificentissimus Deus : "By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."

Bishop Geoffrey Robinson (Confronting Power and Sex in the Catholic Church) believes that the pope's teaching on this subject was not infallible because a clause in Pastor Aeternalis, which defined papal infallibility in 1870, means that the pope was assuming an infallibility he did not have in this case (chapter 4):

"6. For the Holy Spirit was promised to the successors of Peter not so that they might, by his revelation, make known some new doctrine, but that, by his assistance, they might religiously guard and faithfully expound the revelation or deposit of faith transmitted by the apostles."

As Pope Pius himself stated, he was pronouncing a new doctrine from divine revelation, not expounding a matter transmitted by the apostles. Bishop Geoffrey Robinson does not say the Assumption of Mary is not true, merely that Pope Pius XII did not infallibly define it to be. On this view, for a Catholic it need not be true.