A friend sent me this quote, he said I asked him about it two years ago. I don't remember asking, but I'm grateful he sent it.
"Henceforward the Immaculate Conception became an apple of discord between rival schools of Thomists and Scotists, and the rival orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans. They charged each other with heresy, and even with mortal sin for holding the one view or the other. Visions, marvelous fictions, weeping pictures of Mary, and letters from heaven were called in to help the argument for or against a fact which no human being, not even Mary herself, can know without a divine revelation. Four Dominicans, who were discovered in a pious fraud against the Franciscan doctrine, were burned, by order of a papal court, in Berne, on the eve of the Reformation. The Swedish prophetess, St. Birgitte, was assured in a vision by the Mother of God that she was conceived without sin; while St. Catharine of Siena prophesied for the Dominicans that Mary was sanctified in the third hour after her conception. So near came the contending parties that the difference, though very important as a question of principle, was practically narrowed down to a question of a few hours. The Franciscan view gradually gained ground. The University of Paris, the Spanish nation, and the Council of Basle (1439) favored it. Pope Sixtus IV., himself a Franciscan, gave his sanction and blessing to the festival of the Immaculate Conception, but threatened with excommunication all those of both parties who branded the one or the other doctrine as a heresy and mortal sin, since the Roman Church had not yet decided the question (1476 and 1483)." [Source]
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Yes, and other gems from this source that show the connections between the heresies that went into Arabia, Muhammad's appropriation of them; and the heresies in the RCC and the rise of Islam.
Excellent source material! Thanks for this, James.
This adds more evidence to my posts on Islam and church history.
"The first traces of the Romish Mariolatry and Mariology are found in the apocryphal Gospels of Gnostic and Ebionitic origin.
In marked contrast with the canonical Gospels, they decorate the life of Mary with marvelous fables, most of which have passed into the Roman Church, and some also into the Mohammedan Koran and its commentaries."
"It must be remembered that Mohammed derived his defective knowledge of Christianity from Gnostic and other heretical sources. Gibbon and Stanley trace the Immaculate Conception directly to the Koran, III. pp. 31, 37 (Rodwell's translation, p. 499), where it is said of Mary: 'Remember when the angel said: "Mary, verily has God chosen thee, and purified thee, and chosen thee above the women of the world."' [ Qur’an 3:42]
"Mariolatry preceded the Romish Mariology. Each successive step in the excessive veneration (hyperdulia) of the Virgin, and each festival memorializing a certain event in her life, was followed by a progress in the doctrine concerning Mary and her relation to Christ and the believer. "
. . .
"Epiphanius places among his eighty heresies the Mariolatry of the Collyridianæ, a company of women in Arabia, in the last part of the fourth century, who sacrificed to Mary little cakes or loaves of bread (κολλυρίς, hence the name Κολλυριδιανοί), and paid her divine honor with festive rites similar to those connected with the cult of Cybele, the magna mater deûm, in Arabia and Phrygia."
But they did settle it. Protestants never settle anything.
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