Blog-spotting: Fides Quaerens Intellectum by Frank Ramirez

I have to be really honest here: I don't read a lot of blogs. There are though a few that I check in on regularly. Frank Ramirez is one of the bloggers on Fides Quaerens Intellectum. While I might not agree with everything posted on this blog, I always find Frank's content quite interesting. For instance, note the following comment from Frank:

There is no work that I am aware of that deals with the subject of divine revelation understood in the papal church traditionally and contemporarily, let alone specific aspects of it such as the practical out workings of these two understandings of divine revelation.

In my own research it was the dogmatic status of the belief in the Blessed Mother’s bodily assumption that revealed the practical out workings of both views. It was my firm belief as a papal catholic that although this divinely revealed event was not in Scripture, we knew it to have happened by the eyewitness testimony of the apostles, which they then handed down to the subsequent Church. I believed, in other words, that the papal catholic apologetic use of 2 Thess 2:15 applied to the belief of the bodily assumption of the Blessed Mother perfectly.

“So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by our spoken word or by our letter.” (ESV; emphasis mine)

What I discovered was what the papal church discovered from the 19th century into the 20th in her battles with Modernism and Liberalism, namely, that, unlike the Resurrection of Jesus, there is no eyewitness testimony or 1st century literature recording this event. In fact, there is nothing about the end of the Blessed Mother’s life for over 300 years. Operating within Tridentine theology, which again was the view of the papal church from the 16th century well into the 20th century, I logically began to ask the question, “Well, if Scripture and oral Apostolic Tradition (the two sources of divine revelation) do not deliver this belief to the saints, then how do we know this event happened?”

Insightful!