27.

 Is the Latin teaching of the Assumption of the Virgin the same as the Orthodox doctrine of the Dormition of the Virgin?

            The doctrine of the Assumption of the Virgin, which Rome proclaimed to be a dogma in 1950, implies that Mary did not undergo a physical death because of the Immaculate Conception. That is, because Mary was “preserved immaculate from all stain of original sin,” as Rome's pronouncement read, she would not have died like the rest of mankind, but would have been assumed directly into Heaven. This doctrine, like that of the Immaculate Conception, is a product of Rome's incorrect understanding of the ancestral sin, and it is not acceptable to Orthodox theology.

            In the Church's Holy Tradition, it is recorded that prior to her death, the Mother of God prayed to Christ to deliver her from the hands of the malicious demons that meet human souls on the way to Heaven in order to try to seize them and take them away to hell. Christ heard the prayers of His Mother, and in the hour of her death, He came from Heaven with a multitude of angels to receive Mary's soul, which is depicted as an infant in His hands in icons of the Dormition of the Mother of God. Moreover, all of the Apostles (save Thomas) gathered in Jerusalem when Mary died, and they buried her most pure body with sacred hymns. Ignoring these facts, the Roman Catholic Church once again severed itself from the Sacred Apostolic Tradition to which it itself adhered prior to its departure from the Church in 1054.

            Orthodoxy believes that all mankind, Mary included, automatically inherit the mortality of Adam, although not Adam's guilt: men are guilty only insofar as they choose to imitate Adam. While Mary is without personal sin (since she did not imitate Adam's disobedience), she is still a member of the human race and did undergo a physical death like all of Adam's descendants. And like all of mankind, she needed to be saved by Christ.

            The Orthodox celebration of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos is a guarantee that Mary's salvation after bodily death is the destiny of all people who follow her example of cooperation with the will of God, and of all who follow her example of love, obedience and humility. It is a sign that all God's faithful people, after Mary's example, will become temples of the living God and that they will share in God's Kingdom.

            In addition to the Roman Catholic Church's dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin, there also developed a cult of the Immaculate Heart of the Most Holy Virgin, which has been universally disseminated, along with Rome's cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky explains that applicable to the second cult is a decree of the Fifth Ecumenical Council (the Ninth Canon against Heretics), which states:

If anyone shall take the expression, Christ ought to be worshiped in His two natures, in the sense that he wishes to introduce thus two adorations, the one in special relation to God the Word and the other as pertaining to the Man... and does not venerate, by one adoration, God the Word made man, together with His flesh, as the Holy Church has taught from the beginning, let him be anathema [Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, pp. 186-87].

Fr. Michael states that although this decree touches only upon the separate worship of Christ's Divinity and His Humanity, it still indirectly shows that in general the veneration and worship of the Savior should be directed to Him as a whole, and not to parts of His Being. He also states that even if heart is taken to mean Christ's love itself, still, neither in the Old Testament nor in the New was there ever a custom to worship separately God's love, His wisdom, His creative or providential power, or His sanctity. Fr. Michael adds that:

All the more must one say this concerning the parts of [Christ's] bodily nature. There is something unnatural in the separation of the heart from the general bodily nature of the Lord for the purpose of prayer, contrition and worship before Him. Even in the ordinary relationships of life, no matter how much a man might be attached to another — for example, a mother to a child — he would never refer to his attachment to the heart of the beloved person, but will refer it to the given person as a whole [Ibid].

With regard to the Latin Church's cult of the Immaculate Heart of the Most Holy Virgin, Fr. Michael remarks that one can say the same thing that was said about the veneration of the heart of Jesus. As another writer expounds further on the matter, the veneration of the heart of Christ and the Mother of God is just as inappropriate as the veneration of their lungs or pancreas — something that goes against piety and would be unthinkable.