[gred]

Many Catholics believe that Mary was born without sin (immaculate conception), never died (assumption into heaven), can advocate to Jesus for believers (intercession) and has been crowned the Queen of Heaven. This goes well beyond "admiring" or "honoring". To complicate matters, many of these dogmas were only formalized by the Catholic church in the past 200 years. Quite a hard sell for the "sola scriptura" contingent.

[dragonwriter]

> To complicate matters, many of these dogmas were only formalized by the Catholic church in the past 200 years. Quite a hard sell for the "sola scriptura" contingent.

There are only four things on that list, and only two of them are dogmas (and there are a whole two more Marian dogmas that aren’t on your list), so I am not sure where the “many of these dogmas” comes from; also, the various Protestant positions on the role of scripture (prima scriptura, sola scriptura, and nuda scriptura, in ascending order of how far they differ from the Catholic [or, for that matter, Eastern Orthodox] position) were themselves formalized not much less recently.

[gred]

It's a little ironic to label a call to "stop adding new things" as a "new thing" itself, no?

[throw0101a]

> Many Catholics believe that Mary was born without sin (immaculate conception), never died (assumption into heaven), can advocate to Jesus for believers (intercession) and has been crowned the Queen of Heaven.

So do the Orthodox churches. And both have roots going back way longer that 'just' two hundred years:

> Mary as Queen of Heaven is praised in the Salve Regina ("Hail Queen"), which is sung in the time from Trinity Sunday until the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent. It is attributed to a German Benedictine monk, Hermann of Reichenau (1013–1054). Traditionally it has been sung in Latin, though many translations exist. In the Middle Ages, Salve Regina offices were held every Saturday.[21]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_Heaven#Salve_Regina

> "Majestic and Heavenly Maid, Lady, Queen, protect and keep me under your wing lest Satan the sower of destruction glory over me, lest my wicked foe be victorious against me." St. Ephrem the Syrian (4th Century)

* http://theorthodoxfaith.com/article/mary-as-the-queen-of-hea...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephrem_the_Syrian

And if we're going to with potentially troublesome dogmas, I would think the Real Presence would be much higher on the list:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_presence_of_Christ_in_the...

[gred]

Thanks for the links.

Regarding "real presence", and speaking only for myself as a Christian who doesn't believe this -- my attitude to this is similar to my attitude to disagreements on creation in 6 days vs 6 eras, disagreements over where the end-of-times millennium will fall in the overall sequence of events of Christ's return, and disagreements on how or whether to celebrate Christmas.

For all of these topics I have a belief, and I'll argue it happily, but I also know that none of these are central to salvation. I'm not so sure about Mariology, which seems to veer dangerously close to idolatry and appears to cloud Jesus' central (and exclusive) role in salvation.