The Immaculate Conception and bodily Assumption of Mary

Roman Catholics affirm two dogmas about Mary. The Immaculate Conception, defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854, holds that Mary was preserved free from original sin from the first moment of her conception, by the grace of God in view of the merits of Christ. The Assumption, defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950, holds that at the end of her earthly life Mary was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory. Both express the Catholic conviction that the mother of Christ was uniquely graced and is the foremost of the redeemed.

Pius IX proclaimed the Immaculate Conception in the bull Ineffabilis Deus (1854), and Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption in Munificentissimus Deus (1950); neither doctrine rests on an explicit biblical statement, and both are argued instead from centuries of patristic reflection on texts such as the angel's greeting to Mary as "full of grace" (Luke 1:28) and from a long liturgical tradition of feasts, the Dormition or Assumption feast attested in the Eastern church from at least the sixth century and the Immaculate Conception feast observed in the West from the Middle Ages before its doctrinal definition. Pius XII's definition followed a formal worldwide consultation of the Catholic episcopate, initiated by the 1946 encyclical Deiparae Virginis Mariae, which found near-unanimous support among bishops for proceeding to a dogmatic definition.

These two definitions are the exercises of papal authority most often cited in connection with papal infallibility, the Assumption being the one statement since 1870 universally agreed to meet its conditions. The Eastern Orthodox venerate Mary highly and keep the feast of her Dormition ("falling asleep") but do not define the Immaculate Conception, holding a different understanding of original sin; most Protestants reject both as lacking scriptural warrant. The affirmation thus marks a distinctively Roman Catholic development of Marian devotion and doctrine.

Eastern Orthodoxy's objection is not merely that the Immaculate Conception lacks conciliar warrant but that it answers a question posed by a Western, Augustinian doctrine of original sin as inherited guilt that Orthodox theology does not share; Orthodox teaching speaks instead of ancestral sin, an inherited mortality and tendency to sin rather than personal guilt transmitted from Adam, so that the Western dogma addresses a problem the Eastern tradition frames differently rather than one it simply leaves unanswered.

Anglican and Lutheran churches have at times shown sympathy toward the Assumption as pious devotion while declining to bind consciences to either doctrine, whereas Reformed and evangelical Protestants generally reject both as unwarranted by scripture and as instances of a Marian devotion they judge to have grown beyond what the New Testament supports.