I must admit, I brought Tobit into the discussion because of some comments I saw on another website, in which someone attempted to make a Catholic priest look like an imbecile for defending Tobit’s statements about almsgiving. But Tobit’s statements, while certainly capable of being misused to promote a sort of works righteousness, can just as easily be understood in keeping with biblical piety.

   "The Church affirms that for believers the sacraments of the New Covenant are necessary for salvation. Sacramental grace is the grace of the Holy Spirit, given by Christ and proper to each sacrament. The Spirit heals and transforms those who receive him by conforming them to the Son of God. The fruit of the sacramental life is that the Spirit of adoption makes the faithful partakers in the divine nature by uniting them in a living union with the only Son, the Savior" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1129).

   "The schools of the Sophists have taught with remarkable agreement that the sacraments of the new law (those now used in the Christian church) justify and confer grace, provided we do not set up a barrier of mortal sin. How deadly and pestilential this notion is cannot be expressed and the more so because for many centuries it has been a current claim in a good part of the world, to the great loss of the church. Of a certainty it is diabolical. For in promising a righteousness apart from faith, it hurls souls headlong to destruction. Secondly, because it draws the cause of righteousness from the sacraments, it binds mens pitiable minds (of themselves more than enough inclined to earth) in this superstition, so that they repose in the appearance of a physical thing rather than in God himself" (Institutes IV:14:14).
   "Now, it is clear how false is the teaching, long propagated by some and still persisted in by others, that through baptism we are released and made exempt from original sin, and from the corruption that descended from Adam into all his posterity; and are restored into that same righteousness and purity of nature which Adam would have obtained if he had remained upright as he was first created. For teachers of this type never understood what original sin, what original righteousness, or what the grace of baptism was" (Institutes IV: 15:10).

   I struggle as a Protestant who longs for catholicity over the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven.

We know that Mary went to heaven, and the date of August 15 for the Assumption of Mary continued to be recognized in the Lutheran and Swiss Reformed churches of the Reformation.

But there is not a complete agreement as to the details. Did she pass through death, and then ascend bodily into heaven? Or did she ascend into heaven without tasting death? Or should we just say that her Blessed soul passed into heaven and was received by Christ, the Saints and the Angels there?

I would tentatively suggest the following:

1. We do not know for a certainty the details of Mary’s entrance into heaven. We do know the fact of it, and it is surely a cause for celebration.

We converts have been made so rich. We have been given wealth beyond our wildest dreams! What words can express the sense of the child who, after passing through a series of orphanages and foster homes, finds himself standing in the doorway of an unfamiliar mansion staring into the loving faces of long-forgotten family members? He is reintroduced to his Father, Almighty God, and to Mary, his mother and queen, who is standing, arms outstretched in welcome, next to his elder brother, King Jesus- in the midst of that glorious company of angelic and saintly siblings who stretch forth from heaven to earth and under the earth. Can you imagine a more royal reunion? Few joys surpass the ones related here by these former theological step-children who have finally come home. [Patrick Madrid (ed), Surprised By Truth (Encinitas: Basilica Press, 1994), p.10)]