Glory to Jesus Christ. I'm Mother Natalia, a Byzantine Catholic nun from Christ to the Bridegir

Monastery and this is Pines with Aquinas. A couple days ago, those of us Byzantine's who are on the new calendar celebrated the leave taking of the

dormition of the Theotocos. So I'm a little late in the game in recording this

particular episode but I wanted to share a couple of thoughts reflections that I had about the feast.

So on August 15th again in the new calendar we celebrate the dormition of the Theotocos, the falling asleep of the godbearer.

And this is the same feast, the same day as in the West it celebrated the assumption of Mary. So the reason we call it

the Dormition, the falling asleep of the mother of God, is that the belief in the East is that

Mary died before being assumed bodily into heaven. So we maintain the same belief the dogma that Mary was bodily assumed into heaven.

We just believe that she died before that happened.

And I know that, so in the West you can believe you can stay true to the

to the dogma of the assumption and to believe either that Mary died or that she didn't.

So both of these are perfectly acceptable to believe within the Catholic tradition.

I do know that at some point the more commonly held the belief even in the West was that Mary died.

And I don't know historically someone, y'all can look this up and someone who actually

knows anything about history church history could explain this to you I don't know at what

point it started developing the thought that she didn't die, but I do know that if you go to the

Holy Land, as our community did a few years ago, if you go to the Holy Land, there is a site that's

referenced that's venerated by the Orthodox as the site of the Tomb of the Mother of

God. And then there's a site that's venerated by the

Roman Catholics as being the tomb of the mother of God. Because so much division in the Holy Land it's really painful.

Anyways, but the point is if the Roman Catholics have a sight of

veneration of the tomb of the mother of God, then it's very clear that at some point it was the

...