I love Fr. Dietzen's syndicated weekly column. He's so dang sensible. I just wish his columns were online somewhere. And my scanner isn't connected right now, so here goes typing:

Looking for references to Mary's Assumption in the Bible

Q. Where in the Bible does it state that the Blessed Virgin Mary was taken to heaven? Or that St. John was with her until she died? Where does it say Mary was glorified in heaven? I can't find any of this in the Bible. A Christian friend brought this to my attention and said everything we believe should be in Scripture. (New York)

A. Catholics and most other Christians often find themselves unnecessarily confused and embarrassed when someone aggressively confronts them with this question, Where do you find this or that belief in the Scriptures?

They panic and run to their priest or write to me and say, "We must be wrong because I can't find this anywhere in the Bible." The truth is that we, and all Christians, hold as sacred many significant truths that are not, at least explicitly, in the Bible.

Jesus did not write a Bible, nor did he tell his Apostles to write one. He established a community of believers to which he imparted his Holy Spirit. He promised to be with this community, to keep it in the truth, until the end of time (See Matthew 28 and John 15 and 16).

We need to remember that over a period of many years, the Christian Scriptures were produced by the early Christian communities; they are part of Christian tradition, not something outside and separate from that tradition.

Thousands of Christians were born and died before the New Testament was even written. These followers of Jesus received their faith not from a book, but from the company of those who were Christ's disciples before them, the group we now call the Church.

To put it plainly, therefore, we do not believe, and Christians never have believed, that all the doctrines and truths we profess are explicitly in the Bible. We do believe the Bible is the word of God. We believe that the Bible is the norm of our faith, that nothing the Church believes or holds as revealed by God can contradict what is in the Scriptures.

We also believe, however, as the Christian Church has believed from the beginning, that the Holy Spirit guides us above all in and through the community of faith, not exclusively by the Bible which that same community produced in its earliest decades.

Even Christians who say they "accept nothing that isn't in the Bible" must prove the most basic of their beliefs, that the book is the word of God, from something outside that book. It must be authenticated by someone, or some group, that can point to it and say authoritatively: "This is God's word and revelation. Accept it and believe it."

So don't panic when these questions arise. Explain that you are on a different track of faith, the faith of the Church that, by the light of the Holy Spirit, gave us the Bible in the first place and which guides us still in the doctrines we believe.

That said, it is true that the dogmas about Mary's Assumption and glorification in heaven are among those which cannot be found explicitly in the Bible. Many passages in both the Old and New Testaments, however, show that the honors and roles our faith attributes to the mother of Jesus are in accord with how the Gospels tell us the Father's love is played out in the life of Jesus and in our lives. Nothing in these doctrines contradicts or denies what is in the Bible."