ABSTRACT
Only in 1950, after the teaching authority in the Church had long deferred it, and almost a century after the declaration of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, did the Pope, moved by a growing wave of popular petitions,386 feel compelled to declare the Assumption as a revealed truth. A ll the evidence shows that the dogmatization was motivated chiefly by the religious need of the Catholic masses. Behind this stands the archetypal numen of feminine deity,387 who, at the Council of 886 “ In the course of time these requests and petitions, so far from decreasing, grew daily more numerous and more insistent." Munificentissimus Deust p. 5. 387 A Catholic writer says of the Assumption: "N or, would it seem, is the under lying motif itself even peculiarly Christian; rather would it seem to be but one expression of a universal archetypal pattern, which somehow responds to some deep and widespread human need, and which finds other similar expressions in
Ephesus in 431, imperiously announced her claim to the title of "Theotokos" (God-bearer), as distinct from that of a mere "Anthropotokos" (man-bearer) accorded to her by the Nestorian rationalists.
