Dogma, Infallibility, and Other Churches

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.