Assumption of the Virgin Mary
“After we have poured forth prayers of supplication again and again to God, and have invoked the light of the Spirit of Truth, for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, we pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”
(Pius XII, Apostolic Constitution defining "ex cathedra" (from the chair of Peter) the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, November 01, 1950)
Poets can have amazing intuition. In the poem entitled “The Psalm with Mary”
Teresa Ferenc sees the mystery of the Assumption of Our Lady:
you evaporated and you are assumed
all for love of him
The perspective of love seems most accurate if one wants to grasp the meaning of the mystery of Mary's Assumption. It all starts with the fact that Christianity - if we take it seriously - is one great thanksgiving for this Gift we have received from the Eternal Father in the person of Jesus Christ.
Let us think: Since the Son of God truly became one of us, Mary is absolutely the only human being of all the generations of mankind, whose life’s calling was motherhood to the Son of God. Many human generations have already passed through our earth. We do not know how many more generations will live on it. They are definitely billions, billions of people. Well, among these many billions of people there was and will not be anyone who would have a vocation as sublime as Mary. Only she was called to be the mother of the Son of God and we rightly call her the Mother of God - because although she gave birth and raised the Son of God in his human nature, maternal service is directed towards the person of a child. The man Jesus Christ is the same divine person of the Son of God through whom the world was created. The one whom Mary gave birth in Bethlehem as one of us, is eternal and Almighty God, the only begotten Son of God. That is why in Mary we honor the Mother of God.
Of course, she gave birth to our Lord in his humanity, but she gave birth to the Son of God - the Son of God and the Son of Mary are the same person. Thousands and millions of people found their Everything in Jesus and were bound with him with the strongest love, but only she was his mother. That is why we love her so dearly and venerate her with such conviction. By assuming humanity, the Son of God willingly accepted our human fate in a world deformed by our sins. However, He Himself was the Perfect and Sinless Man. And he came to us so that all who believe in him and hold on tightly to him might be freed from sin and filled with holiness. Well, the first person whom the Son of God embraced most fully and abundantly with his holiness was Mary. Therefore, he embraced her with his holiness and made her most literally sinless, because she was to become His Mother.
She could not be worthy of it on her own, so He made her worthy of God's motherhood. The fact that God himself prepared Mary for her unique motherhood in human history was expressed by the angel Gabriel in the words: "full of grace, the Lord is with you" (cf. Lk 1:28). For God prepared her to be a mother from the first moment of her conception, just as the sun gives light at dawn even before its sunrise.
Already in the Gospel there is rapture at this unique service that Mary performed for all of us. " Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed!" (cf. Lk 11:27) - a woman from the crowd calls out to Jesus spontaneously. " Behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed" (cf. Lk 1:48), announces the Holy Spirit through Mary's lips to her future glory in the Church. Each generation of Christians contemplated Mary as the Ark of the New Covenant, incomparably more magnificent than the Ark of the Old Testament, in which the tablets of God's commandments were kept. After all, in Mary, the Eternal Father placed the greatest treasure he wanted to give us, his own Son. It was from her body that was taken and in her body the body of the Son of God was formed! So, we cannot blame ourselves for loving her so much.
Not only was the role that Mary fulfilled in oursalvation all unique. Also, the love with which she loved Jesus is incomparable with that of the greatest mystics and saints. Of course, she did not have it of herself, she was blessed with it especially because of her unique calling. "Blessed are you who believed," Elizabeth exclaims. On the other hand, in Cana in Galilee, Mary was also able to convince others to take up her attitude of total abandonment to Jesus: "Do whatever he tells you," (cf. Jn 2: 4) and thus probably hastened the beginning of the messianic hour. Mary was therefore the first person to believe in Jesus and the first apostle to teach others to trust in Jesus. Moreover, anyone who listens attentively to the hymn of the Magnificat that she sings must realize that it is not only Mary's personal thanksgiving; In it, she thanks God for the gift of salvation on behalf of all of us, on behalf of all redeemed humanity.
Only when we remember all this, we can understand a little the truth of her Assumption. Already on this earth she loved God with all her being, with all her soul and with all her body. Already on this earth, this love carried her into an unimaginably proximity to God. And even during her historical life, Mary was the perfect image of the Church, herpersonification. Let us repeat it once more: She did not have all of this, God gave her so much because of her absolutely unique vocation to God’s motherhood.
After her death, Mary, with body and soul, found herself in heaven, because it was unacceptable that the body from which the body of the Son of God was taken, should remain in the tomb and suffer decay. At the same time, she was fully ripe for such a great exaltation, because she had lived through her life without sin and filled with love. In this way, she is a living guarantee that all of us who have hoped in the Cross and Resurrection of Christ will also be saved in our bodies, if only in this hope we will persevere to the end.
Anyone who can admire Mary's faith and love will necessarily want to follow her, imitate her total trust in God and total, unconditional love. After all, it was because Mary was completely filled with love that her body could also enter in heaven. Moreover, Mary's Assumption reminds us of the special dignity of our human body. Mary now, but someday all of us, if we only find ourselves in the group of the saved, we will be saved whole, also in our bodies. "The body, however, is not for immorality, but for the Lord," the Apostle Paul teaches. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? (cf. 1 Cor 6: 13-19).
In a world that is shaped as if God did not exist, the human body is humiliated not only by pornography, drunkenness, drug addiction, or various debauchery. Unfortunately - as evidenced by the ever-rising voices in favor of euthanasia - we see more and more contempt for the human body when it is sick, old or infirm.
Today we very much need a renewal of theMarian devotion. If we revive in ourselves the faith that Mary is already saved completely in her soul and body, perhaps our respect for our own body will be renewed in us, but also for the bodies of our neighbors. After all, our bodies - and not just our souls - are destined for eternal life!
The feast of the Assumption of the Mother of God was established only at the end of the 6th century and quickly, within one generation, it became the most important Marian feast, overshadowing the significance of two other feasts in honor of Mary. This fact has been a fascinating long puzzle for historians of the liturgy. The archaeological excavations carried out in 1972 by B Bagatti in the Gethsemane church in Jerusalem, traditionally considered the burial place of the Mother of Jesus, shed a sensational light on this puzzle.
Well, a small church was built there only at the beginning of the 5th century, replaced by a basilica built at the end of the 6th century by the emperor Maurice. But most importantly: the tomb in this church, carved in the rock, dates from the first century of the Christian era and no traces of human corpses could be found there. How do you explain this amazing fact that in a small cemetery a tomb could stand for generations in which no one was ever buried? As Bagatti shows, this tomb corresponds exactly to the description of the tomb found in the Syrian apocrypha of the 2nd-3rd century, reporting the Assumption of Mary.
Bagatti, carefully using all the references to this topic that have been preserved in ancient sources, proposes the following reconstruction of the events. Probably during Mary's lifetime, some Christian prepared a rock tomb for her. The place was chosen perfectly: it was there, in Gethsemane, that her Son often came with his disciples to pray, and it was there that he sweated blood on the night of his arrest.
After her death, Mary was probably placed in this tomb. Soon after, the tomb became the site of mysterious events, the core of which was the empirical fact that Mary's body was no longer in the tomb. The Christians in Jerusalem must have experienced these events deeply and made the tomb a place of veneration. This would be evidenced by the fact that no one was buried in this grave for generations.
The fact that, despite the cult, no church was built on this tomb and that the oldest Christian writers are silent about it, Bagatti explains very simply: This place (as well as the Cenacle, about which ancient sources are also silent) existed for the first few centuries - probably with some break after 132, i.e. after the uprising of Bar Kochba, but then it was a no-one's place - in the hands of Christians of Jewish origin, who never built churches on graves.
It was at the beginning of the fifth century that this place came under the management of the Church. As a result, not only did the temple was built here quickly, but most of all the interest of the faithful in the mystery of Mary's Assumption grew enormously. The later official establishment of the holiday was, in a way, forced by the social consciousness of that time, and this is probably the solution to the mystery of why this holiday so rapidly acquired such great importance in the Church.
Marian dogma Munificentissimus Deus (The most bountiful God).
Pope Pius XII described the final stage of the road to dogma: “(...) we felt it appropriate to make a direct and official request to all the Venerable Brothers in the bishopric that each of them would be willing to reveal to us in brief words their views. Therefore, on May 1, 1946, we wrote to them the letter "Deiparae Virginis Mariae", which contained the following questions: "Do you, Venerable Brethren, according to your great wisdom and prudence, consider that the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin can be presented and defined as a dogma of faith, and do you wish it with your clergy and people?"
Pius XII repeated the path chosen by Pius IX. Then and now a kind of "correspondence council" was organized. Popes did not want to act as if they stood above the Church and could act independently of it in such important moments. They listened to what the Holy Spirit was saying to the Church and proclaimed what the Church had previously believed. This is a beautiful illustration of how Catholics understand the infallibility of the Church (the infallibility of popes and councils is a special form of Church infallibility). Requests to proclaim this dogma had been flowing into the Vatican. They were sent by ruling states (e.g. the Queen of Spain), 72 cardinals, 27 patriarchs, over 17,000. priests, almost 11 thousand monks, over 50 thousand nuns and 80 thousand lay faithful. 98.2% of Bishop returned positive responses to the pope, only 6 bishops expressed their doctrinal doubts.
Just five years after the end of World War II, on November 1, 1950, when the world experienced total evil, when the frenzy of death and cruelty sowed doubt in man and screamed about the absence of God, Pope Pius XII proclaims ex cathedra the Marian dogma Munificentissimus Deus (The most bountiful God). In an infallible dogmatic definition, he clothed the truth which has been professed and worshiped in the liturgy since antiquity.
No one questioned it in the Church, it was present in the mysteries of the Rosary, in the rapidly developing veneration of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This doctrine was not even a problem in the dialogue with the Orthodox. What was the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary supposed to give to a man suffering from the traumas of the 20th century? What does it mean to us today?
“Taken up into heaven, Mary shows us the way to God, the way to heaven, the way to life. She shows it to her children baptized in Christ and to all people of good will. She opens this way especially to the little ones and to the poor, those who are dear to divine mercy. The Queen of the world reveals to individuals and to nations the power of the love of God whose plan upsets that of the proud, pulls down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble, fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty (cf. Lk 1:51-53).” (Saint John Paul II, Homily, Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sunday, August 15, 1999)
Until Tomorrow
fr. george