This coming Friday is the Feast of the
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We will celebrate Mass here at 8 a.m.
and again at 6 p.m. I hope that you will be able to join us.
On this day we celebrate the victory of Christ
over death, already complete and total in the case of His Mother, Mary. She was
assumed, body and soul, into heaven, to share fully and completely in her Son’s
victory over death. As the Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus (Nov 1, 1950) that proclaimed this doctrine
stated:
“Therefore, it seems almost impossible to think of her who
conceived Christ, bore Him, nourished Him with her milk, held Him in her arms,
and pressed Him to her breast, as separated from Him after this earthly life in
her body, even though not in soul. Since our Redeemer is the Son of Mary,
surely, as the most perfect observer of divine law, He could not refuse to
honor, in addition to His Eternal Father, His most beloved Mother also. And,
since He could adorn her with so great a gift as to keep her unharmed by the
corruption of the tomb, it must be believed that He actually did this.”
Basically the argument is that since Jesus is
such a good son, and could do this for His Mother, obviously He must have done
so. It is an argument that leads with the heart, not the head.
The best reflection I have ever read on the
Assumption comes not from a theologian but an artist. In Feb. 3, 1951 issue of
the British magazine, The Tablet, the
author Graham Greene asks why the doctrine of the Assumption was declared now,
in 1950, when there were no heresies about Mary to combat. He connects it
instead to the events of WWII, especially the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. He wrote:
“In our day there are no obvious signs of heretical beliefs within
the Church concerning the Assumption of Our Lady and therefore it was believed
by some Catholics that to proclaim the dogma was unnecessary. But Catholics
today cannot remain quite untouched by the general heresy of the time, the
unimportance of the individual. Today the human body is regarded as expendable
material, something to be eliminated wholesale by the atom bomb, a kind of
anonymous carrion. After the First World War crosses marked the places where
the dead lay, Allied and enemy: lights burned continually in the capitals of
Europe over the graves of the unknown warriors. But no crosses today mark the
common graves into which the dead of London and Berlin were shoveled, and
Hiroshima’s memorial is the outline of a body photographed by the heat flash on
asphalt. The definition of the Assumption proclaims again the doctrine of our
Resurrection, the eternal destiny of each human body, and again it is the
history of Mary which maintains the doctrine in its clarity. The Resurrection
of Christ can be regarded as the Resurrection of a God, but the Resurrection of
Mary foreshadows the Resurrection of each one of us.”
So as we celebrate the Assumption of the
Blessed Virgin Mary what we really are celebrating is our faith in the
resurrection of each one of us. Happy Feast Day!
God Bless,
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