On the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Christians have celebrated today’s great feast almost since the very beginnings of the Church. While Pius XII declared the Dogma of the Assumption only in November 1950, with the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, the custom of celebrating the day and of the belief that at the end of her earthly life, Our Lady was brought body and soul straight to heaven dates to the fifth century, at least— after the Council of Ephesus (431) declares Mary to be Theotokos, literally “God-bearer,” or the one who gave birth to God, hence in the Latin tradition, Mother of God.

The Church affirms the dogma more on the basis of Sacred Tradition, as Sacred Scripture does not directly attest to the Assumption. Nevertheless, “The Woman Clothed with the Sun” of Revelation 12 has long been taken as biblical testimony of Our Lady’s position in Heaven, body and soul, and at the head of the war against the infernal fallen spirits seeking the ruin of souls. Gen. 3:15, Psalm 132(133), Rev. 11: 19, Lk 1:28, 1 Cor. 15:23, and Mt. 27:52-53 are all cited as biblical evidence pointing, though not directly and conclusively, to the Assumption. In addition, the biblical records of Enoch and Elijah being taken by God into heaven are cited as examples showing how in very special circumstances God has taken particularly holy people directly into heavenly glory, and the Church sees them as harbingers of Our Lady’s Assumption at the end of her earthly life.

Liturgically, the event of the Assumption began to be celebrated as early as the fifth century, and established as a feast by the Emperor Maurice on August 15, 600, and in Rome about 50 years. Pope Sergius (687-701) established a process for the feast. (From Wikipedia). While not on par with Christmas and Easter, as these pertain to the Lord Himself, nevertheless the celebration of the Assumption historically ranked just below those great feasts in its liturgical importance and in the hearts of the Christian faithful, and for those who love the Virgin and practice devotion to her, in imitation of Her Son who loves her perfectly, today is a day overflowing with peace and joy. Traditionally in the Catholic West, and in many places today, the Solemnity of the Assumption is a public holiday, marked by freedom from work and by joy and festivity: the true inner meaning of a holy day of obligation.

Munificentissimus Deus sets forth the reasons for the promulgation of the dogma. The Constitution in its entirety can be found at https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/apost_constitutions/documents/hf_p-xii_apc_19501101_munificentissimus-deus.html.

Here are some relevant excerpts:

“3. Actually God, who from all eternity regards Mary with a most favorable and unique affection, has "when the fullness of time came"(2) put the plan of his providence into effect in such a way that all the privileges and prerogatives he had granted to her in his sovereign generosity were to shine forth in her in a kind of perfect harmony. And, although the Church has always recognized this supreme generosity and the perfect harmony of graces and has daily studied them more and more throughout the course of the centuries, still it is in our own age that the privilege of the bodily Assumption into heaven of Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, has certainly shone forth more clearly.

4. That privilege has shone forth in new radiance since our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, solemnly proclaimed the dogma of the loving Mother of God's Immaculate Conception. These two privileges are most closely bound to one another. Christ overcame sin and death by his own death, and one who through Baptism has been born again in a supernatural way has conquered sin and death through the same Christ. Yet, according to the general rule, God does not will to grant to the just the full effect of the victory over death until the end of time has come. And so it is that the bodies of even the just are corrupted after death, and only on the last day will they be joined, each to its own glorious soul.

5. Now God has willed that the Blessed Virgin Mary should be exempted from this general rule. She, by an entirely unique privilege, completely overcame sin by her Immaculate Conception, and as a result she was not subject to the law of remaining in the corruption of the grave, and she did not have to wait until the end of time for the redemption of her body.

6. Thus, when it was solemnly proclaimed that Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, was from the very beginning free from the taint of original sin, the minds of the faithful were filled with a stronger hope that the day might soon come when the dogma of the Virgin Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven would also be defined by the Church's supreme teaching authority.”

Pius XII continues,

“11. And, since we were dealing with a matter of such great moment and of such importance, we considered it opportune to ask all our venerable brethren in the episcopate directly and authoritatively that each of them should make known to us his mind in a formal statement. Hence, on May 1, 1946, we gave them our letter "Deiparae Virginis Mariae," a letter in which these words are contained: "Do you, venerable brethren, in your outstanding wisdom and prudence, judge that the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith? Do you, with your clergy and people, desire it?"

12. But those whom "the Holy Spirit has placed as bishops to rule the Church of God"(4) gave an almost unanimous affirmative response to both these questions. This "outstanding agreement of the Catholic prelates and the faithful,"(5) affirming that the bodily Assumption of God's Mother into heaven can be defined as a dogma of faith, since it shows us the concordant teaching of the Church's ordinary doctrinal authority and the concordant faith of the Christian people which the same doctrinal authority sustains and directs, thus by itself and in an entirely certain and infallible way, manifests this privilege as a truth revealed by God and contained in that divine deposit which Christ has delivered to his Spouse to be guarded faithfully and to be taught infallibly.”

Further,

“17. In the liturgical books which deal with the feast either of the dormition or of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin there are expressions that agree in testifying that, when the Virgin Mother of God passed from this earthly exile to heaven, what happened to her sacred body was, by the decree of divine Providence, in keeping with the dignity of the Mother of the Word Incarnate, and with the other privileges she had been accorded. Thus, to cite an illustrious example, this is set forth in that sacramentary which Adrian I, our predecessor of immortal memory, sent to the Emperor Charlemagne. These words are found in this volume: "Venerable to us, O Lord, is the festivity of this day on which the holy Mother of God suffered temporal death, but still could not be kept down by the bonds of death, who has begotten your Son our Lord incarnate from herself."(11)

18. What is here indicated in that sobriety characteristic of the Roman liturgy is presented more clearly and completely in other ancient liturgical books. To take one as an example, the Gallican sacramentary designates this privilege of Mary's as "an ineffable mystery all the more worthy of praise as the Virgin's Assumption is something unique among men." And, in the Byzantine liturgy, not only is the Virgin Mary's bodily Assumption connected time and time again with the dignity of the Mother of God, but also with the other privileges, and in particular with the virginal motherhood granted her by a singular decree of God's Providence. "God, the King of the universe, has granted you favors that surpass nature. As he kept you a virgin in childbirth, thus he has kept your body incorrupt in the tomb and has glorified it by his divine act of transferring it from the tomb."(12)”

And,

“20. However, since the liturgy of the Church does not engender the Catholic faith, but rather springs from it, in such a way that the practices of the sacred worship proceed from the faith as the fruit comes from the tree, it follows that the holy Fathers and the great Doctors, in the homilies and sermons they gave the people on this feast day, did not draw their teaching from the feast itself as from a primary source, but rather they spoke of this doctrine as something already known and accepted by Christ's faithful. They presented it more clearly. They offered more profound explanations of its meaning and nature, bringing out into sharper light the fact that this feast shows, not only that the dead body of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained incorrupt, but that she gained a triumph out of death, her heavenly glorification after the example of her only begotten Son, Jesus Christ-truths that the liturgical books had frequently touched upon concisely and briefly.

21. Thus St. John Damascene, an outstanding herald of this traditional truth, spoke out with powerful eloquence when he compared the bodily Assumption of the loving Mother of God with her other prerogatives and privileges. "It was fitting that she, who had kept her virginity intact in childbirth, should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death. It was fitting that she, who had carried the Creator as a child at her breast, should dwell in the divine tabernacles. It was fitting that the spouse, whom the Father had taken to himself, should live in the divine mansions. It was fitting that she, who had seen her Son upon the cross and who had thereby received into her heart the sword of sorrow which she had escaped in the act of giving birth to him, should look upon him as he sits with the Father. It was fitting that God's Mother should possess what belongs to her Son, and that she should be honored by every creature as the Mother and as the handmaid of God."(17)”

We can focus profitable on the word “fitting,” as it is an important one in ancient and medieval theology. In my own conversion to the Church, I struggled with the sinlessness of Mary in light of Romans 3:23 and its absolute statement that “all have sinned,” no exceptions. How, I reasoned as a Protestant, could the Church then affirm that Mary was sinless by exception? This is no trivial question, as the Church herself, up to and including her greatest theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, struggled with the conundrum. The answer was given by St. Bonaventure. Before I knew that answer, I reasoned it out a solution to the question by the following considerations. Infants who die immediately upon their births have committed no personal sin. There thus exists a subclass of people — infants and children who die before the age of reasons — within the class of “all people have sinned” who have not indeed sinned. Could there be a second class?

The Church’s answer is indeed, yes, there is a second class, and it is occupied by one and only one person, the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was the great Franciscan Dun Scotus who gave the answer — but he, too, built upon the work of previous theologians. Wikipedia — I know, I know, but its account is good — writes the following:

“The English ecclesiastic and scholar Eadmer (c. 1060 – c. 1126) reasoned that it was possible that Mary was conceived without original sin in view of God's omnipotence, and that it was also appropriate in view of her role as Mother of God: Potuit, decuit, fecit, "it was possible, it was fitting, therefore it was done".^[23]Others, including Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), objected that if Mary were free of original sin at her conception then she would have no need of redemption, making Christ's saving redemption superfluous; they were answered by Duns Scotus (1264–1308), who "developed the idea of preservative redemption as being a more perfect one: to have been preserved free from original sin was a greater grace than to be set free from sin".^[28]”

Let’s return to the theological notion of “fittingness.” Eadmer uses the term “appropriate,” but “fittingness” is better, because it is used in theology (and it is free of any whiff of correction, political or otherwise). Don Scotus held, and the Church affirms in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, not that Mary had no need of redemption, but rather that her unique vocation as the Mother of God required, as it were, her sinlessness; she needed redemption most of all and since she so needed it, in view of her vocation to be the Mother of God, she received its plenitude at the moment of her Conception, such that one can never speak of any taint of sin, original or actual, at any time whatsoever, in the Blessed Mother.

I write “as it were,” because as God is omnipotent, He can do things any way it seems best to him, consistent with His nature (he cannot sin, and he cannot and does not act capriciously). But why does it seem a requirement? I thought then, and think now, that it is a matter of parallelism: just as the Son receives from the Father a perfect divinity, so He receives from His Mother a perfect humanity — but He can receive it from her only if she has it to give to Him. As He has a Perfect Father, so it is fitting that He has a perfect mother. Yet this perfection is possible only by divine intervention, and it makes sense that the perfection she possessed, she possessed from the beginning of her life, just as God, who has no beginning, is perfect from all eternity. Or: just as there is never a moment in which the Eternal Father is not perfect, so there never is a moment in her created life when the Lord’s Mother is not perfect. Otherwise the parallel is broken but more importantly, the perfection she enjoys would not be absolute. Had she been tainted by Original Sin, at any point, the humanity she gave to her Son would likewise have been tainted. He received from her a perfect human nature, not a nature that had been perfected. For the Church affirms that Jesus Christ is Perfect God and Perfect Man, One Person with two natures, each of which is sinless. Only thus can He be the atonement for the sins of the world. And thus the privilege of the Immaculate Conception, as all of the Blessed Mother’s other privileges, is ordered to the mystery of Jesus Christ and His work of redemption.

Why, then, the Assumption? It is related to the Immaculate Conception because both assert the sinlessness of the Mother of God. Why would God take Mary up soul and body into the glory of heaven? Death is the separation of the soul from the body. At death, we are judged immediately, but we await the end of time and the Final Resurrection for souls and bodies to be reunited forever, wherever. Death is also the punishment for sin. But Mary never sinned, nor did she have any taint whatsoever of Original Sin. She is thus exempt from the general punishment, and it is fitting that God take her directly to Heaven, body and soul.

Munificentissimus Deus recurs to St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, thus:

32. Along with many others, the Seraphic Doctor held the same views [as St. Thomas Aquinas and his teacher, St. Albert the Great]. He considered it as entirely certain that, as God had preserved the most holy Virgin Mary from the violation of her virginal purity and integrity in conceiving and in childbirth, he would never have permitted her body to have been resolved into dust and ashes.(32) Explaining these words of Sacred Scripture: "Who is this that comes up from the desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her beloved?"(33) and applying them in a kind of accommodated sense to the Blessed Virgin, he reasons thus: "From this we can see that she is there bodily...her blessedness would not have been complete unless she were there as a person. The soul is not a person, but the soul, joined to the body, is a person. It is manifest that she is there in soul and in body. Otherwise she would not possess her complete beatitude.(34)

Which raises the question, well then, did she die or just fall asleep? Here the Church leaves the matter as an open question.

The language of the dogma reads thus:

44. For which reason, 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.

The salient clause is “having completed the course of her earthly life…”. The phrase does not indicate whether she died or not. The first reason, and, I think, the most important, is that everything concerning the Blessed Virgin Mary is mystery. There are matters that God allows us to know and not completely understand. There are matters that we don’t understand at all. There are matters that we don’t know, as they are known to God alone. And further, as a world-renown Marianist once told me, “we know more about the Blessed Mother through loving her than we do through theological reasoning” — which makes perfect sense, because we know more about anyone by loving the person than by thinking or reading about the person: love creates a personal relationship, and yet we never fully know the object of our love. If this is true of anyone, so much the more so in the case of the Blessed Mother. The more we love her, the more we know she is encompassed by mystery, the mystery of the Triune God Himself.

The second reason flows from the first. One can argue that she did not die because she never lived, for a single moment or its smallest possible measurement, under the taint of sin and thus had not incurred not incurred the penalty for it. If even Enoch and Elijah, who despite their greatness were sinners, could be assumed by God directly into heaven, how much more so, then, the Mother of God? It seems possible.

One can also argue, however and on the other hand, that as the perfect disciple, the only disciple who was perfectly conformed to Her Son, she wished and willed to undergo death in union with His own Passion and Death. God wished it too, one can argue, for He wished her to share perfectly in all the glory of heaven that was hers by divine condescension through her sharing perfectly in all the suffering of Christ, including his death.

The Eastern Christian tradition — and the Assumption, called there the Dormition, or Falling Asleep, was first celebrated in the East — is succinctly summarized by the great Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware:

Orthodox tradition is clear and unwavering in regard to the central point [of the Dormition]: the Holy Virgin underwent, as did her Son, a physical death, but her body – like His – was afterwards raised from the dead and she was taken up into heaven, in her body as well as in her soul. She has passed beyond death and judgement and lives wholly in the Age to Come. The Resurrection of the Body ... has in her case been anticipated and is already an accomplished fact. That does not mean, however, that she is dissociated from the rest of humanity and placed in a wholly different category: for we all hope to share one day in that same glory of the Resurrection of the Body that she enjoys even now.^[48]

Catholic tradition is slightly different. Again from Wikipedia, and with renewed ongoing apologies,

Some Catholics believe that Mary died before being assumed, but they believe that she was miraculously resurrected before being assumed (mortalistic interpretation). Others believe she was assumed bodily into Heaven without first dying (immortalistic interpretation).^[43][44] Either understanding may be legitimately held by Catholics, with Eastern Catholics observing the Feast as the Dormition. It seems, however, that there is much more evidence for the mortalistic position in the Catholic traditions (liturgy, apocrypha, material culture).^[45] Pope John Paul IIexpressed the mortalistic position in his public speech.^[46]” (The speech in question was the General Audience of 25 June 1997.)

Why have I expended all this time and energy — and why have you, if you’ve read so far — on this matter? Again I refer to Munificentissimus Deus,

“42. We, who have placed our pontificate under the special patronage of the most holy Virgin, to whom we have had recourse so often in times of grave trouble, we who have consecrated the entire human race to her Immaculate Heart in public ceremonies, and who have time and time again experienced her powerful protection, are confident that this solemn proclamation and definition of the Assumption will contribute in no small way to the advantage of human society, since it redounds to the glory of the Most Blessed Trinity, to which the Blessed Mother of God is bound by such singular bonds. It is to be hoped that all the faithful will be stirred up to a stronger piety toward their heavenly Mother, and that the souls of all those who glory in the Christian name may be moved by the desire of sharing in the unity of Jesus Christ's Mystical Body and of increasing their love for her who shows her motherly heart to all the members of this august body. And so we may hope that those who meditate upon the glorious example Mary offers us may be more and more convinced of the value of a human life entirely devoted to carrying out the heavenly Father's will and to bringing good to others. Thus, while the illusory teachings of materialism and the corruption of morals that follows from these teachings threaten to extinguish the light of virtue and to ruin the lives of men by exciting discord among them, in this magnificent way all may see clearly to what a lofty goal our bodies and souls are destined. Finally it is our hope that belief in Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven will make our belief in our own resurrection stronger and render it more effective.”

It is amazing to me that in the depth of the summer, when all seems dead and listless from heat and we are approached by the first inklings of the fall and winter, the annual seasonal death, God would assume His Mother into heaven precisely as motive of hope for us. It is likewise amazing to me that Pius XII, surveying a world devastated by the horrors and destruction of the Second World War, finds after a period of extended prayer and discernment, that the moment is right to proclaim this dogma as a way of reinvigorating the world and giving it hope. It seems especially fitting to me, as war rages in Gaza and Ukraine and throughout the world, as people seem listless in the face of AI, technological wizardry, economic uncertainty, and a certain sense of powerlessness that results from “overwhelm,” that we pause to consider that God has the last word, and the last word is life everlasting for all who believe. Mary’s Assumption, is, as it were, a downpayment and guarantee of that promise. May today’ feast be a motive of great joy for us, and also spur us to share ever more fully with others our own joy in the marvelous light that has been shed throughout the world. For “the Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overtake it.”

Our Lady of the Assumption, Mother of Hope, pray for us.