IHS
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary—15 August A.D. 2018
Ave Maria!
Assumption of the Blessed Virgin,
Bartolome Esteban Murillo
(1618 - 1682) circa 1640Latin Mass Text
English Mass Text
Blessing of First-fruits
Melito of Sardis - Assumption or Dormition of the Blessed Virgin
Breviary Readings on the Assumption
“Before all ages, in the beginning He created me,
and through all ages I shall not cease to be....
My abode is in the full assembly of the saints.”[1]Some time around the mid-nineteenth century, the great liturgical writer Dom Prosper Guéranger, abbot of Solesmes, wrote:[2]
The God made Man revealed to us the only name which fully expressed Him in His twofold nature; He is called “The Son.” Son of Man as He is Son of God, on earth He had only a Mother, as in heaven He had only a Father. In the august Trinity He proceeds from the Father, remaining consubstantial with Him; only distinguished from Him in that He is the Son; producing together with Him, as one Principle, the Holy Ghost.
In the external mission He fulfils by the Incarnation (to the glory of the Blessed Trinity)—communicating to His humanity the manners, so to say, of His Divinity, as far as the diversity of the two natures permits—He is in no way separated from His Mother and would have her participate even in the giving of the Holy Ghost to every soul.
This ineffable union is the source of all Mary's greatnesses, which are crowned by today's triumph.[3]
To some, that may be a little bit "heavy" on the theology of the Trinity, but it points to an easy to understand—yet important—lesson about the sublime dignity of our Blessed Lady. Make no mistake about it, Mary is a creature of God, precisely as we are creatures of God; born by natural means of her parents Joachim and Anne, a soul created by God only a decade or so before the birth of Christ.
Yet, in a sense, she existed in the mind of God from all creation, as His perfect knowledge knew unerringly that she alone—above all others in chastity, charity, and humility—would cooperate in His plan for the redemption of the children of Adam and Eve. Mary was in His mind when, in the Garden of Eden, He told the serpent that He would send “a woman who would crush its head, and for whom it would lie in wait for her heel.”[4]
That is why the Church accommodates that beautiful passage from Ecclesiasticus: “Before all ages, in the beginning, He created me.” God knew Mary, and what He would make of Her from all eternity. When He created her soul, He allowed Her the privilege—unknown since Eve—of being free from all sin. Knowing her eternal perseverance, God allowed Mary to benefit in advance from the Redemption to be wrought by her Son.
In eternity, Mary is the daughter of the Father; and in time she is the Spouse of the Holy Ghost, and the Mother of God the Son.
But it was not in God's mind to allow her to “drop out of the picture” after the business of Redemption was concluded and her life on earth had come to its natural end. There is a second clause to that phrase in Ecclesiasticus: “Before all ages ... He created me, and through all ages I shall not cease to be.” We are told that Mary spent 73 years on earth, at which time the virtually unanimous tradition of the Church, the writings of several contemporaries, and the infallible pronouncement of Pope Pius XII, tell us that she was taken up to heaven body and soul.
As an early Doctor of the Church, St. John Damascene, tells us:
She did not return to dust, but since she was a living heaven was placed in the heavenly tabernacles. How could she taste death, she from whom true life has flowed to all mankind? As Mother of the living God, she was rightly taken up to His side.[5]
But also remember what I read earlier from Abbot Guéranger: Our Lord “is in no way separated from His Mother and would have her participate even in the giving of the Holy Ghost to every soul”—that recalls what is, for us, even more significant. Mary is not simply in heaven with her Son. She continues to be intimately related to the three Divine Persons of the Trinity, and continues to cooperate with them in the mystery of the salvation of individual souls, even as she cooperated in the redemption of mankind.
At least until the end of time Mary will continue to recognize our needs and refer them to her Son as she did at the wedding feast at Cana; she will continue to place our prayers before the throne of her Father—our Father; she will rejoice with her Divine Spouse as He dwells in the souls of the godly; she will long await the day of judgment and the resurrection to glory of the just, for her “abode is in the full assembly of the saints.”
Learn two things, if you will, from this feast of our Lady's Assumption. The first is that it is possible for a human being to choose not to sin, to persevere in God's graces unto eternal glory. The second, of course, is that we can have no greater advocate before our Father, and her Holy Spouse. and their Divine Son, than the Blessed Virgin Mary—who was, this day, taken body and soul into the splendor of heaven.
NOTES:
[1] Ecclesiasticus xxiv: 14-16 http://www.drbo.org/x/d?b=drl&bk=26&ch=24&l=14-#x
[3] The Liturgical Year, Feast of the Assumption, Vol. XIII. https://archive.org/stream/V13TheLiturgicalYear/V13TheLiturgicalYear_djvu.txt
[4] Cf. Genesis iii: 15 http://www.drbo.org/cgi-bin/d?b=drl&bk=1&ch=3&l=15#x
[5] St. John Damascene, Second Discourse on the Dormition of the Blessed Virgin (Second nocturn of the feast). http://www.rosarychurch.net/breviary/august.html
