Today Catholics around the world will celebrate the Assumption of Our Blessed Mother Mary into Heaven. In honor of the Assumption, I read Pope Pius XII's 1950 Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, which declared as dogma what was always believed by the Church. My first question on the Assumption when I became Catholic was why? Why in 1950 would the Church declare this as dogma? The impression I get from non-Catholic Christians is that they believe "Catholics just make this stuff up" and declare it, but of course after looking at the history of this and reading Munificentissimus Deus, that is not the case at all. When the Church declares something to be a part of the deposit of faith, it does so usually in response to existing controversies/questions and to ensure long accepted vibrant truths of the faith are not lost for future generations.
Of course the idea of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven, at the end of her life has been with the church from earliest times, in both East and West. The Orthodox church celebrates the end of Mary's life as the Dormition. The Orthodox believe that following her dormition, Mary experienced bodily resurrection 3 days later. The Ivory carving below depicting the Dormition is from the late 10th, early 11th century.
According to our faith, "we believe in the resurrection of the dead", and that when we die our souls and bodies separate, but that at the end of all time, there will be a bodily resurrection and souls will be united with the glorified resurrected body.
Pope Pius XII states it as follows in the letter:
"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."
In the Immaculate Conception, we also believe that Mary, this singularly unique human being whom God chose take on flesh through (and she assented), was "full of grace" and conceived with a privileged gift of grace sufficient to remain sinless while on earth. In the Pope's letter, he describes the relationship:
"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."
As Pope Pius XII discusses the events leading up to the declaration, he reiterates that the assumption is consonant with historic Christian understanding:
"Many outstanding theologians eagerly and zealously carried out investigations on this subject either privately or in public ecclesiastical institutions and in other schools where the sacred disciplines are taught. Marian Congresses, both national and international in scope, have been held in many parts of the Catholic world. These studies and investigations have brought out into even clearer light the fact that the dogma of the Virgin Mary's Assumption into heaven is contained in the deposit of Christian faith entrusted to the Church."
and he goes on to quote Vatican II documents saying:
"the Holy Spirit was not promised to the successors of Peter in such a way that, by his revelation, they might manifest new doctrine, but so that, by his assistance, they might guard as sacred and might faithfully propose the revelation delivered through the apostles, or the deposit of faith"
Then he goes into a long litany of sources affirming The Assumption through time:
"This belief of the sacred pastors and of Christ's faithful is universally manifested still more splendidly by the fact that, since ancient times, there have been both in the East and in the West solemn liturgical offices commemorating this privilege."
795
"Thus, to cite an illustrious example, this is set forth in that sacramentary which Adrian I, our predecessor of immortal memory [~795], 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."
8th century
"Byzantine liturgy [8th century], 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."
St Sergius: 687 to 701
"And, when our predecessor St. Sergius I prescribed what is known as the litany, or the stational procession, to be held on four Marian feasts, he specified together the Feasts of the Nativity, the Annunciation, the Purification, and the Dormition of the Virgin Mary."
St Leo IV: 847 to 855
"Again, St. Leo IV saw to it that the feast, which was already being celebrated under the title of the Assumption of the Blessed Mother of God, should be observed in even a more solemn way when he ordered a vigil to be held on the day before it and prescribed prayers to be recited after it until the octave day. When this had been done, he decided to take part himself in the celebration, in the midst of a great multitude of the faithful."
St. John Damascene, 676
"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."
St. Albert the Great, ~1200
"From these proofs and authorities and from many others, it is manifest that the most blessed Mother of God has been assumed above the choirs of angels. And this we believe in every way to be true.
Of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Pope Pius XII says:
".. the Angelic Doctor, despite the fact that he never dealt directly with this question, nevertheless, whenever he touched upon it, always held together with the Catholic Church, that Mary's body had been assumed into heaven along with her soul"
Of St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), he says:
"...the Seraphic Doctor held the same views. 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"
St. Bernardine of Siena, 1450
St. Robert Bellarmine, 1542
St. Peter Canisius 1521-1597
"This teaching has already been accepted for some centuries, it has been held as certain in the minds of the pious people, and it has been taught to the entire Church in such a way that those who deny that Mary's body has been assumed into heaven are not to be listened to patiently but are everywhere to be denounced as over-contentious or rash men, and as imbued with a spirit that is heretical rather than Catholic.
St. Francis de Sales, 1622
St. Alphonsus, 1696
So, clearly, it is indisputable that the Assumption was a part of the practiced deposit of faith for many, many centuries. However, just being a part of the liturgy does not in itself 'make it true', as Pope Pius XII goes on to say:
"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."
Of what use is it for me as a Christian to contemplate the Assumption? Pope Pius XII writes:
"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."
So the actual proclamation of the Assumption is near the end:
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."
"In the Ascension, Christ was raised in glory to the right hand of the Father, while Mary herself would be raised to that same glory in the Assumption, enjoying beforehand, by a unique privilege, the destiny reserved for all the just at the resurrection of the dead. Crowned in glory – as she appears in the last glorious mystery – Mary shines forth as Queen of the Angels and Saints, the anticipation and the supreme realization of the eschatological state of the Church. At the centre of this unfolding sequence of the glory of the Son and the Mother, the Rosary sets before us the third glorious mystery, Pentecost, which reveals the face of the Church as a family gathered together with Mary, enlivened by the powerful outpouring of the Spirit and ready for the mission of evangelization. The contemplation of this scene, like that of the other glorious mysteries, ought to lead the faithful to an ever greater appreciation of their new life in Christ, lived in the heart of the Church, a life of which the scene of Pentecost itself is the great “icon”. The glorious mysteries thus lead the faithful to greater hope for the eschatological goal towards which they journey as members of the pilgrim People of God in history"
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