PaddlingPadre

Seventy-five years ago, in another Holy Year when Rome, much as now during this present year of Jubilee, was thronged with pilgrims, Pope Pius XII, on All Saints Day, was carried in procession into St. Peter’s square, where, in the presence of bishops and archbishops, cardinals and dignitaries, and some seven-hundred thousand of the faithful who filled the massive square to overflowing, he had come to extol munificentissimus Deus, the great bountifulness of God.

More specifically, he had come, in his capacity as the Bishop of Rome, the successor of the Prince of the Apostles and Christ’s Vicar on Earth, to solemnly define, as a matter of Divine and Catholic Faith, the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, body and soul, into heaven upon the completion of her earthly life, a declaration which was the crowning joy of that Jubilee of 1950.

And while this formal definition certainly made headlines around the world, it was a long road that had brought Pope Pius to the steps of St. Peter’s to proclaim it. For from the very beginning of the Church, from the days of the apostles themselves, Christian theology had been built up by the asking of various questions that were all, it could be said, variations on a single, fundamental question: Given the salvation and the grace that we have experienced in Christ, what can we say of Christ? What can we say of God?

From such questions had arisen, as soon as circumstances allowed for the possibility, formal definitions of the faith that safeguarded what had been handed on by the apostles from error and misunderstanding. And so, starting with the person of Christ, the early councils affirm his divinity: he is consubstantial with the Father, united also with the Holy Spirit, one divine substance, three Divine Persons, for our salvation in Christ was not done by a mere human being, but rather by God himself. And yet, a human being Jesus surely had been, or else our human nature would not have been redeemed, for if he had not been human, he would not have been truly like us, and so, confirming both his divinity and his humanity together, the Council of Ephesus in 431 declared of Mary that she was truly Θεοτοκος,  Deiparae, the Mother of God; for the Son of God, existing before all ages, had in history taken flesh from her, being truly her son just as she, creature though she was, was truly his mother.

And this truth, naturally enough, turned the minds of the faithful to the great privileges that belonged to Mary as the Mother of God, as even the gospel writers had made plain: she was full of grace, blessed among women, to be praised throughout all generations. So full of grace was Mary, so singularly blessed among the entire human race, that she had remained a virgin after the birth of Christ, just as she had before. So highly was she favored that, in anticipation of the merits of Christ’s suffering and death, she had by a special grace been immaculately conceived, preserved from the stain of original sin. And, just as the Church’s awareness for these great graces in the life of Mary had grown, so too had an appreciation for a further mystery: that surely for one so favored, one so blessed, one whose very flesh had provided flesh for our Savior, that the mortal remains of such a woman would surely not be left to face decay, but would be raised, even in the moment of her passing, to share in the glory of her risen son, to reign with him as the Queen Mother of Heaven.

And so, even in ancient days, no one dared to claim any bodily relics of the Blessed Mother, and, already then, the fathers and doctors of the Church professed their faith in the Assumption. To quote but one example at length, St. John Damascene writes:

“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 therebyreceived 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.”

On the strength of the these sentiments, this feast which we celebrate spread throughout the Church and gained ever greater acceptance amongst the Christian people, who saw in it rightly the words of the psalmist fulfilled: Arise, O Lord, into your resting place: you and the ark, which you have sanctified. The great schoolmen of the middle ages held to the same doctrine, and more recent authorities added their voices to the same. Hence St. Robert Bellarmine asks:

“Who could believe that the ark of holiness, the dwelling place of the Word of God, the temple of the Holy Spirit, could be reduced to ruin? My soul is filled with horror at the thought that this virginal flesh which had begotten God, had brought him into the world, had nourished and carried him, could have been turned into ashes or given over to be food for worms.”

Thus also St. Alphonsus:

“Jesus did not wish to have the body of Mary corrupted after death, since it would have redounded to his own dishonor to have her virginal flesh, from which he himself had assumed flesh, reduced to dust.”

And so, with the passing of the centuries, the clamor had grown from the Christian people that what had long been celebrated and believed be at last authoritatively affirmed as a dogma of faith. Nearly at the First Vatican Council in 1869 had this been done, and, from the moment he had taken up the Petrine ministry, Pope Pius XII had been inundated with petitions from across the world, from bishops and the lay faithful, from national groups and Marian congresses, urging this solemn definition. And so, in 1946, Pius had asked all the bishops of the world:“Do you, venerable brethren, in your outstanding wisdom and prudence, judge that the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith? Do you, with your clergy and people, desire it?”

The response that Pius received was a near unanimous affirmation, a sure sign that the sensus fidelium, “the supernatural appreciation of faith on the part of the whole people, from the bishops to the last of the faithful,” which is itself an infallible sign of the truth in such matters, the Church being at all times led by the Holy Spirt to the fulness of truth, had already affirmed the doctrine of the Assumption before any definition. And so it was that four years later, on that November day in 1950, that Pope Pius XII, to the hundreds of thousands that had gathered at the Vatican, added his own voice to that of the fathers and doctors, of the schoolmen and the saints:

“The Mother of God, immaculate in her conception, a most perfect virgin in her divine motherhood, the noble associate of the divine Redeemer who has won a complete triumph over sin and its consequences, finally obtained, as the supreme culmination of her privileges, that she should be preserved free from the corruption of the tomb and that, like her own Son, having overcome death, she might be taken up body and soul to the glory of heaven where, as Queen, she sits in splendor at the right hand of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages.”

This truth, Pius hoped with certainty, would redound to the glory of the Most Blessed Trinity, would move we faithful Christians to greater love of our heavenly mother, would stir us to share more deeply in the riches of Christ’s mystical body which Mary shares in most richly of all, that we might be inspired more profoundly by her example of abandoning herself totally to the will of the Father, and that we might have greater faith in our own resurrection, seeing more clearly the great destiny that awaits both the bodies and the souls of those who believe, so thorough and glorious is Christ’s ability to transform us.

And so, seventy-five years ago, Pope Pius spoke to the crowds:

“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.”