ASSUMPTION BELIEF IS ANCIENT: BY DR LUKY WHITTLE

 

ASSUMPTION BELIEF IS ANCIENT

For almost sixteen centuries Catholics have believed that the Blessed Virgin’s body did not suffer corruption after death but that she was taken up body and soul into heaven. 

The Catholic Church’s second – and thus far – final Mariological dogma is the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into heaven.  Solemnly defined by Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) on 1 November 1950, this belief had been entrenched in Catholic tradition since the sixth century or even earlier, when Christians started the practice of annually celebrating the feast of the Assumption on 15 August.

In the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII wrote:

“We proclaim, declare and define as a dogma revealed by God, the Immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever Virgin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into glory of heaven.”

The Bible does not tell us how Our Lady underwent the process of death, to which the Eastern Church so luminously refers as her “dormition” or falling asleep.  

Catholic tradition and/or legend maintains that when Mary’s days on earth had ended, she, surrounded by the apostles, fell into the sleep of death.  Only the apostle Thomas was absent when Mary was carried to the tomb and buried.  

When he finally arrived, he broke down to hear of her death and begged to be taken to her tomb.  They took him to the place.  When they opened it they found that the body had gone.  

In its place a sheaf of lilies, symbolic of purity, was found.  This tradition is captured in a poem by Sister M Angeline SSND titled “Memories of the Assumption”.

         

  They bore her in a reverent group

            To a holy place

            Left her body in the earth

            Her body, full of grace

 

            But Thomas, tardy, slow of foot,

            Absent when she died

            Spent with sorrow, craved to see

            Her of the Crucified

 

            There was a swift intake of breath

            A hurried silent breath

            Startled, they opened the newmade tomb

            To find but lilies there.

Records of debates concerning the Assumption go back as far as the sixth century AD.  One of the first English poems in which the belief that Mary’s body and soul were united in heaven is contained is one written by the poet William of Shoreham in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. He wrote: “The fifth joy of that woman (occurred) when her body came to heaven (and her) soul took to the body, as had been its custom (before death occurred).”           

That it took fifteen centuries before a belief that appears to have been universally accepted in the  Church to be included in its official doctrine bears witness to the endurance to which a writer once referred as “the patience that is Rome.” 

The year 1950 was a golden age for Marian devotion in the Church.  This trend was followed a decade later by an epoch in which some radical Catholics would – in the name of ecumenism - challenge and dispute the renown of Mary.  Pope Pius XII had already forestalled their objections when he wrote in defence of Catholic Mariology in his encyclical letter Fulgens Corona published on 8 September 1953:

 

Non-Catholics and reformers are … mistaken, when … they find fault with, or disapprove of, our devotion to the Virgin Mother of God, as if it took something from the worship due to God alone and to Jesus Christ.  The contrary is true because any honor and veneration which we may give to our heavenly Mother undoubtedly redounds to the glory of her divine Son, not only because all graces and all gifts, even the highest, flow from Him as from their primary source, but also because ‘the glory of children are their fathers’ (Proverbs 17:6).

 

How was Our Lady taken up to heaven?  The human mind with its limited capacity for rapture tends to be constrained in its efforts to contain this glory.  It took a poet with a joint capacity for faith and verbal expression like Sister Dennis OP to give voice to her imagination.  Her Assumption poem which she titled “Flying Birds” was first published in The Tablet of 19 August 1961.

 

            In a compact body, keeping perfect rhythm,

            Above the smoking factory chimney’s crest,

            Regardless even of the beauty of the green fields,

            Waving trees, and joyous, shouting children,

            The birds circle the heavens in their morning flight.

 

            So, surely, must the Angels have borne aloft

            Our Lady on that first Assumption Day!

 

            Intent on the beauty of Him on whom they desire to look,

            They ignore the things of earth and gaze on her

            Whom clothed with the sun, the moon under her feet,

            They bear to joyful reunion with her Son –

            With Him who is also her God.