The Assumption of Mary, Glory to the Lord
Fourth Glorious Mystery
👑 The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Taken Up, Body and Soul — Glory to the Lord
For millennia the belief that the Virgin Mary is in heaven was not a disputed topic, and for most Christians it still is not. After all, she is the mother of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the Son of God, hence her title Mother of God; to dispute that title requires disputing the divine nature of Jesus. But the Assumption has some particular things to teach us about her closeness to her Son.
For those unaware of what the Assumption is, here is the definition itself:
Plainly put: when she had lived out her life here on earth, she was taken up body and soul into heaven.
An assumption into heaven is not without precedent. Scripture attests it plainly of two men before her.
Enoch. "Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him" (Genesis 5:24). Sirach recalls him twice (44:16 and 49:14), and the Letter to the Hebrews says he "was taken up so that he should not see death" (Hebrews 11:5).
Elijah. "And Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven" in the chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11), and he appears at the Transfiguration alongside Moses.
Note carefully the distinction we drew in the overview: Christ ascended by His own divine power; Mary was assumed, taken up by God's power. He rises as Lord; she is raised as creature. Her Assumption is a gift received, never a power possessed.
Pope Pius XII names three titles in the definition itself, and every one of them is hers by reason of her Son.
Immaculate. This refers to her Immaculate Conception, in which Christ saved and preserved the Blessed Virgin Mary from original sin by the merits of His passion, death, and resurrection. God, being outside of time, applied that grace to her at the very moment of her conception. This made her pure and full of grace, which is why the Angel Gabriel greets her, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you." (Defined by Pope Pius IX in Ineffabilis Deus, 1854.)
Mother of God. Since Jesus is God and Mary is His mother, she is Theotokos, God-bearer, as affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
Ever-Virgin. Her perpetual virginity was affirmed by the early Fathers, notably St. Jerome, who translated the Scriptures into Latin (the Vulgate) and wrote a defense of her perpetual virginity against Helvidius in the 380s.
Every title given to the Blessed Virgin Mary is hers because of her relation to her Son, Jesus Christ. Strip Christ away and not one of them stands.
The Assumption is the Marian dogma most often challenged, usually with the words, "that isn't in the Bible." The case for it is considerably stronger than most suppose, and it rests on seven pillars.
The strongest scriptural argument is hiding in a chapter break. Chapter divisions were added to Scripture only in the thirteenth century; in the text St. John wrote, these words run together without a pause:
St. John announces that the Ark of the Covenant has been seen in heaven, and then he tells us what he saw: a Woman. The Ark is the Woman.
This is the same typology we traced at the Visitation, where Mary journeys through the hills of Judah as the Ark once did. Here it reaches its end: the Ark of the New Covenant is now bodily in heaven.
Bodily corruption is not natural to man as God first made him. It is a penalty of original sin: "you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19). Decay in the grave is the wage of the sin of Adam.
But Mary, by the singular grace of her Immaculate Conception, was preserved from original sin from the first instant of her existence. She never contracted the disease; it is therefore supremely fitting that she should not suffer the disease's penalty. She who was spared the sin is fittingly spared its corruption.
This is the argument on which Munificentissimus Deus chiefly leans, and it binds the two Marian dogmas together as a single coherent whole: the Immaculate Conception at the beginning of her life, the Assumption at its end, and both of them entirely the work of her Son's redemption applied to her in a singular way.
"Honor your father and your mother." Christ did not come to abolish the Law but to fulfill it, and He fulfilled it perfectly, in every jot and tittle.
Now ask the question plainly. Given that He had the power to do otherwise, would the Son who perfectly keeps the commandment to honor His mother leave her body to rot in the earth? The Assumption is what perfect filial piety looks like when the Son is omnipotent.
This one is quiet, and it is devastating.
The early Church venerated relics with fierce devotion. Christians gathered the bones of the martyrs from the sand of the arena. Cities competed, sometimes bitterly, for the remains of the Apostles: Rome claims Peter and Paul, Ephesus and elsewhere claimed John, Compostela claims James. Bishops built basilicas over the graves of saints. A body of any holy person was a treasure beyond price.
Now consider: after Christ Himself, whose body would have been the single most precious relic in all Christendom? The body of His Mother. The woman who carried God in her womb.
And no city ever claimed it. No church ever displayed it. No tomb was ever venerated as holding her body. In an age that fought over the bones of saints, there is simply no relic of Mary, and there never was.
Ancient tradition points to Jerusalem and to Ephesus as the place of her dormition, and both places are venerated, but neither has ever claimed her body. That silence, in that Church, at that time, is not an accident. The most natural explanation is the one the Church has always given: there was no body to venerate.
The old maxim runs lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of prayer is the law of belief. What the Church prays, the Church believes.
The feast of Mary's Dormition and Assumption was being kept in Jerusalem by the fifth century and spread through the Christian East; it was established at Rome by the seventh century, and Pope Sergius I (d. 701) numbered it among the great Marian feasts with a solemn procession. It has been kept on the fifteenth of August, East and West, ever since.
In other words, the Church prayed the Assumption for well over a thousand years before she defined it. The definition of 1950 did not invent a belief; it set a seal on one that the faithful had been celebrating, in the liturgy, since the patristic age.
The doctrine is preached explicitly by the Fathers, especially in the East, from an early date. Among those Pius XII cites in Munificentissimus Deus:
St. John Damascene (d. 749), whose Homilies on the Dormition are the fullest early treatment; St. Germanus of Constantinople (d. 733); St. Modestus of Jerusalem; St. Andrew of Crete; and in the West St. Gregory of Tours (d. 594), among the earliest Latin witnesses. Later the great Doctors take it up: St. Bernard, St. Albert the Great, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, St. Robert Bellarmine, St. Francis de Sales, and St. Alphonsus Liguori.
Here is the piece most people do not know, and it matters enormously.
Before defining anything, Pope Pius XII wrote to the entire episcopate of the world in 1946 (Deiparae Virginis Mariae) and asked two questions: do you, with your clergy and people, believe the Assumption can be defined? And do you desire it? The answer came back overwhelmingly, virtually unanimously, in the affirmative.
The Pope did not hand down a novelty. He canvassed the universal Church and found the belief already there, held by bishops and faithful across every continent and rite. The definition of 1950 is the Church recognizing her own faith, not inventing it. That is precisely how the development of doctrine is supposed to work.
But what does the mystery of the Assumption give us, and how does it bring us closer to Christ? It gives us a glimpse of the promised resurrection and the glorified life we will have with God in heaven.
It is important to understand that we are made body and soul. Our soul is made in the image and likeness of God, but He made us with a body as well, and we are not whole without it. Our glorified state after death and resurrection will be one of body and soul reunited, in the eternal presence of God.
The Blessed Virgin Mary was taken to be with her Son in heaven in her glorified state, body and soul, for all eternity. She is not an exception to our hope; she is the first instance of it. What has already happened to her is what Christ has promised to do for all who belong to Him. She has simply arrived first.
The fruit of this mystery is the grace of a happy death, that we may come to the end of our own earthly course in the friendship of God, and so follow where she has gone. Every Hail Mary we pray asks it: "pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death." In the Assumption we see what that prayer is for.
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria. (Scripture here follows the RSV-2CE.)
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