The Months Of Mary… The Assumption

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY

This is the third in a series of articles on our Lady in connection with some of the themes found in the Fatima message and some of her other major apparitions. The previous article dealt with her Immaculate Conception, and this article is about her Assumption, body and soul, into Heaven, which is celebrated on August 15.
The Immaculate Conception was defined as a dogma of the Church by Pope Pius IX on December 8, 1854, and as we saw last time, the idea of the Immaculate Conception was a crucial part of the apparitions at Lourdes; and it could be said that aspects or at least hints of the Assumption dogma can be found in the Fatima message.
The fact that the Blessed Virgin is indeed in Heaven was affirmed during the very first apparition at Fatima, when in response to Lucia’s question as to where she was from, the Lady they saw, who was “more brilliant than the sun,” said, “I come from Heaven.” When Lucia further asked if they, the children, would go to Heaven, she was told, yes, she and Jacinta would go to Heaven, but Francisco would need to say many rosaries first.
And then at the end of her message on July 13, our Lady asked the children to say the Fatima Decade prayer which so many Catholics now pray at the end of each decade of the rosary: “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins; save us from the fires of Hell; lead all souls into Heaven, especially those who are in most need of thy mercy.”
So the beautiful Lady lived in Heaven, and desired that everyone should live so as to become worthy of Heaven. But do we as Catholics think very much about Heaven, that it is our hoped-for eternal destination, and that all the glitter and glamour of the world is nothing in comparison with achieving Heaven?
Because the children were kidnapped by the local mayor, the August apparition didn’t take place at the Cova da Iria on the 13th of August, but a few days later at a place called Valhinos, which was near their home village of Aljustrel. On this occasion, our Lady repeated that she would perform a miracle, so all would believe, and said that if they had not been kidnapped it would have been even greater. She finished by saying, “Pray, pray very much, and make sacrifices for sinners; for many souls go to Hell, because there are none to sacrifice themselves and pray for them.”
The Blessed Virgin appeared again to five children at Beauraing, a small town in the southern, French-speaking, part of Belgium, between late November 1932 and January 1933. During the course of these apparitions, she asked the children to always be good and to pray very much, and during her last apparition, on January 3, 1933, she said to one of the children, “I am the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven. Pray always.”
It is significant that our Lady described herself at Beauraing as the “Queen of Heaven,” a status which points to her assumption into Heaven.
These apparitions were approved in 1949, and it was during the next year that Pope Pius XII defined the dogma of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven as an article of faith.
This declaration came out of the work of many theologians over the centuries. They had developed arguments in support of the dogma on the basis that our Lady, being sinless, was not subject to the effects of sin, including bodily corruption; and so therefore her assumption into Heaven could be deduced from her Immaculate Conception and sinlessness.
The fact that the Virgin Mary was described as the “most blessed of all women” by St. Elizabeth at the time of the Visitation, was seen as pointing to her freedom from the original sin which subjected the rest of mankind to bodily corruption and death. And likewise, it was argued that since our Lady had fully shared in her Son’s victory over sin and death, so she should also share in His Resurrection and glorification at the end of her life on Earth, rather than having to wait for the general resurrection from the dead.
And in support of the position that she has indeed been assumed into Heaven, we have the fact that there has never been any cult associated with the bodily relics of Mary. And also, while there have been saints whose bodies have remained incorrupt on Earth such as St. Catherine Labouré, St. Bernadette, and the Curé d’Ars, we would expect that our Lady, whose holiness far surpassed those saintly figures, would have been swiftly taken up to Heaven by God. That is, we might expect God to both preserve her body and also anticipate her Resurrection and glorification.
In 1949, Pope Pius XII had asked the world’s bishops if they thought it opportune to proclaim the bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven as something divinely revealed, and thus a dogma of the faith. Nearly 100 percent of the over one thousand bishops queried responded favorably, and the Pope took this as an affirmation of the fact of the Assumption. But he essentially based the dogmatic declaration on the intimate union between Christ and His Mother, on her Divine Maternity and on her co-redemptive role at the crucifixion.
Thus, on November 1, 1950, in the apostolic constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, he solemnly proclaimed the dogma in the following words, “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” (n. 44).
And he went on to say, “Hence if anyone, which God forbid, should dare willfully to deny or to call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith” (n. 45).
So as in the case of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, Catholics are bound to believe in the Assumption as an article of faith. And such declarations are extremely rare, which underlines just how important our Lady is for the life of the Church in our increasingly tumultuous times.

The Hand Of Mary

We can probably also see a link between Fatima and proclamation of this dogma. The evidence for this comes from what Federico Cardinal Tedeschini, the pontifical legate, revealed in Fatima on October 13, 1951. During his homily at the shrine, he spoke of the October 1917 miracle of the sun and then went on to describe how a repetition of this miracle had been seen by the Pope in Rome on four occasions during the previous year.
“In the Vatican Gardens, the Holy Father looked towards the sun, and then there was renewed before his eyes the prodigy which, years before, this same valley witnessed, on this same day. The solar disc, surrounded by its halo — who can gaze on it? He could, during those four days; beneath the hand of Mary, he could observe the sun coming down, moving, convulsing, palpitating with life, transmitting, in a spectacle of celestial movements, silent but eloquent messages to the Vicar of Christ.”
Apparently the Pope saw these visions as a sign from God that he should go ahead with the declaration of the dogma of the Assumption, and no doubt also saw them as a further sign of the truth of the Fatima apparitions.
Yes, the Lady who is more brilliant than the sun, and who is also our spiritual Mother, is indeed in Heaven, where she awaits us her children.

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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also written two time-travel/adventure books for young people, and the third in the series is due to be published later this year — details can be seen at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk.)