Q. Is it an article of faith that the Blessed Mother died before being assumed into Heaven, or are we free to believe that she did not die before being taken to Heaven? — G.P., Florida.
A. The Church has never formally declared that the Blessed Mother died before she was assumed, body and soul, into Heaven, but saints, holy writers, and Popes have said that she did undergo death but not the decay of the grave. Even if she did die, she would certainly have escaped the decay of the grave since that fate is the consequence of original sin, and Mary did not have original sin.
St. John Damascene (675-749) referred to an “ancient and truthful tradition” that the Virgin Mary did die and was placed in a coffin in the Garden of Gethsemane. After three days of singing and chanting by angels, he said, the coffin was opened, but the apostles “were unable anywhere to find her most lauded body.”
In his proclamation of the Assumption in 1950, Pope Pius XII said that the fathers and doctors of the Church, in their explanations of the Assumption, brought “into sharper light the fact that this feast shows, not only that the dead body of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained incorrupt, but that she gained a triumph out of death, her heavenly glorification after the example of her only begotten Son, Jesus Christ” (Munificentissimus Deus, n. 20).
A beautiful and eloquent commentary on this matter was offered by Fr. William Martin in the July 2007 issue of the Homiletic & Pastoral Review:
“The death which was long desired came at length to her who was the mother of the living. But death came not as a punishment of sin, but almost as a privilege, so that she could be united to her Son in all things in the redemption of the world. Mary died not of sickness, nor was her death a tragic one. Our Blessed Mother died of love. Her burning love of God actually consumed her natural strength. Her death was a holocaust of love, a love so great that the earth could not contain it, a love so ardent that it broke loose from its bodily chains and flew to its God. And all Heaven rejoiced at the reunion of Mother and Son. God decreed from all eternity that the body which was once the home for God on earth would return at death to the home of God in Heaven, where she with Christ could continue her office as mediatrix.”
Q. Why is the trend at funerals and weddings for priests to invite everyone to receive Communion, seemingly regardless of religion or worthiness? This is an affront to the Sacraments of Penance and, most of all, the Holy Eucharist. Maybe they are trying to compensate for the sex abuse scandals in the Church, but in reality they are creating another scandal. — E.B., New York.
A. We have seen this situation handled in different ways. The worst way is to invite all to Communion since that is indeed a scandal and a sacrilege. Another way is to invite those who are not Catholic or are not “properly prepared” to receive Communion to come forward for a blessing, crossing their hands in front of themselves to indicate that they do not wish to receive the Eucharist. In a column two weeks ago, we quoted Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., on the inappropriateness of this gesture.
The third and best way would be to explain what the Eucharist is, and what are the conditions for receiving it worthily. It’s not enough to say that one must be “properly prepared” without explaining what that means. It would mean mentioning that those who are conscious of being in serious sin should not come forward, and then saying that if a person never goes to Mass, except at weddings and funerals, he should remain in his pew since deliberately missing Mass on Sunday is a mortal sin.
Now that would put a big-time damper on a wedding or funeral, which is why you will seldom if ever hear a priest say such a thing. Nominal Catholics have no clue about the sacredness of Holy Communion, or they have disregarded what they once knew, so a priest who tried to protect and defend the Eucharist would be loudly excoriated, and probably sanctioned by his bishop, for daring to tell the non-practicing Catholics in the congregation not to come to Communion.
Perhaps priests could choose as one of the readings at the Mass the passage from First Corinthians where St. Paul says that “whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will have to answer for the body and blood of the Lord. A person should examine himself, and so eat the bread and drink the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are ill and infirm, and a considerable number are dying. If we discerned ourselves, we would not be under judgment; but since we are judged by [the] Lord, we are being disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world” (11:27-32).
Q. Could you please answer these two questions: (1) We so often hear that Our Lord spent three days and three nights in the tomb, but He didn’t. He rose from the dead before the third night. (2) The Nicene Creed says that Jesus is “the only begotten Son of God,” and someone has suggested that since Jesus was “begotten,” He is inferior to the Father? How should we respond? — J.H.T., via e-mail.
A. (1) In Matt. 12:40, Jesus is quoted as saying: “Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.” In Matt. 27:62-65, the chief priests and Pharisees said to Pontius Pilate: “Sir, we remember that this impostor while still alive said, ‘After three days I will be raised up.’ Give orders, then, that the grave be secured until the third day, lest his disciples come and steal him and say to the people, ‘He has been raised from the dead.’ This last imposture would be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, ‘The guard is yours; go secure it as best you can’.”
To the modern mind, three days and three nights mean 72 hours, but the ancient Jews calculated time in a different way. To them three days could mean any part of the first day (Friday), all of the second day (Saturday), and part of the third day (Sunday). So Jesus was not in the tomb for 72 hours, but perhaps only for half of that time, that is, from sundown on Friday to dawn on Sunday. Without knowing the exact time of His burial and His Resurrection, the time in the tomb could be close to the 40 hours that we traditionally commemorate with Eucharistic adoration.
(2) As various writers have pointed out, the word “begotten” comes from the Greek word monogenes, which means one of a kind or unique. Jesus was not created by the Father, but rather shares the same divine nature as the Father. John confirms this in verses 1-3 of his Gospel, when he says of Jesus that “in the beginning was the Word,/ and the Word was with God./ and the Word was God./ He was in the beginning with God./ All things came to be through him,/ and without him nothing came to be.”
In Col. 1:15-17, St. Paul says in Jesus “were created all things in/ heaven and on earth,/ the visible and invisible,/ whether thrones or dominions or/ principalities or powers;/ all things were created through him and/ for him.”
Creation is not just the work of the Father, says the Catechism of the Catholic Church (n. 258), but is “the common work of three divine Persons. For as the Trinity has only one and the same nature, so too does it have only one and the same operation: ‘The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle.’ However each divine Person performs the common work according to his unique personal property.”
Refuting some of the heresies about Jesus that were popular in the early centuries of the Church, the Catechism (n. 465) notes that “the first Council of Nicaea in 325 confessed in its Creed that the Son of God is ‘begotten, not made, of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father,’ and condemned Arius, who had affirmed that the Son of God ‘came to be from things that were not’ and that he was ‘from another substance’ than that of the Father.”
In paragraph 451, says the Catechism (n. 467), the Council of Chalcedon said that “we unanimously teach and confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ: the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man, composed of rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father as to his divinity and consubstantial with us as to his humanity.”
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