Assumption of Mary

[babochka]

The Catholic Church does have a feast celebrating the death of Mary.
It is called The Dormition.

One needs to appreciate it is not big in the Latin Rite, but it is in the East, and it appears at least as ancient as that of the Assumption.

Exactly. Can we not trust the liturgy of the Church to teach the faith? Are we to believe that this great feast teaches nothing but “pious tradition”, or do we trust that the liturgy of the Church passes on the faith of the Church? And from the liturgy of the great feast of Mary’s death and assumption, we have the following texts:

O marvelous wonder! The Fount of life hath been** laid in a grave**, and the tomb hath become a ladder leading to heaven. Rejoice, O Gethsemane, the holy chamber of the Theotokos. And let us believers shout to her with Gabriel, the chief of the angels, saying, Rejoice, O full of grace. The Lord is with thee, granting the world, through thee, the Great Mercy.

 

[thistle]

I am saying that a dogma does not drop from a clear blue sky.
Dogmas arise from clearly observable preceeding circumstances and conditions.

One of those evolving situations is sometimes increasingly strident dissent from what was up to that time considered a clearly held, long-time traditional belief, liturgical practice and even a common place teaching. Such was the divinity of Christ for example.

I call that “evolution” of a dogma, you may call it something else, the reality is the same.

Mary’s death is not and never has been Church doctrine. You are wrong.

 

[AmbroseSJ]

Mary’s death is not and never has been Church doctrine. You are wrong.

Why don’t you give us something more substantial or convincing than your own bald assertions? Show us your proof. We on the other hand have been backing up our arguments with Liturgical teachings, Papal statements and dogmas.

Otherwise you are just another internet opinion monger.

 

[Mintaka]

Mary’s death has always been part of the Magisterium.

OTOH, in certain parts of the West in very late medieval times, certain people spread the poetic idea that Mary went into a coma but didn’t die, mostly by misunderstanding “falling asleep” or the Bible text “He would not let His beloved see decay.” (Which was first applied to Jesus, and there it didn’t mean that Jesus didn’t die.)

Since in the next few centuries, Marian devotion in the West has always been very important and under great attack, and since it was more important to promote Mary as being alive in heaven, body and soul, and that Mary was Immaculate – so far the Popes have been very gentle about not defining it as error to say that Mary never died. They don’t want to tell people’s moms that they’re heretics.

But as much as it freaked me out when I first started studying up on it, I think it’s pretty clear that Mary did drink of the same chalice as her Son, in that the Second Eve accepted death despite being sinless and unfallen.

But since the Popes are being very gentle about it, you do have the right to believe differently on this point.

 

[thistle]

Why don’t you give us something more substantial or convincing than your own bald assertions? Show us your proof. We on the other hand have been backing up our arguments with Liturgical teachings, Papal statements and dogmas.

Otherwise you are just another internet opinion monger.

You have this the wrong way round. The claim was made by Blue Horizon that the death of Mary is Church doctrine. The onus is on her/him to provide proof of claim and not on me.
Please direct me to the teaching in the CCC that BINDS all Catholics upon pain of sin to believe that Mary died before being assumed.
It is not up to me to prove a negative!!!

 

[Mintaka]

I’m going to link to an extremely middle of the road Catholic devotional source.

It’s Rosarium sive Psalterium Beatae Virginis Mariae, published in Antwerp in 1600. It was written and printed for recusant English Catholics.

While giving an account of the Dominican Rosary mysteries in the Preface, the book defines the Fourth Glorious Mystery as:

1. Dormitio sacrae Virginis; & tam animae quam corporis eius in coelos Assumptio.

(The Dormition of the sacred Virgin, and also the Assumption of her soul as well as her body into the heavens.)

If I’ve edited it right, here’s a link to the book’s picture of the Dormition. As usual, it follows the early Christian account of the surviving Apostles gathering at her bedside right before she dies.

 

[Mintaka]

Here’s a quick translation of the aforementioned book’s meditations on the Dormition and Assumption. There’s a skosh more under the Coronation of Mary, but this is probably enough to show the intent.

The Assumption of the God-bearing Virgin into Heaven.

Meanwhile the Apostles (as handed down by them) had each preached to their particular regions of this circle of lands: first Peter in Judea, then in Syria, and then afterward and especially in Italia; Andrew in Greece; James the Greater in Spain; John in Asia; Thomas in India; James the Less in Jerusalem; Philip in Phrygia; Bartholomew in Scythia; Matthew in Ethiopia; Simon in Persia; Thaddaeus in Mesopotamia; Matthias in Palestine; Paul in all the world, as it were – cooperating with the Lord everywhere and having supported their words with signs following them. And everywhere the Church bloomed with the splendor of all the virtues.

The most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, given that she was infused with divine matters so that she abounded in experiential knowledge, such that she taught the Evangelists many mysteries that she had known and observed herself, before others; yet she being a woman, and the most humble and modest of all creatures, she neither would preach in their presence nor dwell with the multitudes; but in the private estate of her perpetual Virginity and observing the virtues for the rest of them, she follows that “best part” of the contemplative life which she had chosen learned, and diligently practiced from her childhood.

1. Hail Mary.

Therefore the most free God-bearing virgin was continually unbusy with mundane worries, for the sake of her divine meditations; the Apostle John (to whom she was commended by the Lord on the Cross) procuring all things necessary for life.

1. Hail Mary.

Fifteen years after the Lord’s Ascension, it was divinely revealed to the Virgin Mary that soon she would reach enjoyment with her most glorious Son in heaven, by paying off the debt of death.*

• This is a weird expression, but it shows up also in accounts of saintly deaths of people who stayed dead.

1. Hail Mary.

The suppliant Mother of God then asked her Son, the same Lord, that he would think it fitting to supply her a sight of His Apostles before she was deceased from this world.

1. Hail Mary.

In a moment’s time, carried off aloft, all the Apostles came together in Jerusalem for visiting the Virgin, except for St. James (already killed for the glory of Christ) and St. Thomas, who got there a little late by special providence of God.

1. Hail Mary.

And so, with the Apostles and other apostolic men gathered, she handed over her most holy spirit (cf. John 19:30) into the hands of God; with light shining all around on it
from a remarkable heavenly flock, and escorted by them, it flew into the heavens.

1. Hail Mary.

Indeed, her sacred body which had conceived God in its womb in an ineffable way, was deposited in an honorable place in Beth-shemesh* with both angelic and apostolic psalmody.

• Beth-shemesh is where the Ark miraculously returned to Israel from Palestine, in 1 Samuel 6:12-15.

1. Hail Mary.

A choir of those angels remained in that place for three whole days, singing “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,” and praising God to His mother.

1. Hail Mary.

After three days, the song of the angels having ceased, the Apostle Thomas came, who, burning with the most devoted desire for seeing and venerating the Virgin’s sacred body, asked strenuously to be taken there by his fellow apostles.

1. Hail Mary.

Therefore, the rest of the Apostles being willing to grant Thomas this favor, they opened the place; but beyond the holy burial linens with the sweetest scent, they found nothing else.

1. Hail Mary.

Nor could they judge anything else by the witness of all their eyes but that the immaculate, incorrupt body of the Virgin had been assumed into heaven by a singular privilege; and they declared this as a special providence of God.

 

[Mintaka]

Here’s another middle-of-the-road Rosary book with meditations:

Rosarium beatissimae Virginis Deiparae Mariae, by Abraham Bzowski. Published in Rome, 1617.

Fourth [Glorious] Mystery.

The Virgin Mary is assumed to her heavenly chamber.

1 Our Father. 10 Hail Mary.

I adore you, most holy Virgin Mary, gloriously rising from the prison of the sepulchre, and proceeding to the sidereal Kingdom adorned with the immense glory of the heavens.

I beseech you, by your ineffable consolation that you foreknew at the hour of passing. May you think it fitting to assist my sinful soul at the last moment of my life, to protect me with your shadow from all the traps of my spiritual enemies; so that it could cross through the most crooked dangers more safely; and blessed by your hands, it could fly off to the place of eternal happiness, where you reign with your Son for everlasting ages. Amen.

 

[Blue_Horizon]

Mary’s death is not and never has been Church doctrine. You are wrong.

Thistle every one here understands your personal and spirited opinion on this point.

But if you want to influence or educate the confused or undecided on an apologetics forum… then you do need to mount a refuting case, argument or authority to shore up what is, at this point, your baseless emotion.

If all you can do is keep repeating your unexplained emotional and somewhat dogmatic opinion… how is that essentially different from mild trolling or unhelpful bluster?

 

[Blue_Horizon]

You have this the wrong way round. The claim was made by Blue Horizon that the death of Mary is Church doctrine. The onus is on her/him to provide proof of claim and not on me.
Please direct me to the teaching in the CCC that BINDS all Catholics upon pain of sin to believe that Mary died before being assumed.
It is not up to me to prove a negative!!!

Thistle I said it has been a constant belief and teaching of the Church, unlike the dissenting, but currently limit, view. And JPII says the same thing.

Try not to get hung up on the word “doctrine” … you are forcing a modern meaning onto it that has more to do with Ultramontanism than its much older meaning.

 

[prodromos]

If the Church celebrates a major feast day for the Dormition of Mary, then it has indeed formally defined that she did indeed die. The fact that the Latin rite has since changed the focus of this feast day to her bodily assumption, and subsequently changed the name of the feast day, does nothing to change this fact. When the feast day was first established in Rome, it was called the Dormition of Mary…

 

[prodromos]

There is evidence of the feast of the Dormition being celebrated from before the 3rd Ecumenical council at Ephesus, and by the end of the 6th century, the feast of the Dormition on August 15 had been established by custom and was also decreed by emperor Mauricius to be observed throughout the Byzantine empire. This is long before the schism in the 11th century.

 

[prodromos]

It was at the end of the 7th century that Pope Sergius I introduced three feasts of the Virgin Mary to the Roman calendar, her annunciation, her nativity, and her dormition.

 

[prodromos]

w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1997/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_25061997.html

On 25 June 1997 during a General Audience Pope John Paul II affirmed that Mary did indeed experience natural death prior to her assumption into Heaven, stating:It is true that in Revelation death is presented as a punishment for sin. However, the fact that the Church proclaims Mary free from original sin by a unique divine privilege does not lead to the conclusion that she also received physical immortality. The Mother is not superior to the Son who underwent death, giving it a new meaning and changing it into a means of salvation. Involved in Christ’s redemptive work and associated in his saving sacrifice, Mary was able to share in his suffering and death for the sake of humanity’s Redemption. What Severus of Antioch says about Christ also applies to her: “Without a preliminary death, how could the Resurrection have taken place?” (Antijulianistica, Beirut 1931, 194f.). To share in Christ’s Resurrection, Mary had first to share in his death. The New Testament provides no information on the circumstances of Mary’s death. This silence leads one to suppose that it happened naturally, with no detail particularly worthy of mention. If this were not the case, how could the information about it have remained hidden from her contemporaries and not have been passed down to us in some way? As to the cause of Mary’s death, the opinions that wish to exclude her from death by natural causes seem groundless. It is more important to look for the Blessed Virgin’s spiritual attitude at the moment of her departure from this world. In this regard, St Francis de Sales maintains that Mary’s death was due to a transport of love. He speaks of a dying “in love, from love and through love”, going so far as to say that the Mother of God died of love for her Son Jesus (Treatise on the Love of God, bk. 7, ch. XIII-XIV). Whatever from the physical point of view was the organic, biological cause of the end of her bodily life, it can be said that for Mary the passage from this life to the next was the full development of grace in glory, so that no death can ever be so fittingly described as a “dormition” as hers.

 

[AmbroseSJ]

Yes, we have not only noted the silence regarding her death (in only that single phrase in M.D.) , but we have also noted St. Pope JPII’s explication that the silence was not due to any doubt about the death of the Virgin Mary, but rather that Pope Pius XII considered it to be outside the intent of the dogmatic declaration.

You have to understand our view is that this is an ancient Church teaching and belief. We do not believe this is a “pious opinion.” We see it taught by both the Eastern and Western Church in the Liturgy, in the Fathers of the Church, by various Popes and even in the dogmatic declaration of M.D as was quoted earlier.

Therefore, although it has never been FORMALLY and dogmatically defined (as in the case of the male only Priesthood) because it has been the ancient and continual teaching of the ordinary Magisterium.

Our wish is only that this ancient and continuous Church teaching be upheld first. We oppose those who try to push this teaching into the background, or to try to demote this teaching to just another speculative opinion among many.

 

[Good_Fella]

If the Church celebrates a major feast day for the Dormition of Mary, then it has indeed formally defined that she did indeed die. The fact that the Latin rite has since changed the focus of this feast day to her bodily assumption, and subsequently changed the name of the feast day, does nothing to change this fact. When the feast day was first established in Rome, it was called the Dormition of Mary…

I agree. The beliefs and teachings of the Church from earliest time need not be verbally formulized in order to be infallibly true requiring the religious assent of all the faithful. It wasn’t until 1854 that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was dogmatically defined by Pope Pius lX in his Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus. But Pope Sixtus IV ruled that all theological speculation and dispute about the Immaculate Conception should come to an end when he instituted the Feast Day in 1476. He in fact made an explicit reference to this teaching of the Church in his Apostolic Constitution Cum Praeexcelsa which was issued in 1477. We also find references to this teaching in the Decree on Original Sin by the Council of Trent in 1546, in the Bull *Ex Omnibus Afflictionibus * of Pope Pius V, issued in 1567, and the Brief *Sollicitudo Omnium Ecclesiarum * of Pope Alexander VII in 1661, soon after the Feast Day was universally established as a memorial belonging to the sacred Tradition of the Church from earliest time in conjunction with the writings of the early Church Fathers who designated Mary as the new Eve and the new Ark of the Covenant.

PAX
:heaven: