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The Roman Catholic Monastery of the Holy Cross was founded in 1989 and became a Benedictine house of the Subiaco Congregation in 2000. We follow a traditional contemplative life, chanting Psalms seven times a day and singing Gregorian chant at the Eucharist. We do this in a distinctive way by living our monastic life on the South Side of Chicago. Prior Peter, the author of this blog, was appointed Prior in August of 2004.

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Assumption - Dom Brendan

When I was a child and we had a Holy Day of Obligation like today our parish priest would inevitably begin his sermon by saying: Today is the Feast of the Assumption and how happy we are to be here. My father would groan quietly and slide down in the pew for what he knew would be a 40 minute sermon on the joys of coming to Church in the middle of the week. Obviously he was not happy to be there, half baked Catholic that he was. But his sentiments did not seem to be shared by the other in my parish: the Church on a day like today would have standing room only at all three masses.

In 1958 a parish priest could assume that most people would be happy to treat a weekday as a Sunday and interrupt their day to come to church to celebrate the Liturgy in honor of the Mother of God. I doubt if any priest today would make that assumption, if you’ll forgive the pun.

So why are we doing it? Certainly, we are honoring the memory of the Mother of the Lord. But we cannot forget that we’re doing so out of a set of specific historical circumstances that most of us have first hand knowledge of.

Historically speaking there has been a Feast of the Assumption since the 7th or 8th Century, but it was Pius XII who proclaimed the Assumption a dogma of the faith in 1950. However this was viewed at the time, his decision has been criticized in the last 25 years by voices inside and outside the Church.

But the fact that the Pope proclaimed the Assumption a dogma and the timing of it, November 1, 1950 cannot have been insignificant given the extraordinary assault on the human body witnessed in what another Pope has called "The Century of Tears".

Ten million killed in World War I, 600,000 alone in one battle, the Battle of the Somme (there were 58,000 causalities in the first hour of that battle). And that figure is dwarfed by the 60 million dead in the battles and death factories of WWII.

We have no time to talk about the 40 million dead in the Stalinist purges of the 30’s and 40’s, the 100 million dead in the Maoist purges of the 50’s and 60’s, the millions killed by Pol Pot in Cambodia, or the slaughter of over 1.3 million Tutsi’s in Ruanda. And I have only skimmed the surface: we should not forget the 28 million abortions in this country alone since Roe v. Wade. A century of unimaginable atrocities, and a century that gave us new verb to describe what human beings are capable of: genocide.

In the face of this assault on the human body, Pius XII understood that in defining the dogma of the Assumption the Church was at the same time making an assertion about the nobility, dignity and worth of the bodies and souls of every human being.

It is not the teaching of the Church that the Mother of God escaped the common fate reserved to all human beings. It is the Church's teaching that at the end of her life she was taken into heaven body and soul in anticipation of the general resurrection on the last day. She is, as it were, the first fruits of Christ's Resurrection from the Dead just as she was his first disciple.

That is a bold and extraordinary claim for the Church to make about a fellow human being who was and is a woman and a mother. An extradordinary claim to make about the human body in an age that both exalts and denegrates bodilness in every advertisement, tv show, movie and magazine.

But it is also an extraordinarily hopeful and optimistic assertion about the lives and deaths of every human being in an age rank with pessimisim nihilism, and dispair. To say that Mary lives, body and soul in heaven means that Christianity does not promise a salvation of the soul alone in which all that has been precious and valuable to us in this world will vanish like a pageant that has been staged for a single occasion and then has no further meaning.

It means that God knows and loves the entire person that we are now, body and soul, flesh and spirit. Immortality or eternal life is not a "state" we will enjoy in heaven or fail to enjoy in hell after our death, it is something that is present, in this body of ours thoughout the journey we call life. Present in and through what we experience, feel, suffer, think, know, love and fail to love.

Our eternity is based on God's love for us. And anyone whom God loves never ceases to be. It is not just a shadow of ourselves that continues in being, rather in God and because of God we ourselves, with all that we are and all that is most ourselves, are preserved forever in an act of creative love.

So it is for the Mother of God. So it is for the great throng of the dead throughout human history and so it will be for us. And so it will be for you and me.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let me preface my comment with a firm belief in the dogma concerning Mary. There are other questions that non-Catholics have that are rarely addressed by the Church.

On what basis do we declare the slavation of Mary? Do we assert that because of the Immaculate Conception, she lost a part of her human nature (ergo: with no "original" sin, she had no other tendancy toward sin)? Do we say that she was completely free of all sin? (I'm sure her village neighbors would tell us otherwise). Do we say that because of her "freedom" from sin, she was not susceptible to a human death? This would explain the fundamentalist protestor claim that we worship her as a god.
If we say her "freedom" from original sin was by preservation (a common church teaching), we are introducing a fifth type of salvation. (#1 Salvation by faith, as demonstrated by Abraham; #2 Salvation by the laws of the OT; #3 Salvation through the crucifixion and resurrection; #4 Salvation through the search for God because of never hearing about His works on the cross).
Just what type of salvation is the Church introducing with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception?

9:09 AM  
Blogger Prior Peter, OSB said...

Dear anonymous,
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception grows out of the awareness of Mary's Assumption and the understanding that the Resurrection is already 'inbreaking' in the present. I see no reason not to assume that the teaching of the Assumption is based on experience (there are no 'first class' relics of the Virgin Mary that I know of).

In terms of 'the salvation of Mary', God saves. How God saves is surely His decision and not bound by rules. God chose Mary before Christ was born, and her willingness to participate in God's plan makes it clear that she had faith in God. Is something else necessary to be saved?

Incidentally, we do not say that because Mary was free from Original Sin that she was not suceptible to death. Like her sinless Son, she died (the Father prefer to say that she 'fell asleep'). What did not happen is that her body did not corrupt and was instead taken into heaven.

Not having access to her gossipy village neighbors, I would not venture to guess what they would say about her behavior. And even if they thought she sinned, why would we believe them over the revealed teaching of the Church?

Finally, sin is not a part of human nature as intended by God. It is a deprivation and corruption of human nature. So Mary lost nothing of her human nature by preservation from sin. This we know from Christology. Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human. He is not less than human because He is sinless; nor is Mary. If anyone loses part of human nature, it is surely us sinners who, as Dante puts it, 'lose the good of the intellect' by sin. So we become less than we are meant to be as rational creatures by sinning.

Peace to you in Jesus Christ!

11:39 AM  

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