What is the Assumption of Mary?

The dogma

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was solemnly defined as a dogma of the Catholic faith by Pope Pius XII in the apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus on November 1, 1950. The text of the definition reads: "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."¹

The definition was made ex cathedra, with the full authority of the universal Magisterium. It is therefore an infallible teaching of the Catholic faith.

What the dogma does and does not teach

The dogma affirms:

1. The Assumption is bodily. Mary's body was preserved from corruption in the grave; she was taken to heaven in her bodily integrity.
2. The Assumption is soul as well as body. The whole person of Mary was received into the heavenly glory; her soul was not separated from her body to enter heaven without it.
3. The Assumption took place at the end of her earthly life. The dogma deliberately leaves open whether Mary actually died (the Dormitio, the falling asleep, of the Eastern tradition) before being assumed, or whether she was assumed without dying. The Catholic tradition has more often held that she did die a peaceful death (the Transitus Mariae tradition); the dogma does not require this view but does not exclude it.

The theological logic

The Assumption is theologically continuous with the Immaculate Conception (see What is the Immaculate Conception?):

• Mary was preserved from original sin from the first moment of her existence.
• The corruption of the body in death is a consequence of original sin (Genesis 3:19; Romans 5:12).
• It is therefore fitting that Mary, free from original sin, should be preserved also from the bodily corruption that follows from it.

Beyond this logical fittingness, the Assumption is the personal application of the Resurrection of Christ to the woman whose entire life was unique participation in the Redemption: as Mother of the Redeemer, as the New Eve at his side at Calvary, as the model and Mother of the Church, Mary received the first-fruits of the bodily resurrection that all the redeemed are promised at the end of time.²

The patristic and liturgical witness

The dogma was not invented by Pope Pius XII in 1950. The pope was defining what the universal Church had already believed and celebrated for many centuries:

• The feast of the Dormitio (the falling asleep of Mary) was being celebrated in Jerusalem from at least the fifth century.
• The Emperor Maurice (582-602) extended the feast to the universal calendar of the Eastern Empire.
• In the West, Pope Saint Sergius I introduced a procession on the feast in the seventh century.
• Saint John Damascene (eighth century) gave the classical patristic statement of the bodily Assumption.

The dogmatic definition therefore ratified what the universal Church had been teaching and celebrating in liturgy for at least 1500 years.

The feast

The Solemnity of the Assumption is celebrated on August 15 in the universal calendar. It is a holy day of obligation in the United States (with the exception that, in some dioceses, the obligation is dispensed when the feast falls on a Saturday or Monday). The Mass of the Assumption proclaims the Marian woman of Revelation 12:1, "clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars."

The fourth Glorious Mystery of the Rosary is the Assumption.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Pope Pius XII, apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus (November 1, 1950), defining the dogma of the Assumption. ↩

2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 966 to 974, on the Assumption. ↩