The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary falls on August 15, which is a Sunday in 2021.  While details are not known to us, we have been assured that the Blessed Mother was assumed body and soul into Heaven.  This has been known since the earliest days of Christianity!

After the Ascension of her Son, the Virgin Mary aided the beginnings of the Church with her prayers. Even after her Assumption into heaven, she continues to intercede for her children, to be a model of faith and charity for all, and to exercise over them a salutary influence deriving from the superabundant merits of Christ. The faithful see in Mary an image and an anticipation of the resurrection that awaits them and they invoke her as advocate, helper, benefactress and mediatrix.” (Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, # 197)

In the same metropolitan DC neighborhood as the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and the Saint John Paul II National Shrine is the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America, which includes replicas of Holy Land shrines.  The monastery was envisioned when it would have been rare for an American to visit the actual Holy Land.

Some years ago, I recall being confused to see a replica of the “Tomb of Mary” in that DC monastery and wondered how it coincided with our belief in the Assumption. Subsequently, I have had it clarified for me that there are indeed “tombs” for the Blessed Mother in both Ephesus and Jerusalem, but there is nobody in either tomb (cf, Tim Staples, The Assumption of Mary in History).  Similar to the Holy Sepulchre itself, these are empty tombs.

After great mid-twentieth century appeal from the faithful and from the episcopacy, Pope Pius XII’s Munificentissimus Deus (1950) assured us that the Assumption was incontestable dogma:

13. Various testimonies, indications and signs of this common belief of the Church are evident from remote times down through the course of the centuries; and this same belief becomes more clearly manifest from day to day.

38. All these proofs and considerations of the holy Fathers and the theologians are based upon the Sacred Writings as their ultimate foundation. These set the loving Mother of God as it were before our very eyes as most intimately joined to her divine Son and as always sharing his lot. Consequently it seems impossible to think of her, the one who conceived Christ, brought him forth, nursed him with her milk, held him in her arms, and clasped him to her breast, as being apart from him in body, even though not in soul, after this earthly life. Since our Redeemer is the Son of Mary, he could not do otherwise, as the perfect observer of God’s law, than to honor, not only his eternal Father, but also his most beloved Mother. And, since it was within his power to grant her this great honor, to preserve her from the corruption of the tomb, we must believe that he really acted in this way.

41. Since the universal Church, within which dwells the Spirit of Truth who infallibly directs it toward an ever more perfect knowledge of the revealed truths, has expressed its own belief many times over the course of the centuries, and since the bishops of the entire world are almost unanimously petitioning that the truth of the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven should be defined as a dogma of divine and Catholic faith–this truth which is based on the Sacred Writings, which is thoroughly rooted in the minds of the faithful, which has been approved in ecclesiastical worship from the most remote times, which is completely in harmony with the other revealed truths, and which has been expounded and explained magnificently in the work, the science, and the wisdom of the theologians – we believe that the moment appointed in the plan of divine providence for the solemn proclamation of this outstanding privilege of the Virgin Mary has already arrived.”

44….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.

In a general audience one half-century later, St Pope John Paul II (6/25/97) provided further clarification:

Some theologians have in fact maintained that the Blessed Virgin did not die and and was immediately raised from earthly life to heavenly glory. However, this opinion was unknown until the 17th century, whereas a common tradition actually exists which sees Mary’s death as her entry into heavenly glory.”

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….As to the cause of Mary’s death, the opinions that wish to exclude her from death by natural causes seem groundless….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.

Why?

So, why does the Church teach that the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed – body and soul  – into Heaven?  Well, the short answer is because it’s true – the ultimate reason to believe anything!

While our own bodies will be separated from our souls at death, they will eventually be reunited.  As Dr. Scott Hahn notes, “Most of us don’t really believe in the resurrection of the body. Or we struggle to believe it….we don’t treat our bodies like sacred temples that belong in the heavenly courts” (Hope to Die: The Christian Meaning of Death and the Resurrection of the Body, Introduction). We are given a choice as to whether we truly want our united bodies and souls to spend all eternity with God and His mother.

Let the Assumption of the Blessed Mother remind us that God desires that we accept His unbelievably great offer for our united bodies and souls to spend all eternity with Him and His mother.