“By the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, 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.” — Pope Pius XII
On November 1, 1950, crowds from the world over thronged St. Peter’s
Square in Rome to hear Pope Pius XII give the Church its most recently
proclaimed dogma: the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Another huge effort to bring people out was the 1950 Holy Year.
L’Osservatore Romano wrote, “It was the biggest conversation that any
Pope has ever had with the world.”
More than a million and a half
pilgrims come to Rome. It was the first mass event in Christianity’s
history.
The Pope calls all the faithful to reawaken, to shake off
lethargy, to live Catholicism in a militant way.
The Holy Year concludes with another huge event: the proclamation of
the dogma of the Assumption.
Today, it is still the most recent dogma
proclaimed by the Church.
There is something slightly troubling in this Marian devotion.
Mediatrix of a God who is very far off, the Madonna seems like our last
refuge before what is inevitable explodes, before some tragic secret
assails humanity.
The narration’s last paragraph is only correct, of course, in the sense of Revelation 12,
in which the “great sign” which appears in the sky, “a woman clothed
with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of
twelve stars,” suffers the wrath of the dragon’s persecution … and
eventually is victorious when the huge dragon is thrown down to earth
thanks to the intervention of God and Saint Michael.
Such were the times.
The effervescent anthropological optimism of Gaudium et Spes
was more than a decade into the future.
The world of 1950 was still
shell-shocked from the horrors of the Second World War: Europe had
barely begun its struggle towards economic stability, and Italian
Catholics were fighting a battle to the death with Communism in the
polls.
Graham Greene gives us a sense of what those times were like and what the dogma meant to those who welcomed it, writing in Life magazine in 1950:
"It is legitimate, of course, to speculate why this
precise moment in history has been chosen.
I can write only as an
uninstructed Catholic.
Because the doctrines of Christ’s nature as God
and Man are walled about by the doctrine of the Annunciation and the
Virgin Birth, so that it is not too much to say that the whole of
Christianity to this day lies in Our Lady’s womb, it is to her that
recourse has always been had in times of crisis.
So it was through all
the terrible storms of the 16th century when the Turks seemed on the
point of conquering Europe: Appropriately Pius V instituted the feast
day of the Most Holy Rosary in thanksgiving for the great victory of
Lepanto. And now, when a yet heavier threat lies upon our borders,
perhaps the proclamation of the new dogma will help the devotion of
millions. Devotion means simply an expression of love and if we love
enough, even in human terms, we gain courage.
This would be no argument, of course, for proclaiming a novel belief,
but a dogma is only a definition of an old belief. It restricts the
area of truth at the expense of legend or heresy, and the greatest
definitions of the Church, accepted alike by Protestants and Catholics —
the nature of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity — were definitions
drawn up to exclude heresies within the Church itself."
In our day there are no obvious signs of heretical beliefs within the
Church concerning the Assumption of Our Lady and therefore it was
believed by some Catholics that to proclaim the dogma was unnecessary.
But Catholics today cannot remain quite untouched by the general heresy
of our time, the unimportance of the individual.
Today the human body is
regarded as expendable material, something to be eliminated wholesale
by the atom bomb, a kind of anonymous carrion.
After the First World War
crosses marked the places where the dead lay, Allied and enemy: Light
burned continually in the capitals of Europe over the graves of the
unknown warriors.
But no crosses today mark the common graves into which
the dead of London and Berlin were shoveled, and Hiroshima’s memorial
is the outline of a body photographed by the heat flash on asphalt.
The
definition of the Assumption proclaims again the doctrine of our
Resurrection, the eternal destiny of each human body, and again it is
the history of Mary which maintains the doctrine in its clarity.
The
Resurrection of Christ can be regarded as the Resurrection of a God, but
the Resurrection of Mary foreshadows the Resurrection of each one of
us.
Such were the times, indeed. And so the Church’s enduring faith in
the Assumption of Mary — catalogued in painstaking historical detail by
Pius XII in Munificentissimus Deus
— raises our eyes too beyond the still-deepening “general heresy of our
time,” the devaluation of human life, to our Mother in heaven who
intercedes for us at God’s right hand, Queen of the Church triumphant.
SIC: NCR/INT'L