The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Holyday of Obligation – Transferred to the weekend Masses

The Solemnity of the Assumption is normally celebrated on August 15th and is a Holyday of Obligation. As the Solemnity falls on a Saturday this year, the celebration of the solemnity is transferred to the weekend Masses with the obligation to attend Mass on Sunday or the evening before.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

The Assumption is the oldest feast day of Our Lady but we do not know when it first came to be celebrated. From the fourth century the "Memory of Mary" was being celebrated. Later it was to become our feast of the Assumption. Having become a great celebration in the churches of the Eastern Empire. In the seventh century, it began to be celebrated in Rome under the title of the "Falling Asleep" ("Dormitio") of the Mother of God. Soon the name was changed to the "Assumption of Mary," since there was more to the feast than her dying. It also proclaimed that she had been taken up, body and soul, into heaven.

On November 1st, 1950, Pope Pius XII defined the Assumption of Mary to be a dogma of faith: “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 to heavenly glory.” Thus, he solemnly proclaimed that the belief whereby the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the close of her earthly life, was taken up, body and soul, into the glory of heaven, definitively forms part of the deposit of faith, received from the Apostles. To avoid all that is uncertain, the Pope did not state either the manner or the circumstances of time and place in which the Assumption took place. Only the fact of the Assumption of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of heaven, is the matter of the definition.

We gather next weekend to honour Mary, who has gone before us in faith to share in the victory over death won by her Son, in which we all can share, in the glory of heaven, if we live lives of fidelity to God’s Word as Mary did.