Although most of the windows in our church date from the 1960’s, the large window of the Assumption of Mary behind the altar has been gracing our church since 1906, a gift of the Cuneo Family. The image confuses many people: If Mary is being taken up into heaven, why are most of the apostles looking down? Well, the answer is that the artisan (or, perhaps the benefactor) chose to depict two separate images of the Assumption in one window.  The upper part of the window reproduces in stained glass part of a large painting of the Assumption by the Italian Renaissance painter Titian. The original hangs behind the altar in a Franciscan church in Venice. The lower half of the painting clearly shows the disciples looking upward as Mary enters body and soul into heavenly glory. In our widow, this part of the painting was cut out and replaced by an ancient tradition surrounding Mary’s death. The apostles supposedly came to visit Mary’s grave and found her body absent on the third day after her death, replaced by a bouquet of white flowers. Only a few of the disciples in this depiction seem to have grasped the new location of Mary’s body and are looking upward toward the heavens. The rest are still mystified by the empty tomb, much as they were on Easter Sunday when Jesus’ body was missing.

Although the two images do not blend together all that well, the window does honor both the Eastern and Western traditions concerning the end of Mary’s life. Historians hold that belief in Mary being raised body and soul into heavenly glory (the first among us to share fully in Christ’s redemptive act) can be traced to the second century. Interest in and devotion to this belief has enjoyed greater significance in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Rite churches than in the Western church. In the Eastern tradition, the Feast was officially established on the church calendar in the fifth century and is called the Dormition or The Falling Asleep of Mary. The belief was quite explicit. Mary died a peaceful death and her soul retuned to God. On the third day after her death, her body was also raised to heaven. By the eighth century the Feast of the Assumption of Mary was being celebrated on or about August 15 in both the Eastern and Western church. In both the East and the West, a distinction was made between Christ’s Ascension and Mary’s Assumption:  Jesus attained heavenly glory under his own power; Mary was raised to glory through the redemption wrought by Christ’s Resurrection.

Belief in the Assumption of Mary did not become an official teaching or dogma of the Catholic Church until 1950, during the papacy of Pope Pius XII: “We pronounce, proclaim and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma that the Immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever Virgin, when the course of her earthly life was over, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory.” Notice that the proclamation leaves open the question of whether Mary died. It also leaves open the question of what it means to be raised “body and soul” into heaven. Whatever a resurrected body may be like, the resurrection of the body has been an essential belief from the beginning. We are not simply spirits encased in a disposable body. Our physicality matters: how we treat our own bodies and how we treat others.  Some people have speculated that it was in the aftermath of two world wars with tremendous loss of life, the Holocaust in Europe, and the unleashing of the atomic bomb over Japan that led the Pope to make the proclamation when he did. People matter—not just their souls. Even the psychologist Carl Jung chimed in to applaud the proclamation, seeing it as an affirmation of the feminine in God and the prototype for our resurrection. In this sense, the Assumption becomes a feast of hope. As the bishops said at the Second Vatican Council fifteen years later: “the Mother of Jesus in the glory which she possesses in body and soul in heaven is the image and the beginning of the Church as it is to be perfected in the world to come.”

If you are wondering why our church, founded in 1881, should be called Assumption, when the Assumption did not become an official teaching of the Church until 1950, well, popes are not supposed to proclaim church teachings out of thin air. Pope Pius was simply making official what had been a common Catholic belief for centuries. Even Martin Luther believed in it! Before making the Assumption Catholic dogma, the Vatican polled the 1181 residential bishops in the world. Only 22 dissented. Of that number, only 8 expressed reservations about the doctrine itself. The others were in dioceses where Catholics were a small minority, such as the Bible Belt, and were concerned that it would negatively affect relations with other Christians—since the doctrine does not have a solid basis in Scripture. At any rate, it was on August 15, 1886 that Mass was celebrated for the first time in our present church. Don’t forget to come to Mass on Thursday August 15, and then join in the Feast Day Picnic following the 12:15 Mass next Sunday, August 18.

                                                                           Fr. Joe