Catholic Faith Refresher Course

Did the Holy Church of God hear about the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary for the first time on November 1, 1950? Certainly not! One needs just to read the text by which Our Holy Father Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to see that since the most ancient times of the Church, the faithful already professed faith in the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary. Whether in ikons, whether in stained glass windows, whether in the writings of the Fathers, already everywhere, faith in the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary was professed, but it was not yet solemnly defined by Holy Church.

These dogmas, indeed, we must remember, cannot be new truths. The Revelation was wholly completed at the death of the last Apostle. One must therefore look before the death of the last Apostle in the Deposit of Tradition, of Revelation, bequeathed to us, given to us by the Apostles, to find there the truths which we must still believe today. No Pope can invent a new truth which he would like to submit to our Faith. He can only find this truth in the course of centuries, signifying that this truth was already implicitly contained in that Revelation and Faith which the Apostles have given us. This is the teaching of the Church.

Thus when we believe in the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, that is, when we believe that the Good Lord granted that the body of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary be already glorified now, we do nothing else than unite ourselves to the faith of the whole Church, to the Church of all the centuries. And this must be for us a great joy, a great consolation, to think that our Faith today, stronger than ever, more solid than ever, is in union with that of the Catholics of all the centuries.

There is in this dogma of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary a very precious truth, very useful for our times, for our days. In these days, some want to deny miracles; in our days, some want to deny all supernatural realities. This word “supernatural” contains something somehow mysterious; the supernatural state may be difficult to understand for some faithful, it may be difficult to grasp. Yet it is present in the whole teaching of the Church.

The Feast of the Assumption shows us the very crowning of the work of God, of the supernatural work of God. God wants it for us too, as He did for the Most Blessed Virgin. He wants to “assume” our body, to spiritualize our body in a certain way and to give us all the joys of the spirit and all the joys of our divine filiation.

And how does that change our daily life? How must this supernatural life, this divine adoption, change our daily life? Because we must not see things as we would have seen them if we had merely had our human nature! To know that we are called to live for God, to live in God, to know Him directly, Him Who has created all things, must arouse in our hearts, in our intelligences, a desire of God, a longing to love God, through this divine nature, which is in us by grace, by sanctifying grace, a longing as those aroused throughout all the centuries of the Church from the very beginning of the Christian era.

This is what the mystery of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary teaches us today. And there shall be a similar crowning for us too. We must expect this, we must hope for this.

Let us ask the Most Blessed Virgin Mary on this day of her Assumption to help us truly understand what our supernatural life is, a participation in the Divine Life. God knows that She knows it, this participation in the Divine Life, She who has given natural life to Our Lord Jesus Christ, through the grace of the Holy Ghost. How much did the Good Lord flood her with spiritual graces! And how much is She capable of making us understand how beautiful, how good, how sweet it is to be united with Our Lord, to know the Good Lord and to live with God!

Let us ask the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to put in our souls, in our hearts, this immense desire, this unquenchable desire, of all the moments of our life, of our whole life, of each week, month and year, to be with God for all eternity.

- Excerpts from a Sermon by Archbp Marcel Lefebvre, 8/15/75