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7.
St. Mary of the Angels
THE
WOMAN of greater beauty than theirs, whom the heavenly choirs had held in
esteem from her first moment of existence and revered the more when she
became of the Holy Spirit a mother-to-be, this chosen of women they wanted
for their queen. But she still had the remainder of her life on earth to
finish out, which extended beyond her Son's ascension into glory, and
which the angels respected. God's will was theirs. They awaited the hour
of his choice.
What then happened will always remain a glory
of the Faith, not to be doubted. A pious curiosity does have, however, a
set of questions to raise out of its very interest in the subject. When
the angels came to earth to carry back with them the human form that had
tabernacled the Word made flesh, did they find it lifeless? Or had this
sacred body of a mother so completely escaped death that it never for an
instant suffered a loss of life, a separation from the soul? The answer
one way or the other cannot affect the doctrine, which is what counts:
that, whether she died or not, the mother of our Savior is now in heaven
and has been ever since her assumption, body as well as soul.
The Assumption merits its feast day. But the
introduction of a feast into the liturgy presupposes a popular belief in
what it commemorates. St. John Damascene, a student of Tradition, is
confident the doctrine enjoyed from the start an unbroken continuity of
assent. His confidence is rooted in common sense. What else is it but
common sense to suppose that so revered a figure as the mother of their
Lord could not have disappeared from among the Christians without being
missed, without having aroused their concern? The apostle John, into
whose care she had been divinely entrusted, was not the type to disregard
the responsibility and take no interest in her whereabouts; nor was he a
recluse who did not converse with people. If in fact Mary died and her
soul for a brief interval of time remained out of her body, as the common
legend holds, the faithful in her neighborhood must surely have known and
as surely spread the word abroad. If her sacred body was laid to rest in
a tomb, whether in the Garden of Olives or the Valley of Josaphat, or
again in the suburb of Ephesus, as the legends variously suggests,
certainly the pallbearers and mourners would have had to know. And if her
possible tomb did not become a foremost attraction among the early
Christians, who did indeed venerate the remains of their saints, is it not
because they believed it to be no longer occupied? Or, if not that,
because there was no such tomb?
St. Epiphanius, "the oracle of Palestine,"
doubted whether so blessed a mother was entombed anywhere. "Whether she
died and was buried," he writes, "we do not know." God may have sent for
his mother, he rather thought, before death got to her at all. The
definition of the dogma, which formulates the bare essential of belief,
leaves the question open. It avoids the mention of death, asserting only
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."
The common opinion, held by an impressive
number of mystics and theologians, favors a brief death for his mother
since Christ himself died. "Although her body," writes Cardinal Newman as
one of the many, "was for a while separated from her soul and consigned to
the tomb, yet it did not remain there, but was speedily united to her soul
again, and raised by our Lord to a new and eternal life of heavenly
glory." But her burial, if buried she was, where did it take place? At
the Council of Chalcedon the Bishop of Jerusalem announced that the Virgin
Mary had been buried in his city, with all the apostles but Thomas in
attendance. Thomas missed the funeral. But when he did finally arrive at
the tomb (how many days later Bishop Juvenal did not say) it was found
empty. On the other hand, already in the fourth century the Ephesians
were of the belief that the tomb stood in the vicinity of their town.
Which of the locations is the correct one, if either? The evangelists,
who must have known, chose to tell posterity nothing about it. Not a word
on the subject did they write down.
This stands out the more impressively from the
backdrop of scriptural custom. The sacred book does not normally deny to
its important dead an obituary of some kind. "Devout men buried Stephen,"
it says of the proto-martyr, "and made great lamentation over him" (Acts
8:2). When the disciples John the Baptist heard of his beheading, goes
the record, "they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb" (Mk.
6:29). But she, whom the precursor's mother had hailed as the mother of
her Lord, departed the world without the semblance of a notice from
Scripture.
Providence was following a purpose, nonetheless
wise for being enigmatic, in withholding from posterity a knowledge of
Mary's final day on earth. Does not a similar obscurity surround the
final day of Moses? His disappearance from among his people remains a
mystery. Of the aged prophet Scripture says, "his eye was not dim, nor
his natural force abated," hinting that his death came abruptly. In the
dark as to what might have happened to their beloved leader, missing him
sorely, "the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty
days." But the statement in his obituary which intrigues, history
verifies: "No man knows the place of his burial to this day" (Deut.
34:5-8).
The follow-up in the New Testament after so
long an interval of silence renews the mystery, but supplies a possible
clue. It states: "The archangel Michael, contending with the devil,
disputed about the body of Moses" (Jude 9). Why the contention?
Interpreters, in the light of the Old Testament obituary, are inclined to
think the contest involved an attempt on Satan's part to steal the
prophet's body from its secret tomb and give it over to the Israelites so
as to tempt them into idolatry. Michael, the swift agent of God, who
alone is to be adored, thwarted the attempt. And who knows but what the
same great angel, who is scripturally associated with Mary against Satan,
may have brought about the secrecy attending her own termination of life
on earth?
For three hundred years not an acknowledged
writer for the Church makes a single mention of Mary's passing, important
as it was. Not until the fourth century does St. Ephiphanius break the
silence, only to refer to the uncertainty of her death and burial.
Significantly enough he does this while refuting the Collyridians, who
insisted on a divine worship for the Mother of God as if she were not his
creature as well. No client of hers ever on earth showed her a deeper
devotion than the Bishop of Constantia, who was now simply doing his
utmost to discourage a cult contrary to her own fervent will. He did not
(nor would she) want the idolaters to have a definite tomb upon which to
fix their false adoration and around which, perhaps, to build a
dishonorable shrine.
The Collyridians did not locate the tomb of
their desire. In their day no one pretended to have discovered it. Not
until after the Council of Ephesus did a faction of Christians think they
had identified it on a site nearby only to be contradicted by a rival
claim in favor of Jerusalem, which in turn suffered a disagreement as to
where in the Holy City the tomb must stand. Out of the welter of
uncertainties just one certainty emerges. The apocryphal Transitus
Mariae, a collection of wild and incompatible legends, nevertheless
clings to a common denominator, the solid and genuine truth. Through the
whole range of discrepancies the legends all assume, and by their
popularity yield proof that the Christian population believed, that the
Virgin Mother had departed the tomb. The particulars about her death,
which had been fantastically multiplied, did not matter. Her assumption
did.
What the faithful needed to know then, by the
grace of God they knew—and still know. Anything additional is
speculation, not doctrine. If tomorrow archaeology could establish the
exact location of her burial and identify what remained of the tomb as
certainly that of the Virgin Mary, this would not alter by the dot of an I
the defined dogma, nor threaten its validity. Its essence is safe. No
discovery on earth could make it less true that the angels have their
queen with them in heaven, all of her, body and soul.
Whether she died and was buried, or remained
dead briefly and was not buried, or in the literal sense just fell asleep,
are correlatives of no importance. They are a side issue of accidentals.
"Nowhere do we read of her death," writes St. Isidore, "although, as some
say, her sepulcher may be found in the Valley of Josaphat." What matters
is, he believed without doubt that, if that sepulcher in the eastern
valley of Jerusalem had really been hers, it now stood vacant. As for St.
John Damascene, he takes Mary's death for granted in his three homilies on
the subject, yet believed as firmly as St. Isidore of Seville in her
assumption. Read his words, feel their charm: "Just as the holy and
incorrupt body that had been born of her, the body that was united
hypostatically to God the Word, rose from the tomb on the third day, so
was there need that she too be snatched from the grave and the mother
restored to her Son."
Since the indwelling Spirit of Truth guides the
Church, Vatican Council II has inferred that "the entire body of the
faithful cannot err in matters of faith." Pope Pius XII enunciated the
same truth to the world on that memorable day, November 1, 1950. He did
not belittle the mystery of Mary's departure which puzzled the people of
her generation and after. "But," he cautioned, "this in no way prevented
them from believing and openly professing that her sacred body had never
been subject to the corruption of the tomb, and that the august tabernacle
of the divine Word had never been reduced to dust and ashes."
The statement, an excerpt from the historic
survey of the doctrine which led up to its dogmatic definition, fitted the
occasion. The Holy Father sat on a throne in St. Peter's Square under a
brilliant sky, surrounded by a crowd reaching out of the piazza into the
streets of Rome, and of course into the basilica itself, a crowd totaling
an estimated 600,000. An evident joy in his voice gave it a rich vibrancy
which a set of microphones carried to the extremities of that far-flung
multitude, and which a radio station broadcast to an expectant world. No
sooner had that voice of Peter in our century concluded the definition and
the warning that whoever dared deny it would have completely lost the
Faith, than there began the joyous clamor of bells from 400 church towers,
riotous, deafening, triumphant, just to let the city know how they, too,
felt about the proclamation.
A procession then led the Holy Father into the
basilica through the cheering crowd, while the bells kept swinging, and
there under the majestic dome of St. Peter's, in honor of the Assumption,
he offered a Solemn Pontifical Mass. That the occasion should thus end
with the Holy Sacrifice, ran true to form. Never an honor is conferred
upon Mary but what her divine Son benefits from it. She is our sweetest
reminder of him. At Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, wherever a shrine of hers
stands, there, even the infidel has observed, devotion to the Blessed
Sacrament reaches a peculiar intensity. No one who has ever attended a
Benediction service at Lourdes is likely to forget the international
chorus of a thousand or more voices singing the O Salutaris and
Tantum Ergo. So it was during the Mass at St. Peter's on that All
Saints' Day of years ago: its Gloria, Credo, Offertory and Communion
hymns, the whole Cantata seemed to take on a richer tonality from the joy
of the Marian occasion.
Mary announced her immaculate conception to the world
through St. Catherine Labouré before it was defined a dogma. She
confirmed the truth of it to St. Bernadette after the definition. Did she
in any such way now intervene to verify her assumption into heaven? We
have reason to believe from a reliable assurance, that she did. St.
Anthony of Padua claims to have been favored by such an apparition, which
will be given treatment in a subsequent chapter.
For that matter, Pope Pius had a pertinent
vision of his own, not once, but four times. He had been walking alone in
the Vatican gardens, on each of the occasions, when his attention was
drawn upwards and there he beheld what a crowd of 70,000 had witnessed at
Fatima thirty-four years earlier it was the miracle of the sun repeated
for his benefit on two successive days right before his proclamation, and
a third time on the very day just hours afterwards, and still again eight
days later, November 8, 1950. The action of the sun agreed with the
description he had read of its original performance, doing what it did not
have the power of itself to do, in an obvious effort to tell him—what?, he
caught the meaning. Our Lady was giving him her spectacular approval of
his document on her assumption into heaven.
The Holy Year of that decade, it will be
recalled, closed for the world at Fatima on October 13, 1951, the
thirty-fourth anniversary of the original miracle of the sun, and not even
twelve full months after the great definition. Many people who think of
it wonder why the switch of locale and the selection of that particular
date. They cannot have heard of the apparitions. But all who attended
the services at the Cova da Iria that day, October 13, 1951, heard of them
in no uncertain eloquence from the lips of the papal legate, a personal
choice of the Holy Father, Frederico Cardinal Tedeschini.
His Eminence spoke with conviction of the
privileged visionary, whose confidant he was, "Who," he asked of his
fascinated audience, "can gaze upon the blazing sun, with its corona? But
he could! On all four days he was able to gaze upon the activity of the
sun. Under the hand of Mary, the sun, agitated and entirely convulsed,
was transformed into a picture of life, into a spectacle of heavenly
movements, into a transmission of mute but eloquent messages to the Vicar
of Christ."
A month later, November 17, 1951,
L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican paper, reaffirmed the claim
of Cardinal Tedeschini. It not only approved, it praised, it admired.
And it made capital of the significant timing of the apparitions to occur
just "when the entire Catholic family was rejoicing in union with the
Vicar of Christ over the dogmatic definition of Mary's Assumption into
Heaven."
The Church did in truth rejoice—in the truth of
a decision long delayed. Letters from around the world to the Holy See,
pleading the status of a dogma for the Assumption, had been accumulating
into the thousands. At the abrupt close of Vatican Council I, due to the
outbreak of a European war, a block of some 200 departing bishops first
signed a petition urging the dogma. The 1946 hierarchy under the
supremacy of Pope Pius XII felt almost unanimously the same way about it.
They all but a few responded in the affirmative to his double enquiry:
whether or not they thought the doctrine definable, and whether or not
they and their clergy and people desired it. Desire it they emphatically
did. The Holy Father in thinking out his arguments for the definition and
writing them down in his most famous document, had behind his efforts the
ready compliance of the faithful. They were strongly disposed.
The apostolic address, in which Pope Pius
defined the Assumption, exudes a pride that could only have made its
writing a labor of love. And he did compose the document himself, as
Time magazine has reported of all his compositions, "in his own fine
hand." Here follows an excerpt, no better than the context from which it
comes, yet fit to be framed and hung neatly in the memory for convenient
reference.
"Since our Redeemer is the Son of Mary, he
could not do otherwise, as a perfect observer of God's law, than to honor
not only his eternal Father but also his 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 did."
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