Letter of August 12, 2005

The Assumption Affirms Our Humanity
The Most Reverend Carl F. Mengeling, Bishop of Lansing
On August 15th, the church celebrates the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Since August 15, 2005 is a Monday, it will not be a Holyday
of Obligation. Nonetheless, the church still celebrates the Assumption.

Along with the great significance of this feast for our body and the church and its place in the Divine Plan of Salvation, it has other urgent meaning for our time.

It’s not surprising that three popes have seen an important and urgent ‘connect" between the Assumption and the value and dignity of humanity and
the human body. All three focus on the increasing tendencies and directions of our times that diminish the meaning of humanity by the degradation of the human body. This is a virus at work everywhere and is a threat to humanity and civilizations.

The urgent relevance of the doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary with the meaning and value of the body was important to these three popes.

Pius XII solemnly defined the dogma of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on All Saints Day in 1950. The unprecedented horrors of World War II with its’ immense suffering, death and devastation were still everywhere. The great affront to the value and dignity of humanity and each human person was the great challenge for the church and the world.

The papal bull ‘Munificent God’ elaborated the varied significance of this dogma on all levels and its relationship among the interconnected truths of faith.

Like two of his successors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, he pointed out the importance and relevance of the Assumption to a particular need of our time. He saw a vital and urgent ‘connect’ between the Assumption and the value and dignity of humanity and the human body.

Before concluding, he wrote: "And so we may hope that those who meditate upon the glorious example of Mary offers us may be more and more convinced of the value of a human life entirely devoted to carving out the heavenly Father’s will and to bringing good to others. Thus, while the illusory teachings of
materialism and the corruption of morals that follows from these teachings threaten to extinguish the light of virtue and ruin the lives of men by exciting discord among them, in this magnificent way all may see clearly to what a lofty goal our bodies and souls are destined. Finally it is our hope that belief in Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven will make our belief in our own resurrection stronger and render it more effective."

The dogma of the bodily Assumption of Mary calls us all to ‘wholeness’. Yes, our bodies are destined to life in ‘a new heaven and new earth’. The Assumption
affirms the truth of our Creed: "I believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting".

At a weekly Wednesday Audience on July 9, 1997, Pope John Paul II stressed the ‘connect’ between the bodily Assumption of Mary and the value and dignity
of humanity and the body: "Looking at the mystery of the Blessed Virgin’s Assumption, we can understand the plan of divine providence for humanity. After Christ, Mary is the first to attain glory in soul and body. She anticipates the fullness of life and happiness promised to the elect through the resurrection of the body".

Mary’s Assumption reveals the nobility and dignity of the human body. In the face of the profanation and debasement to which modern society often subjects the body, especially the female body, the Assumption proclaims the eternal destiny and dignity of every human body called by the Lord to become an
instrument of holiness and a sharer in divine glory.

By looking at her, Christians discover the value of their own bodies and guard them as a temple of God, in expectation of the resurrection. The Assumption has immense value and meaning for the life and destiny of humanity.

Our new Holy Father, Benedict XVI made the same ‘connect’ of Pius XII between the Assumption and the value and dignity of humanity and the human body.

About 30 years ago he expressed his views in a reflection for August 15th, the Assumption. It was one of daily reflections for the year in ‘The Hope of the
Mustard Seed’. These and others from other sources are now published in ‘Co-Workers of the Truth’ 1992 by Ignatius Press.

‘Co-Worker of the Truth’ is on the Ratzinger Coat of Arms. It is from the Third Letter of St. John, verse 8. His reflection of 30 years ago:

"The dogma of the assumption of Mary, body and soul, into the glory of the heavenly Kingdom is more confusing than otherwise for us today. Practically
every word of it sounds foreign to our ears and without comprehensible meaning: Mary - heaven - glory. The only word we can really understand is body. What is said here constitutes a recognition of the body and
consequently of the earth, a recognition of matter and of the future of all of these. With this dogma, the Church, which has so often seemed to repudiate matter, sings a new hymn to the body and brings it into contact with the divine. Perhaps this has so little appeal for us because the declaration of the dogma seems to omit or, at least, take for granted an intermediate step that is, in
fact, of the greatest importance for us: the body has to do with heaven because it has to do with the humanness of humanity. That is a statement of great  current significance. The discovery of the body threatens all too often today to become a dehumanization. If we are to take full and unlimited possession of the body, we must cut it off from the sphere of moral responsibility and regard it solely as matter. But it is only when the body is accorded its human dignity that the spirit also continues to be human; only when what is human is seen from the perspective of God’s promises does the body continue to be worthy of respect. That is why, without spiritualistic dogmatism, it is so important for us that God truly indwells and is active in our world even to the taking of a body: from the Virgin Birth to the Lord’s Resurrection and beyond to the time when God’s Yes was able, through the Son, to come into contact again with the body in the Yes of the first believers. Thus all the words of this dogma can now be linked together: first heaven and body, then Mary and glory and body and heaven.