“The Lord has blessed you by His power, because by you He has brought our enemies to nought” This line from today’s reading from the book of Judith can be taken as a succinct summary of all that we believe about the dignity, holiness, and role of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
As a foundation to everything that surrounds Our Blessed Lady, we acknowledge that it is all due to the blessing of Almighty God. As Our Lady herself proclaimed in Her Magnificat: “the Almighty has done great things for me” and it is because of this that “from henceforth all generations shall call me Blessed.” And how very Blessed is She whose feast we celebrate today; blessed beyond any other creature that ever was or ever will be, when She reached the end of Her earthly life, Our Lady was assumed body and soul into heaven.
“The Lord has blessed you by His power,” the Scripture tells us, “because by you He has brought our enemies to nought.” The privileges bestowed upon Our Lady were because of the intrinsic role God chose for Her in His plan for the redemption and salvation of the whole of humanity.
Her most glorious privilege, that of becoming the Mother of God, of necessity meant that She be preserved from anything that would be unworthy of the One She was to carry and to bring forth into the world. As God would not permit non-priestly hands to touch the Ark of the Old Covenant, and struck Uzzah dead for placing his hands upon it, and as consecrated hands alone are permitted to touch the Most Sacred Species, so Our Lady, the Ark of the New Covenant, was preserved perpetually in her consecrated virginity, knowing no man intimately, and even more than this, was preserved from all stain of sin from the very moment of her conception.
In Her very being, Mary conquered the enemy, Her whole life was untarnished by even the slightest turning away from the love and service of God. Satan was able to gain no influence or even minor victory over Her. And therefore, as death came into the world as a punishment for the sin of the first Eve. So, at the end of Her earthly life, the sinless Eve did not undergo this punishment but instead was granted the glory of the resurrected life, won by the Resurrection of Her Son, and offered to all people who would embrace His offer of Redemption.
Our Lady’s Assumption is a cause of hope and encouragement for us, as we look to our Mother who now dwells in our heavenly homeland where we too wish one day to follow. The feast also reminds us of the reality of our own human nature: we were created by God as both physical and spiritual beings. Death, as we will all experience it, is truly un-natural for us as our body and our soul were meant to remain united. One day, at the general Judgement, our bodies and our souls will indeed be reunited for all eternity, wherever we might end up spending that eternity.
Our bodies are destined to be with God for eternity but the enemy uses them so often as the most straightforward way to draw us away from our true home by making both the desires and the weaknesses of the flesh into powerful idols.
As we just briefly explore what I mean by this we will be helped greatly by recent texts coming from Rome, not warning us against these idols, but telling us to bow down and worship them. With the document, Amoris Laetitia, we had the teaching that sin is simply too strong to overcome and therefore, if you’re living in a state of sin, you can receive Holy Communion anyway.
Then, with Dignitas Infinita, we were told that Divine Revelation is wrong and that 2,000 years of Church teaching is now incorrect and the death penalty is never permitted because it is contrary to human dignity.
Now, this week, we are told that despite the death penalty not being permitted, it is now permitted to starve to death anyone who is in a persistent vegetative state – something which within the last 30 years the Vatican had said is never permitted as it constituted the most basic level of care which every human deserves.
Both body and soul, destined for the glory of Heaven, must be put at the service of the Lord and used for His glory. Jacinta of Fatima said that Our Lady told her that “the sins that cause most people to go to hell are sins of the flesh.” This is not the same as saying that these are somehow the worst type of sins – the worst type of sins are those directly against God himself, like sacrilege, idolatry and blasphemy – but Our Lady is saying that these are the ones to which more people are susceptible and which, because of this, sadly so many fall away from God.
But Our Lady gives us hope. Now in Heaven, She carries out Her role as the Mediatrix of all graces and obtains for us all that we need in order to conquer the enemy. St Louis de Montfort spoke of how the true devotees of Our Lady would be given greater graces than the saints in the previous history of the Church.
This because it is those who place themselves most wholeheartedly and faithfully into Her hands who would become the Apostles of the Latter Times in order to conquer the Devil not just in their own lives but also in the life of the Church.
All too aware of the confusion within the Church, and the sin and blasphemy in the world which seems to grow in intensity with each passing year, we have no need to wonder how we are called to respond. We have only to become more Marian, more faithful children of Our Blessed Mother, whose Immaculate Heart one day will triumph and who will definitively conquer Satan as has been promised since the beginning of creation: Ipsa conteret – She will crush the head of the serpent.