Dear St. Mary Friends,
Sunday is the Solemnity of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Below you will find 3 videos on this great dogma of our Faith, but first please read the following from Pope Benedict XVI:
The Feast of the Assumption is a day of joy. God has won…. Love has shown that it is stronger than death, that God possesses the true strength and that his strength is goodness and love. Mary was taken up body and soul into Heaven: there is even room in God for the body. Heaven is no longer a very remote sphere unknown to us.
We have a mother in Heaven. And the Mother of God, the Mother of the Son of God, is our Mother. He himself has said so. He made her our Mother when he said to the disciple and to all of us: "Behold, your Mother!" We have a Mother in Heaven….
Our first parents…feared that if God were too great, he would take something away from their life. They thought that they could set God aside to make room for themselves. This was also the great temptation of the modern age…people have thought and said: "But this God does not give us our freedom; with all his commandments, he restricts the space in our lives. So, God has to disappear; we want to be autonomous and independent. Without this God we ourselves would be gods and do as we pleased".
This was also the view of the Prodigal Son, who did not realize he was "free" precisely because he was in his father's house…. This is how it is in our modern epoch. Previously, it was thought…that by setting God aside and being autonomous, following only our own ideas and inclinations, we would truly be free to do whatever we liked without anyone being able to give us orders. But when God disappears, men and women do not become greater; indeed, they lose the divine dignity, their faces lose God's splendour…. Only if God is great is humankind also great.
Mary is taken up body and soul into the glory of Heaven. With God and in God she is Queen of Heaven and earth. Is she really so remote from us? The contrary is true. Precisely because she is with God and in God, she is very close to each of us…and being Mother of the Son, participates in the power of the Son and in his goodness. We can always entrust the whole of our lives to this Mother, who is not far from any one of us.
On this feast day, let us thank the Lord for the gift of the Mother, and let us pray to Mary to help us find the right path every day. Amen.
