The Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary — Sermon by Fr. Ermatinger

Translation of the Gospel According to St. Luke

At that time: Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost. And she cried out with a loud voice and said: Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. And whence is this to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in my ears, the infant in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed art thou that hast believed, because those things shall be accomplished that were spoken to thee by the Lord. And Mary said: My soul doth magnify the Lord. And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior. Because He hath regarded the humility of His handmaid: for behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. Because He that is mighty hath done great things to me: and holy is His name. And His mercy is from generations to generations to them that fear Him.

Transcription of Sermon

In Pius XII’s Encyclical, which was published on November 1st, 1950, he says

At the end of her earthly life, the Blessed Virgin Mary was assumed body and soul into Heaven.

Unlike the Ascension in which Our Lord ascended into Heaven of His own power, in the Assumption its divine agency that brings the body and soul of Our Lady into Heaven. The Feast of the Assumption is offered after a novena that begins on the Feast of the Transfiguration. And these two feasts are linked in that they both reveal something about the body.

The Transfiguration reveals to us Christ in His glory, but not as something ethereal, but as something corporeal. He is also remembered in the midst of a penitential season. In the middle of Lent, Second Sunday of Lent, we have the reading of the Transfiguration. In a time when we’re fasting, when we should be carrying out penitences in our body and in our souls, the Glorified Body is presented to us. It’s something of a foretaste of Heaven. And both the Transfiguration and the Assumption remind us that human nature is precisely that; body and soul together.

And so, with that in mind, we can say that the souls in Heaven, the souls in Purgatory, the souls in Hell are in an unnatural state. It wouldn’t make sense for Our Lord to create us in a natural state of body and soul and then leave us in perpetuity in an unnatural state. So, the resurrection of the body, the reunification of the body and soul, is not only something that is revealed to us and stated in the Creed as a doctrine of faith, but it also makes perfect logical sense.

When Paul spoke about the resurrection of the body in Athens, the pagans laughed at him. A less-than-Catholic vision of the body will always tend towards moral disorder, denigration of the body, or amnesia of the soul, exultation of the body at the cost of the soul, or attempting to serve God in soul but not in the body; none of these ever work out. And these imbalances always lead to moral and spiritual disaster because they’re rooted in a skewed anthropology. Pagans see the body either as property, and that’s why they say, “my body belongs to me,” and under that standard, they accept abortion and tattoos because body is property. Or the Gnostic pagans who see body as a prison, something of a snakeskin that our soul is supposed to escape from. Or there’s a form of very banal idolatry of the body, which is revealed in gazing at oneself in a mirror or gluttony; something of a banal form of idolatry proper to a banal age as ours.

When we raise the body to an absolute at the cost of the soul, in other words not in subservience to the soul and things spiritual, we also have a twisted vision of the human person. And this explains why we see around us such an inordinate attachment to things that serve the body, whether it’s gyms, yoga classes, drugstores, fast food chains, all of these things also want us to be members for some reason, and making of our society something of one massive healthentration camp, and at the same time, neglecting that which is proper to the human person. We were created to worship. We were created to worship.

That’s why we exist; for Mass. And everything after that should be an emanation of Eucharistic worship, what we do in the body, what we do with our mind, what we do with our affections, our heart, our passions. All of this is to be in service of God. And if it’s not, there’s a sort of self-imposed schizophrenia that’s called sin. And so, we see that all of these faces of paganism ultimately lead to that, a form of self-imposed schizophrenia.

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven is not only a revelation of God’s mercy, it’s also a revelation of His justice. We who have the vestiges of original sin, the disorder of original sin, undergo death out of justice. The Blessed Mother, who is the Immaculate Conception, these two truths formally defined by Magisterium, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are intimately linked. We understand one better in view of the other, and since Mary was immaculately conceived, she doesn’t undergo death as we do. And so, that is also a revelation of divine justice and certainly mercy.

But just as the resurrection of the body and the soul makes sense, we can also say that the Assumption makes sense. The womb that bore the Word made flesh, the breast that suckled Him, the arms that held Him, the eyes that lovingly contemplated Him day and night, the Immaculate Heart and the mind of Mary that were filled with Him, none of these would suffer the punishment of original sin of death, earth, and worms. And since God is just, we die. Since God is just, Mary did not die. Since God is merciful, He assumed His mother body and soul into Heaven to be with Him in His sacred humanity forever.

And that’s why we don’t have first-class relics of the Blessed Virgin Mary. We have first-class relics of all the Apostles, of St. Stephen, of St. Lawrence, contemporaries of the Blessed Virgin Mary; there are no first-class relics of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

In 1 Corinthians 15:20, Paul speaks about the resurrection of the body and speaks of it in terms of the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. The Israelites used to take at harvest time… they would take the first fruits and bring them to the temple as a sacrifice in a certain sort of a symbolic offering of everything to God. And if there are first fruits, there are also second, third, and fourth fruits. they participate in that one offering. So, if Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension are the first fruits, then Mary is the second fruit. In other words, the Ascension and the Resurrection of Our Lord are not isolated events, but they are the first in a chain of events that will be followed by the rest of the Mystical Body. Mary’s assumption is a participation in a privilege particular to her because of the Immaculate Conception, and that’s what makes her second fruits. And what is granted to her as a privilege is revealed to us as a foretaste and a promise to which we are invited to participate.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, the Holy Ghost. Amen. 

– Fr. Ermatinger