TU HONORIFICENTIA POPULI NOSTRI

Signum magnum apparuit in cælo:

mulier amicta sole, et luna sub pedibus ejus.

A great sign appeared in the sky:

a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet.

Rev 12:1

On this holy day on which the Church – that is, the Church of all time, not the church that has become slave of the world and which believed it could even rewrite the praise due to the Mother of God – raises Her song before the mystery of the Assumption, allow me to lead you not to a fleeting pious emotion, but to that rock of sure doctrine on which the Fathers, Doctors and Supreme Pontiffs have built our certainty for centuries.

It was not a pious feeling, it was not a consolatory imagination that generated this festival which the East already knew as The Dormition since the 5th century, and which Rome itself solemnized at the hands of the Popes Sergius I and Leo IV. It was the very logic of Faith, that logic that Saint John Damascene was able to express with unmatched vigor:

«It was fitting that she who had preserved her virginity intact in childbirth should also preserve her body free from corruption after death.»[1]

Oportebat: it was necessary; it was fitting. Not a whim of piety, but a necessity of reason illuminated by Faith – the very same reason that some today, puffed up with knowledge yet devoid of wisdom, would seek to reduce to mere myth or symbol.

Joining this voice, in a harmony which spans the centuries, are Saint Germanus of Constantinople and the ancient tradition attributed to Saint Modestus of Jerusalem; then, at the height of Scholasticism, Saint Albert the Great in his Mariale, and the Angelic Doctor himself, Saint Thomas, who, in his commentary on the Sentences, does not hesitate to apply to the Theotokos that very principle of theological fittingness which Modernists, enamored of doubt rather than certainty, sought to banish from theology as if it were a disgrace rather than a gift of grace to reason. Saint Bonaventure, Saint Bernardine of Siena, Saint Robert Bellarmine, Saint Alphonsus Liguori: an unbroken chain of holiness and doctrine that no pastoral council, no liturgical reform, and no “new” theology can ever sever, for it is not the work of men, but the Holy Spirit’s guardianship of His Church.

When, on November 1st, 1950, Venerable Pius XII pronounced the dogmatic definition in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, he did not invent a new doctrine. Rather, he gathered, as if into a precious vessel, what Tradition had always guarded, and he solemnly entrusted it, with the authority Our Lord placed in the Successor of Peter, to the irrevocable Faith of all ages to come. That was one of the last great acts of a Magisterium that still knew how to teach without trembling, define without negotiating, and guard without scattering – before the storm, which had already been brewing in the halls of Rome, broke upon the Lord’s vineyard.

The Holy Church, according to the liturgy promulgated by Pius XII, today places on the lips of her ministers the words that ancient Israel addressed to Judith – a figure foreshadowing the Virgin Victorious – after she had crushed the head of the enemy of God’s people.

The Lord has blessed you with His power, for through you He has brought our enemies to nothing. Blessed are you, O daughter, by the Lord God Most High, above all women on earth. Blessed be the Lord who created heaven and earth, who guided you to strike the head of the leader of our enemies; for today He has made your name so glorious that praise of you shall never depart from the lips of men... You are the glory of Jerusalem, the joy of Israel, the honor of our people.[2]

One cannot fail to grasp the profound nature of this choice by the Church: Judith, severing the head of Holofernes, is a figure of the One who – Immaculate from the very first moment of Her conception – crushes the head of the ancient serpent beneath her foot; and just as it was said of Judith that her name would never depart from the lips of men, so too is Mary’s name blessed in every generation, and she is the glory of Jerusalem, the joy of Israel, and the honor of the Christian people. Those who today would seek to excise these typologies from the Church’s public prayer – deeming them too “warlike” or too “medieval” for a form of worship that has become timid and accommodating – betray the very meaning of the supernatural battle in which the Holy Church remains engaged.

Father Garrigou-Lagrange, one of the last great masters of the Roman School before Modernists took over the academic chairs, taught that the Assumption is not an isolated privilege, but the necessary fruit of the Immaculate Conception and Divine Motherhood: she who was preserved from sin had also to be preserved from the corruption that is sin’s legacy. There is a coherence in this that defies all theological relativism: God does nothing by halves, and the grace granted to Mary at the beginning of her existence had necessarily to blossom and reach its fulfillment, at the end of her earthly pilgrimage, in the full glory of the risen body.

The great Dominican acknowledged that, when confronted with the highest Marian truths, the theologian passes through three seasons of the soul: first, the assent of filial piety; then, the turmoil caused by the objections raised by the world; and finally – if God grants the time and grace to delve deeper – a return to that same initial certainty, grounded no longer merely in sentiment but in reasoned knowledge. For the things of God – and in particular the graces bestowed upon the Most Holy Mary – are always far richer than the indolence of the intellect dares to imagine. Was this not the very path that so many of the faithful and so many shepherds ought to have followed during these decades of confusion, rather than succumbing – at the first objection from the world – to a culpable silence regarding the highest truths of the Faith? Father Garrigou-Lagrange further taught that Mary’s universal mediation and her Queenship over hearts are not mere rhetorical flourishes but rigorous consequences of her Divine Motherhood: if she is the Mother of the Head, she is also the Mother of the members; if she cooperates in our regeneration in the order of grace, then her glorious Assumption is all the more the first-fruit and guarantee of that same regeneration that will be extended, one day, to the bodies of all the redeemed.

Dear faithful, in an age that has lost the Christian sense of the body – an age that simultaneously idolizes and profanes it, manipulates it and dissolves it into ideologies alien to the Creator’s design – today’s feast reminds us that the human body is not an accident from which the soul ought to yearn to be free, but rather an integral part of the person whom Christ came to redeem wholly through His Incarnation. Mary, assumed into heaven – body and soul – is the first fruits and the guarantee of our own resurrection: a pledge that no modern philosophy, no ephemeral theology, and no pronouncement by disreputable cardinals can ever erase from the Creed we profess.

To you, then, Queen assumed into heaven, we entrust today the Church that suffers so greatly; we ask you that, just as you crushed the head of the ancient serpent from the very beginning, you may also crush the apostasy that today besets the flock of your Son. May you, Ark of the New Covenant assumed into the sanctuary of Heaven, obtain for this poor pilgrim Church the grace to return, without further hesitation, to the fullness of the Faith and the worship that the Fathers have handed down to us. And so may it be.