ASSUMPTION OF MARY

Homily for August 15^th, 2020: Luke 1:39-56.

Mary, the Second Vatican Council says, “shines forth on earth, until the day of the Lord shall come, a sign of certain hope and comfort to the pilgrim People of God” (LG 68). Our pilgrim way is beset with difficulties. We are reminded of them each time we read the morning headlines, or watch the news on television.

On this feast of Mary’s Assumption, we are reminded that Mary also confronted difficulties on her own pilgrim way. What did Mary understand about the angel’s message that even before her marriage to Joseph she was to become the mother of God’s Son? She understood at least this: that in a tiny village where everyone knew everyone else and gossip was rife, many would consider her marriage to Joseph to be irregular. Yet Mary responded without hesitation in trusting faith: “I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say’ (Lk 1:38) 

That act of trusting faith was not blind. Young as Mary was -- and the Scripture scholars think she may have been only fifteen -- she asked what any girl in her position would have asked: “How can this be, since I do not know man?” (Lk 1:34) Even this question, however, reflects faith. Mary was questioning not so much God and his ways as her own ability to understand God’s ways.

Nor was Mary’s faith a once-for-all thing. It needed to be constantly renewed.  Before her Son’s birth, Joseph wanted to break their engagement. When the couple presented their newborn child to the Lord in the Jerusalem temple, Mary heard the aged Simeon prophesy the child’s rejection and his mother’s suffering (Lk 2:34f). Three decades later, after Jesus left home, he seemed on more than one occasion to be fulfilling his command to his disciples about turning one’s back on parents and other relatives (cf. Lk 14:26). At the marriage at Cana Jesus seemed to speak coldly to his mother. She seems not to have been present at the Last Supper. Only at Calvary was Mary permitted to stand beside her now dying Son, along with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 19:26); deliberately unnamed, many Scripture scholars believe, to represent the ideal follower of Jesus Christ in every time and place.

The last glimpse we have of Mary in Scripture is immediately before Pentecost. With the apostles and Jesus’ other relatives, she is praying for the descent of the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:14). Thereafter Mary disappears. Her work of bringing Christ to the world was taken over by the Church. 

How did Mary’s life end? We do not know. In defining Mary’s Assumption on All Saints Day 1950, Pope Pius XII said simply: “When the course of [Mary’s] earthly life had ended, she was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.” The body the Pope referred to is Mary’s new resurrection body: the body with which Jesus rose from the dead -- the heavenly and spiritual body which, as St. Paul says, each one of us will receive in heaven (cf.1 Cor. 15:35-53). There Mary continues to pray for us on our pilgrim way. As the Catechism says: “The Church loves to pray in communion with the Virgin Mary ... and to entrust supplications and praises to her.” (No. 2682).

If it makes sense to ask our friends on earth to pray for us, doesn’t it also make sense to ask the prayers of our friends in heaven, the saints? The Catechism says it does: “Being more closely united to Christ, those who dwell in heaven ... do not cease to intercede with the Father for us. ... We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world.” (No. 956 & 2683) Without Mary’s prayers, I would not be a Catholic priest today. Let me tell you how I know this.

Before I was a Catholic priest, I was an Anglican priest, like my father and grandfather before me. Leaving the church which had taken me from the baptismal font to the altar, and taught me almost all the Catholic truth I know, even today, was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. Starting in 1959, and for almost a year, the question of the Church, and of my conscientious duty before God, was not out of my waking thoughts for two hours together. 

One of the many obstacles to my decision was the need to abandon, possibly forever, the priesthood to which I had aspired from age twelve, and which had brought me great happiness, with no guarantee that it would ever be given back to me. In Holy Week 1960 a Trappist monk at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, himself a convert from Judaism, who was helping me along the last stretch of my spiritual journey, said to me: “Why don’t you give your priesthood to Our Lady, asking her to keep it for you, and to give it back to you when the time is right?” With his help I did this. 

Had I known then that it would be eight years before I could once again stand at the altar as a priest, I would never have had the courage to go through with it. During those years I had many difficulties -- so many that well-meaning priest-advisers told me I should forget any idea of priesthood and embrace a lay vocation.  That I was never willing to do. I knew that Our Lady was keeping my priesthood for me, and I was confident that she would give it back to me one day. 

After eight years, on January 27^th 1968, I knelt before the bishop of Münster in northern Germany, where I was then living, to receive the Church’s commission to stand at the altar once again, as a Catholic priest. I had never told the bishop about entrusting my priesthood to Our Lady. You can imagine my joy, therefore, when, at the end of the private ninety-five-minute ceremony in the chapel of his house, the bishop turned to the altar and intoned the Church’s ancient Marian hymn: Salve regina, “Hail, Holy Queen.”