Assumption Meditation
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin this Friday, August 15th is a good time to reflect on how religion works.
That Jesus' mother's body did not suffer the same decomposition as all other human bodies and was taken into heaven is a doctrine that even many Catholics gag on. This is, of course, because they are cursed with the attitude that things which cannot be fully explained or understood through common experience or science are at best, very questionnable.
As anyone who has undertaken a serious study of Epistemology--and indeed as any honest scientist--can tell you, the rationalist attitude has many more holes in it than the average Swiss cheese. It's too bad the Catholic Establishment gave up on teaching people how to think and use their rational powers rightly. Reason in the fullest sense, as Belloc lamented, is truly dead. For the time being.
Subscribers to Catholicism also need to accept that knowledge comes from two other sources: Revelation and Faith. St. Thomas Aquinas said so in ST Part 2, Question 6.
From my experience, I can say this is true. Twenty years ago, I was a bit too rational and spent several years not really believing in Catholicism even though outwardly I practiced it. Under my parents' roof there could have been no not outwardly practicing it. The Assumption and all other mysteries of the faith were well-meaning nonsense, their original meaning perhaps garbled. A priest-professor at Catholic U. who ridiculed the Real Presence was a contributor to this lapse.
Now, a dozen years into my retro-conversion, I believe fully in the Assumption and all the other stuff. It's not because I "have to" to be a Catholic. No one in Heaven or on earth showed me the mechanics of assumption or led me to that elusive intersection in creation where the spiritual + corporeal meet the spiritual. In the light of faith it makes perfect sense. Mary's body was one of a kind. It did not suffer disorder of eros over ethos and it was the Holy of Holies, where God came to meet Man face to face.
Tradition
The doctrine of the Assumption is the classic example of a little-understood aspect of religious faith: tradition. Tradition's obscurity is shown by the fact that people look to the sacred writings of a faith to understand it. Indeed there are faiths built on the principle that only sacred writings should be their basis. Problematic because as Charlie Hoffman delights in pointing out, there is no indication anywhere in the Holy Bible of which books should make up the Holy Bible. Such matters are decided by the other lung of a religious faith, its tradition.
Every faith has a tradition, teachings and interpretations developed by its scholars and leaders which have as much weight as the "bibles". This is why I say I don't care what the Koran says. Islam also has the sayings and deeds of Mohammed in their deposit of faith and he was not a peace-loving and tolerant pussycat.
Marian doctrine and prayer is mainly the development of Catholic tradition. There is precious little (but very precious) in the four Gospels settled on by the church fathers because they best reflected the fathers' beliefs, hopes and experience of a couple centuries. Half, perhaps most, of early Christians did not believe that Jesus was a God-Man union and had no use for a Theotokos. The first church dedicated to Mary was built in 450 A.D. in the up-and-coming Diocese of Rome.
The past 150 years have seen an explosion of Marian doctrine beginning with the infallible proclamation of the Immaculate Conception in 1852 by Papa Pio Nono (Given the church's condition at the time, this was like the chairman of WorldCom coming out for virgin birth.). The IC began a Golden Age for the Church, what is called a "Marian Century" ending with Pius XII infallibly proclaiming the Doctrine of the Assumption in 1952. This was 10 years after Pius consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart of Mary which he did during WW2 because he figured the world needed a model of purity and love. All of these doctrines had been held as beliefs for centuries.
Pope John Paul II has just added five new mysteries to the Rosary. There is talk of Mary being equal in dignity to Christ, a mediatrix through whom all grace flows. In other churches, women are clergy; in ours, a woman is the holiest of creatures. As we celebrate this 2003 Assumption of Mary's body, we may be on the verge of a deeper understanding of what the body is. Lex orandi; lex credendi. As we pray, so we believe.
--NJC
Copyright © 2001, 2003 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.