The Assumption of Our Lady

Concilium Allocutio August 2010
By Fr. Bede McGregor O.P.
Spiritual Director to the Legion of Mary

The Assumption of Our Lady

It does not happen very often that the Concilium Meeting takes place on the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven in the totality of her personhood. So it is an obvious invitation to meditate on this tremendous feast of Mary. The Assumption is at least three things: a gift of joy, a sign of hope and a source of great encouragement for the Church and each one of us, especially in times of despondency when everything seems to be going against us and we experience apparent failure and the temptation to back off from the struggle to be holy and engage in the apostolate.

These three things must be major characteristics of the Legion if it is truly to be a presence of Mary in our secular and sometimes radically hostile world.

The Assumption is a gift of joy to us. I think Pope Benedict points to a delightful reason for joy on this feast when he says: “The feast of the Assumption is a day of joy. God has won. Love has won. Love has shown that it is stronger than death, that God possesses the true strength and that this 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 too. He himself has said so. He made her our Mother when he said to the disciples and to all of us: ‘Behold Your Mother’. We have a Mother in heaven. Heaven is open. Heaven has a heart.” Mary was God’s gateway to earth and mankind, and now she is our gateway to heaven. We must pass through the heart of Mary if we are to be truly children of the Father and brothers and sisters of Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Assumption is an effective sign of hope. One of the great rallying cries of the Legion is: Victory comes through Mary. She has conquered death through the power of her Son. She has vanquished Satan and destroyed sin. The Assumption of Our Lady assures us that in the fierce and relentless battle between good and evil in our world and in our own interior lives, if we stay in union with Mary she will give us the last word and lead us to Jesus her Son. There are no limits to her maternal love for us and no restrictions on the power of her intercession on our behalf.

The II Vatican Council puts it very simply: Mary shines forth on earth … as a sign of certain hope and comfort to the Pilgrim people of God. Pope Benedict points out there are some people today who live as if they never had to die or as if, with death, everything were over; others, who hold that man is the one and only author of his own destiny, and behave as if God did not exist, and at times they even reach the point of denying that there is room for him in our world. But the Holy Father goes on to point out that only openness to the mystery of God, who is Love, can quench the thirst for truth and happiness in our hearts; only the prospect of eternity can give authentic value to historical events and especially to the mystery of human frailty, suffering and death. The mystery of the Assumption points us to eternity as the ultimate meaning and horizon of our lives. So we Legionaries are called with Mary to be messengers of eternal life. We are called to offer meaning to the lives of our contemporaries. But it is an eternal life that begins here and now by the indwelling of the Trinity through grace and that comes to full flowering at death. In other and simple words the Legion is called like Mary to be a great sign of hope especially to those who see themselves as most hopeless.

The Assumption is a source of Encouragement. It has sometimes been said very beautifully that both humanity and divinity are completely at home in Mary. Certainly God made the perfect home for his Son in her heart. Our Lord spent thirty times more time with His Mother than he did in his public ministry. One of the homeliest reasons for the Assumption is simply because Jesus wanted his Mother to be with Him in Heaven. They were inseparable in life and it is only fitting they should be inseparable for all eternity. And how can we forget her humanity. She is utterly and completely one of us. She lived the life of grace in this world. She cooked meals and did the washing up, she kept the house clean and joyfully met the demands for hospitality and neighbourliness, she discreetly helped young couples in the village who were getting married, she took special care of Joseph her husband when he was dying, she quietly and unobtrusively helped people without putting them under a compliment, she was a great woman to get a bit of advice from. She was a lovely accessible means of grace to all who came into contact with her. She was a terrific woman and mother. None of these beautiful qualities have been lost in heaven but deepened beyond all our imaginings.

Finally, let me say that the Mary that founded the Legion was not simply the Woman who lived two thousand years ago in Nazareth but the Woman of the Assumption who has conquered death and has been invested by God with the distribution of all graces, the one who leads us infallibly to Jesus and through Him to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Amen.