August 10, 2025

Dear Parish Family,

This Friday (August 15), we celebrate the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and commemorate the death of Mary and her bodily assumption into Heaven.  The Assumption is the oldest feast day of Our Lady. The belief in the Assumption of Mary dates back to the apostles themselves.  There was no grave where her body lay buried.  There was only an empty tomb on the edge of Jerusalem near the site of her death. That location also soon became a place of pilgrimage.  The early Christians understood, believed, and taught that Mary had died in the presence of the apostles and was immediately buried.  When they went to visit her body soon after, the tomb was found empty, and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven. 

Why?  It was through Mary’s body that God took flesh.  The Incarnation took place.  In her body, she conceived of the Holy Spirit, carried Jesus in her womb, and gave birth to him.  Hers was a sacred body. 

Some might ask where this is found in Scripture. While the Assumption is not described directly in the Bible, we see hints and signs: in Revelation 12, the woman “clothed with the sun,” who brings forth a child destined to rule the nations; in the Old Testament Ark of the Covenant, a sacred vessel now fulfilled in Mary, the new Ark who carried the Word made flesh. The tradition of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, has recognized and proclaimed the Assumption as a divinely revealed truth.

The Assumption is God’s crowning of His work as Mary ends her earthly life and enters eternity. The feast turns our eyes in that direction, where we will follow when our earthly life is over. The feast days of the Church are not just the commemoration of historical events; they do not look only to the past. They look to the present and to the future and give us an insight into our own relationship with God. The Assumption looks to eternity and gives us hope that we, too, will follow Our Lady when our life is ended. She is already where we hope to be: with God, body and soul, fully alive in glory.

As we gather this year to celebrate this great feast, let us not see it as merely a holy obligation. Let us see it for what it truly is—a promise fulfilled, and a promise extended to each of us. 

Our Lady of the Assumption, pray for us.

Love and prayers,
Father Neil Sullivan