August 15: Feast of the Assumption of Our Mama Mary

'Assumption' in Latin is ass?mpti? meaning "taking up."

Some notes regarding Mama Mary’s Assumption:

It is one of four Marian dogmas of the Catholic Church: the three others are the dogmas of Mother of God, Immaculate Conception, and perpetual virginity.

“Pope Pius XII  in his November 1950 apostolic constitution  Munificentissimus Deus (Most Bountiful God), declared: ‘We proclaim and define it to be a dogma revealed by God that the immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever virgin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.’

The declaration was built upon the 1854 dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which declared that Mary was conceived free from original sin, and both have their foundation in the concept of Mary as the Mother of God.

His Apostolic Constitution contained the Pontiff's accounts of many longstanding traditions by which the Church has celebrated the Assumption throughout its history.

Pius XII cited several early Byzantine liturgical texts and the eighth-century Arab Christian theologian, St. John of Damascus, who recorded: ‘St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven.

It was fitting that she, who had kept her virginity intact in childbirth, should keep her own body free from all corruption even after death,’ and that she, who had carried the creator as a child at her breast, should dwell in the divine tabernacles.”

 There is no explicit record of Mama Mary’s Assumption but Revelation 11:19 and 12:1-6,10 often depict Mama Mary’s assumption: “Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and within his temple was seen the ark of his covenant.   A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads.  Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.”  And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God,    and the authority of his Messiah. For the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been hurled down.”

Mama Mary’s Assumption recalled her wonderful role for our redemption, her great love, obedience, fidelity to God.

Despite her being “blessed among women,” and “blessed for the fruit of her womb, Jesus”, she never called attention to herself.

Instead, her Song of Praise, The Magnificat: (Luke 1:46-55) “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

Check out The Magnificat in Filipino - “Ang Puso Ko'y Nagpupuri- by Fr. Eduardo Hontiveros, SJ in  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2JZK1vrCv0