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Dear Friends in Christ,

Today we celebrate the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This doctrine of the Church obliges us to accept that Mary, upon her death, was taken, body and soul, into Heaven, and there reigns as Queen over all things.

Many people, who otherwise consider themselves to be good Christians, good Catholics, express difficulty with this teaching of the Church.

And yet, the fact of Mary's Assumption, if we believe in the Resurrection of Christ, is a logical necessity.

When God willed Himself to be the Savior of mankind, He also willed that the Son must be born, must take upon Himself human nature, so that He could suffer and die for the sake of those who must suffer and die because of sin. The difference is, that the Son of God dies, not because of sin, but because of love . In the same way, the vessel God chose to bear His Son, could not be touched by the imperfection of sin – for the womb worthy to hold the expression of God's perfect love, Jesus Christ, had to be a womb already saved by that same perfect love. And so, from the moment of her conception, and because of what her Son would do, something already known to God, Mary was freed from the effects of original sin. Her Immaculate Conception was the first necessity of her being, for only such a person, already saved by the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ, could be worthy to receive Jesus Christ.

We spend our lives, in one way or the other, atoning for the effects of original sin, and for the sins that we commit as a result. Grace, which comes from the Sacraments, from actual encounters between God and us – grace gives us the strength to turn away from sin and reform our lives. But the debt – the debt we owe because of our own faults, and the debt we owe Jesus Christ who suffered and died for our sake - those debts make it necessary for us to live, to atone, and most probably, to suffer the purification of Purgatory, before we can experience God directly, and before our bodies can be called up from the grave, and raised to eternal life.

But Mary was exempted from this condition – she was born without the inclination to sin, and she did not sin. And because, in her human form, she had already been made most perfect, most pure, most holy, there was, for her, no delaying the redemption of the promise of eternal life. For Mary, there was no judgement, no purification – there was death and the immediate reunion with God, with her Son, with all the angels and saints. Nothing stood in the way of the love that existed between Mary and Jesus Christ, between Mary and God, who had made her His mother. Therefore, body and soul, Mary had to be assumed into Heaven upon the completion of her life on earth. Nothing else would have been right, nothing else would have made sense.

Added to this necessity of what had to happen because of how God had created her, there is also the simple fact, that Jesus Christ loved His mother so greatly, that He would have wanted her with Him in Heaven as soon as that could happen. As in all things, He was obedient to the will of the Father, and therefore waited upon Mary to finish the course of her natural life, her life on earth. But at her death, from that moment, there was nothing that could keep her apart from her Son.

Dear friends, our Faith is not a faith of science. We can use the science of logic, of reason, to reach certain conclusions about the specifics of our Faith. But in the end, our Faith is a system built upon miracles: the miracle of God becoming man, the miracle of God loving us so much that He would submit to death for our sake, the miracle of resurrection, or being raised from the dead. Therefore, our Faith is what it says it is – the necessity, the necessity of belief, and only miracles make it necessary for us to believe . The miracle of Mary's Assumption is such a necessity, and it is part and parcel of the entire fabric of God's love for us.

Today, as the 2 nd Vatican Council stated, we honor Mary as the “exemplary realization” of the Church, for with her Assumption into Heaven, we are given a clear sign of what God will do for us, when nothing is left to interfere between His love for us, and our love for Him – when there is no life, no death, no sin, to stand in the way of our being with Him for eternity.

Let us give Him glory, for making Mary the sign, clothed with the sun of His love, crowned with the twelve stars of the Apostles – the sign of the Church triumphant, the sign of what we will be, if we accept her lead, follow her example, and make the will of God, the meaning of our life.

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