Assumption of Mary

On August 15, the Church keeps the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary — body and soul into heavenly glory. Defined as a dogma of the Catholic faith by Pope Pius XII in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus on November 1, 1950, the proclamation formalized a conviction held in both East and West since the earliest centuries: that Mary, preserved from the corruption of the tomb, was assumed to be with her Son. The Eastern Churches keep the same feast on the same day under its older name, the Dormition of the Theotokos — the "falling asleep" of the Mother of God.

No Marian shrine is unconnected to this feast. In tradition, Mary's earthly ending is placed at Ephesus on the hill above the ancient city, where the House of the Virgin stands among the cedars; the German mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich's visions in 1812 led French priests to the site in 1881 and there they found the foundations matching her account. In the West, Rome marks the day with the Papal procession to Santa Maria Maggiore, the basilica that claims the relics of the Holy Crib, where Pius XII defined the dogma. Loreto, tradition holds, preserves the Holy House in which Mary received the angel and in which the apostles gathered at her passing.

The great Marian shrines of Europe hold the feast as their high point. Lourdes holds the torchlight procession on the evening of the 14th and the morning Mass of the 15th before the Grotto of Massabielle, where Mary identified herself to Bernadette as "the Immaculate Conception." Fatima marks the anniversary of the fourth apparition in 1917, when the children of the Cova da Iria were shown the vision of hell and asked for devotion to her Immaculate Heart. Czestochowa draws Polish pilgrims by the hundreds of thousands to Jasna Góra, the monastery shrine of the Black Madonna. Zaragoza, the oldest Marian shrine in Spain, remembers the tradition that the Virgin appeared there to James the Apostle while she still lived on earth — the Nuestra Señora del Pilar. From Guadalupe in Mexico to Kevelaer in Germany, the Assumption is the day on which every Marian shrine stands as a local witness to the woman the Church believes to be already where the rest of the redeemed hope to be.

August 15 is also a nationwide public holiday in more than forty countries — from Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and Luxembourg across Italy, Malta, Greece, and Cyprus to Poland, Croatia, Slovenia, and Romania; and from Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica in the Americas to Lebanon, Syria, and the Philippines in Asia. In parts of Germany (Bavaria and Saarland) and in 14 of Switzerland's 26 cantons it is a regional holiday. In several lands it carries a second meaning: in Poland it coincides with Polish Army Day (commemorating the 1920 victory at the Vistula), and in Costa Rica it is also Mother's Day. The Italian name of the feast, Ferragosto, reaches back past the Christian observance to the Roman Feriae Augusti — the emperor's holidays of August — which the fifth-century Church quietly baptized into Mary's day.