Father Richard G. Cipolla
St. Mary's, Norwalk, Connecticut
August 15, 2016
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| The Assumption of the Virgin, by Leonard Porter (2013) St. Mary's, Norwalk, Connecticut (Source) |
“When the corruptible frame takes on incorruptibility and the mortal immortality, then will the saying of Scripture be fulfilled: death is swallowed up in victory.” I Cor. 15:53
When I am asked what Christianity is basically about, and
this question arises more and more in the post-Christian culture we live in, I
answer: it is about death. This comes as a surprise to non-Christians
and to an increasing number of Christians as well. But it should not be so, since it is the
question of the meaning of death and the event of the death of Jesus Christ
that are at the heart of this faith. A
religion that does not squarely face death and does not have an answer to the
fundamental question of death can have no relevance to anyone’s life. But if someone asked me what today’s feast is
all about, I would respond that this feast is the commemoration of an event
that is the response to death, or this is what we understand as the fruit of
Christ’s death, namely eternal life with God, the source and giver of all life,
and we join all the angels in heaven and sing:
Mary is assumed into heaven; today she was raised above choirs of angels
to lasting glory with Christ.
All would go well—until I mention the body: that Mary was
assumed into heaven body and soul. This
is where the trouble starts. The problem is the body. Those people who have no real religion but
claim to be spiritual people are perfectly open to the idea of some purely
spiritual residue surviving after death.
They don’t mind talk of souls flying up to heaven or somewhere, but they
rebel against the notion of the body somehow being included in this existence
after death. Part of the objection lies
on the purely obvious and biological level.
It is obvious that in death the body grows cold and decomposes. It seems to be the final end for that part of
us, the physical part, we call the body.
But the objection goes deeper, because to admit that the body
participates in any way in the state of eternal life after death is to admit
that the body in this life, what I do to it, what I do with it, is ultimately
important: that the body is much more than merely an appearance and in the end
is surely as vital a part of the person I am as that spiritual part I call the
soul.
The body is always the problem. It was the problem for the
Greeks in the Apostolic church, who were open to hear about eternal life but
walked away when Paul began to speak of Jesus’ bodily resurrection. It is the
problem today with those who want to spiritualize and moralize away
Christianity and deny any lasting value to the body with the result that they
claim they can do whatever they want to do with either their own body or
someone else’s body, even that of a child in the womb, and claim that this has
no ultimate significance, because it is merely physical, merely body, with no
ultimate relationship to the spiritual.
This is why so many Catholic funerals today are now a
maudlin canonization of the one whose body lies cold dead in the church. Everyone now flies on eagles’ wings to some
sort of heaven where all Catholics go, where the hope of purgatory has gone the
same way as the fear of hell, where priests wear white vestments on both All
Saints Day and All Souls Day, fearing to upset the people with the traditional
color of black, which color reminds us of the finality and reality of death,
but also the beautiful hope that lies beyond the darkness and sorrow, all of
this a sentimental denial of the reality of death and a cheapening of the
virtue of Christian hope. A priest once said to me: “We are a resurrected people”. I replied:
“I am not aware that I have died yet, so real resurrection is not an
option for me at this time.” Or homilies that describe the dead woman dancing a
jig at this time and smiling on everyone.
Can anyone take this seriously? No. People are not that stupid, and they
have Masses said for the dead and they pray for their beloved who have died.
All of this fools no one.
Whatever we may want to believe because it makes our lives easier,
everyone knows that the body is absolutely an integral and necessary part of
the person I am. My body is how I live
in the world. It is not merely a shell for the soul—pace Plato—it is involved in the most intimate way with the soul,
and what I do with my body always affects my soul and what I do with my soul
affects my body. Therefore there can be
no talk of redemption and salvation, there can be no talk of eternal life,
unless the body is included, for this is a part of the person I am. Salvation means being saved body and soul, as
the whole man, as the whole woman. And
ultimately the feast of the Assumption of Mary is a feast of her redemption, what
that means. She who was conceived without original sin by the merits of her
Son’s death on the Cross, in other words in anticipation of her Son’s death on
the Cross, it is she who is now the fruit of that redemption, when she is taken
up body and soul into eternal life with her Son. It is Mary who is redeemed and who is queen
of heaven, not some disembodied soul, but Mary the woman, the woman who is
clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of
twelve stars. And while it is true that hers is a singular privilege for there
is no other human being in the history of the world who plays the role she does
in salvation history as the New Eve, as the Theotokos, the bearer of God, as
the mother of the Savior, her realized destiny gives us great hope. What is a fact for Mary, her being in heaven
body and soul, as a total person, is what is our hope for ourselves. For it is our resurrection to which we look
forward, it is the fruit of our redemption in Jesus Christ who died on the
Cross in a real body and who rose again on the third day not as a ghost but as
the man, Jesus Christ, whose body was gloriously transformed into a body
destined to live forever in the glory of God.
What Mary is today in heaven in eternity is what is our sure hope for
ourselves, a sure hope founded on faith in Jesus Chris and acted out in the
world in a life that is centered on doing the will of God whose will is that
all shall live.
But we rejoice also because this is the patronal feast of
this great parish of St. Mary’s in Norwalk.
And how fitting it is to celebrate this feast in the Traditional Roman
Rite, where the polyglot of languages of the people of this parish come
together in the objectivity of the Latin language. This Mass is the very cornerstone of Catholic
Tradition, not the product of a committee but rather the distillation of
organic development of 1600 years. It is
the greatest work of art in the history of the Western world, but art not
merely in the aesthetic sense, but rather art as the bridge between the shadows
of this word and the reality of heaven.
How blessed is this parish to be at the very forefront of the return of
Catholic Tradition that is embedded in this Mass, this Mass that is the
antidote to that secularizing sentimentality that confuses the Holy Sacrifice
of the Mass, like Ulrich Zwingli, the Protestant reformer in Zurich, who
destroyed the altar and set up a wooden table, with a communal meal or a
representation of the Last Supper, where the priest becomes the focus of the
Mass as a presider, instead of he who vanishes within the rite and enters into
that silence that is the silence of Mount Moriah, that is the silence of Mount
Tabor, that is the silence of Mount Calvary.
This recovery of the sacred that is at the heart of the mission of this
parish has nothing to do with nostalgia for an imaginary past or with some sort
of reactionary sensibility. This recovery of the sacred is inextricably linked
to the recovery of the Catholic faith as a faith that is living, that is
joyful, that is beautiful, a faith that is a light in the deepening darkness of
a world in thrall to the gray eminence, the disease that is secularism with is
attendant self-centered sentimentality.
We celebrate this feast with great joy, for Mary is assumed
into heaven, body and soul, and she makes our hope for ourselves something
real.
