The cure for the pessimism and despair of the Modern world. August 15, 2022 The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Dear Family of Mary! Today is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary! Today we celebrate 72 years since this Dogma was proclaimed! Now more than ever, we need Our Lady of the Assumption to be with us, showing us the truth of Eternal Life with God in Heaven. We need the truth about God’s love for us, and our need for God. I would like to quote Archbishop Fulton J Sheen, who wrote a beautiful book about our Lady, “The World’s First Love, Mary, Mother of God”. He wrote prophetically about the Assumption, which had just been declared when he composed this book, 1950! Here is a section of his chapter on the Assumption: In this doctrine of the Assumption, the Church meets the despair of the world in a second way. She affirms the beauty of life as against death. When wars, sex, and sin multiply the discords of men, and death threatens on every side, the Church bids us lift up our hearts to the life that has the immortality of the Life that nourished it. Feuerbach said that a man is what he eats. He was more right than he knew. Eat the food of earth, and one dies; eat the Eucharist, and one lives eternally. She, who is the mother of the Eucharist, escapes the decomposition of death. The Assumption challenges the nothingness of the Mortician philosophers in a new way. The greatest task of the spiritual leaders today is to save mankind from despair, into which sex and fear of death have cast it. The world that used to say, “Why worry about the next world, when we live in this one?” has finally learned the hard way that, by not thinking about the next life, one cannot even enjoy this life. When optimism completely breaks down and becomes pessimism, the Church holds forth the promise of hope. Threatened as we are by war on all sides, with death about to be rained from the sky by Promethean fires, the Church defines a truth that has Life at its center. Like a kindly mother whose sons are going off to war, she strokes our heads and says: “You will come back alive, as Mary came back again after walking down the valley of Death.” As the world fears defeat by death, the Church sings the defeat of death. Is not this the harbinger of a better world, as the refrain of life rings out amidst the clamors of the philosophers of death? As communism teaches that man has only a body, but not a soul, so the Church answers: “Then let us begin with a Body.” As the mystical body of the anti-Christ gathers around the tabernacle doors of the cadaver of Lenin, periodically filled with wax to give the illusion of immortality to those who deny immorality, the Mystical Body of Christ bids the despairing to gaze on the two most serious wounds earth ever received, the empty tomb of Christ and the empty tomb of Mary. In 1854 the Church spoke of the Soul of the Immaculate Conception. In 1950 her language was about the Body; the Mystical Body, the Eucharist and the Assumption. With deft dogmatic strokes the Church is repeating Paul’s truth to another pagan age: “Your bodies are meant for the Lord.” There is nothing in a body to beget despair. Man is related to Nothingness, as the philosophers of decadentism teach, but only in his origin, not in his destiny. They put nothingness at the end: the Church puts it at the beginning, for man was created ex nihilo. The modern man gets back to nothingness through despair; the Christian knows nothingness only through self-negation, which is humility. The more that the pagan “nothings” himself, the closer he gets to the hell of despair and suicide. The more the Christian “nothings” himself, the closer he gets to God. Mary went so deep down into nothingness that she became exalted. Respexit humilitatem ancillae suae. And her exaltation was also her Assumption. Coming back to the beginning…to Eros and Thanatos: sex and death, said Freud, are related. They are related in this sense: Eros as egotistic love leads to the death of the soul. But the world need not live under that curse. The Assumption gives Eros a new meaning. Love does lead to death. Where there is love, there is self-forgetfulness, and the maximum in self-forgetfulness is the surrender of life. “Greater love than this no man hath, that he lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13). Our Lord’s love led to His death. Mary’s love led to her transfixion with seven swords. Greater love than this no woman hath, that she stand beneath the Cross of her Son to share, in her own way, in the Redemption of the world. Within three decades the definition of the Assumption will cure the pessimism and despair of the modern world. Freud, who did so much to develop this pessimism, took as his motto; “If I cannot move the Gods on high, I shall set all hell in an uproar.” That uproar which he created will now be stilled by a Lady as powerful as an “army drawn up in battle array”. The age of the “Body Beautiful” will now become the age of the Assumption. In Mary there is a triple transition. In the Annunciation we pass from the holiness of the Old Testament to the holiness of Christ. At Pentecost we pass from the holiness of the historical Christ to the holiness of the Mystical Christ or His Body which is the Church. Mary here receives the Spirit for a second time. The first overshadowing was to give birth to the Head of the Church; this second overshadowing is to give birth to His Body as she is in the midst of the Apostles abiding in prayer. The third transition is the Assumption, as she becomes the first human person to realize the historical destiny of the Faithful as members of Christ’s Mystical Body, beyond death, and beyond judgment. Mary is always in the vanguard of humanity. She is compared to Wisdom, presiding at Creation; she is announced as the Woman who will conquer Satan, as the Virgin who will conceive. She becomes the first person since the Fall to have a unique and unrepeatable kind of union with God; she mothers the infant Christ in Bethlehem; she mothers the Mystical Christ at Jerusalem; and now, by her Assumption, she goes ahead like her Son to prepare a place for us. She participates in the glory of her Son, reigns with Him, presides at His Side over the destinies of the Church in time, and intercedes for us, to Him, as He, in His turn, intercedes to the Heavenly Father. Adam came before Eve chronologically. The new Adam, Christ, comes after the new Eve, Mary, chronologically, although existentially He preceded her as the Creator a creature. By stressing for the moment only the time element, Mary always seems to be the advent of what is in store for man. She anticipates Christ for nine months, as she bears Heaven within her; she anticipates His Passion at Cana, and His Church at Pentecost. Now, in the last great doctrine of the Assumption, she anticipates Heavenly glory, and the definition comes at a time when men think of it least. One wonders if this could not be the last of the great truths of Mary to be defined by the Church. Anything else might seem to be an anticlimax after she is declared to be in Heaven, body and soul. But actually there is one other truth left to be defined, and that is that she is the Mediatrix, under her Son, of all graces. As St. Paul speaks of the Ascension of Our Lord as the prelude to His intercession for us, so we, fittingly, should speak of the Assumption of Our Lady as a prelude to her intercession for us. First, the place, Heaven; then, the function, intercession. The nature of her role is not to call her Son’s attention to some need, in an emergency unnoticed by Him, nor is it to “win” a difficult consent. Rather it is to unite herself to His compassionate Mercy and give a human voice to His Infinite Love. The main ministry of Mary is to incline men’s hearts to obedience to the will of her divine Son. Her last recorded words at Cana are still her words in the Assumption: “Whatsoever He shall say to you, that do ye.” (Fulton J. Sheen, “The Worlds’ First Love, Mary, Mother of God” 1953) I know this is very long, and dense. But Bishop Sheen was giving a prophecy. He could see that within three decades of the proclamation of the Assumption, God would send the cure to the pessimism and despair of the modern world. The Assumption was declared in 1950, and in 1981 Our Lady appeared in Medjugorje. Just at the end of those three decades!! Our Lady came and she has stayed with us, curing our pessimism and despair, one person at a time, in Medjugorje. She is giving us our faith, strong and powerful faith, just at a time when it would seem that the world is drunk on death and despair. She is the answer for our age. And she will triumph!! Today, on the Assumption, let us thank her for her presence, and enter into her school of love and hope and faith and courage! She is raising up an army to defeat the devil in our time, and reclaim God’s children for His Kingdom! Our Lady says to us: “Dear children! Also in this difficult time God’s love sends me to you. My children, do not be afraid, I am with you. With complete trust give me your hearts, that I may help you to recognize the signs of the time in which you live. I will help you to come to know the love of my Son. I will triumph through you. Thank you.” (June 2, 2007) In Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Cathy Nolan ©Mary TV 2022
