No one can reasonably doubt that the Virgin Mary’s soul is now in heaven,
Christ would not have it otherwise. She is pictured as being in heaven by
St. John: “A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the
sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars
... And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations
with a rod of iron” (Rev. 12:1,
5). The doctrine of the Assumption is not
contained explicitly in Scripture, but the fact that Scripture does not record
an event is no absolute argument against it. The Bible does not record the
death of St. Joseph either, but all believe this must have happened.
What Scripture does tell us, however, is that God has taken, in the past,
other individuals both body and soul from the world and translated them
into paradise. Such was the privilege granted to Enoch (Gen. 5:24; Heb.
11:5) and the Prophet Elijah (2 Kgs. 2:1-13). St. Jude may have believed
that the same privilege was given to Moses by referring to the apocryphal
work Assumption of Moses in his short epistle (v. 9). Considering such
precedents, it is not unreasonable to believe that God would bestow upon
the Virgin Mary an even more sublime privilege, namely a glorious
Assumption into heaven, in view of her fulfilment of her proportionately
greater vocation as Mother of God. Such an opinion was certainly held by
the 16th century Protestant Reformer, Heinrich Bullinger:
“Elijah was transported, body and soul, in a chariot of
fire; he was not buried … but mounted up to Heaven, so
that … we might know what immortality and recompense
God prepares for his faithful prophets and for his most
outstanding and incomparable creatures … It is for this
reason, we believe, that the pure and immaculate
embodiment of the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, the
Temple of the Holy Spirit, that is to say, her saintly body,
was carried up to heaven by the angels.”³
The bodies of the glorious Apostles, the martyrs who shed their blood for
Christ, men and women noted for their holiness, have been carefully
preserved and venerated in the Church from the beginning of Christianity.
While the remains of St. Peter and St. Paul are jealously possessed in
3
On Original Sin, 16 (1568).
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