Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.
Continuing our reflections on Mary and her role in Franciscan spirituality.
Today we'll speak about Our Lady's Assumption, the most recent Marian dogma that's been proclaimed by the Church.
The privilege of the bodily Assumption of Mary into Heaven, which was solemnly defined on November 1st, 1950, this privilege is strictly connected to Our Lady's predestination to be immaculately conceived and intimately associated with her Son.
The inescapable law for all the children of Adam is that we're born in sin, and when we die, we return to dust.
But Our Lady herself is more daughter of God than she is daughter of Adam.
She's united to Christ more so than she's united to Adam.
And just as the law of sin doesn't apply to her, she was willed with Jesus before Adam, before consideration of sin.
So too the law of corruption of the grave doesn't touch her or Jesus either.
Jesus and Mary are the two elect creatures who from all eternity, independently of sin, were predestined to glory.
Jesus was raised from the dead by, in His own power, and also in the power of His Father, you can say both.
He is the life that defeats death in Himself, after having voluntarily suffered it.
And He died in order to give glory to God and to expiate, to pay for, our sin.
Mary is completely conformed to Jesus and associated with Him in her predestination and in time as well.
When her mission was completed, she was also associated with Him in glory, hence her assumption.
Franciscans also believe that Mary did die.
She died as a last gesture of conformity to Jesus.
But her death wasn't a painful death, and it wasn't caused by sickness or an external cause.
Mary even physically was more perfect than Eve was before the fall.
So death and punishment for sin couldn't have an effect on the one whom St. Maximilian Kolbe called the Immaculata.
Death is expiation for sin spiritually and mystically, it actually already happened to Our Lady of Calvary, in union with the physical death of Jesus, her Son.
One of the prayers of her feast, the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady, reads this, Her senses had already won the palm of martyrdom under the cross of the Lord.
So she already experienced death there.
Physical death of Mary was a serene passage in an impulse of love towards God, an impulse, a burst which separated her soul from her body.
And her immaculate body, which was a living temple of God like no one else, her immaculate body didn't remain for a long time in the grave that was lovingly watched over by the Apostles.
The Divine Son saw in His mother as Adam had once saw in Eve, or seen in Eve.
He saw in her the flesh of His flesh, Genesis 2:23.
He saw her as almost a part of Himself as man.
In that holy and pure body of Mary, He stayed nine months as a living tabernacle, and He willed that her body remain virgin and intact.
By her, He was lovingly carried, nursed and fed by her sustenance and maternal milk, held up in her arms, protected and guarded in His first steps.
Jesus had Our Lady by His side in the hour of His suffering and death, when the will and the mission of the Father was completed by both of them on Calvary.
And so they would also be united in triumph as well, triumph to which Jesus would naturally associate His mother.
In this way, the two perfect exemplars of the human race, the man and the woman whom God predestined before the world existed, to be His universal glorifiers.
In this way, Jesus and Mary completed their course up to the last moment of their lives, and they've already entered into eternal beatitude, glorified in both soul and body.
With the assumption of the Virgin that followed the ascension of Jesus, the cycle was completed, and creation was free to follow its ultimate goal, which is to glorify God, and at the same time to be glorified itself, to reach eternal beatitude, which is our destination.
And if the ascension of Jesus appears to us as the triumph owed to the God-Man, King of the universe, victor over sin and death, the assumption of Mary consecrates her universal queenship, the queenship of a creature who is fully human like us, and her assumption should be a source of consolation for us too.
She is the first fruits of that glorification to which we're all called as members of the body of which Christ is the head.
Even at the universal judgment, the Virgin will be the Alma Socia of Christ.
Jesus will sit at the right hand of the Father, and Mary will sit at the right hand of the Son of her Son.
To the glorification of the Virgin is the finishing touch that completes and unveils to the Franciscans' eyes the harmony of God's divine design, that eternal plan of love which has as its center and foundation Jesus, who is Son of God and Son of Mary too.
So let's ask Our Lady then for the grace to set our minds and our hearts on the things above, to quote from St. Paul, where she is seated alongside her Son.
Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.