The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated on Sept. 8, is perhaps the least observed among all of the Marian feasts. In terms of popular piety, it is certainly overshadowed by the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, three months later — or, to be more precise, nine months earlier — and the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary 24 days earlier.
Indeed, in my ten years as the Catholicism Expert for About.com, I found that the Assumption seemed to attract the most attention, in part because of the perennial debate over whether Mary suffered death before her body was assumed into heaven. Pope Pius XII, in his apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus, made it clear that he believed the unbroken tradition of both Eastern and Western Christianity, writing “this feast shows, not only that the dead body of the Blessed Virgin Mary remained incorrupt, but that she gained a triumph out of death, her heavenly glorification after the example of her only begotten Son, Jesus Christ … .” But when he defined the dogma of the Assumption, he left that detail out, which means that Catholics can legitimately disagree whether Mary died as each of us will do.
Original Sin
Personally, I have found no reason to doubt the unbroken tradition, but many of my readers disagreed. The most common argument that they advanced was that Mary was kept free from the stain of Original Sin through her Immaculate Conception, and death, as we know, is a consequence of the sin of Adam. And on the surface, it seems like a good argument.
But when we examine how Mary was kept free from the stain of Original Sin, that argument falls apart. Her conception, though preceding the death of Christ in time, was made immaculate through his death. “By death,” as Eastern Christians sing throughout the season of Easter, “he trampled death.” And our triumph over the ultimate death — the consigning of our souls to Hell — requires us to be united to Christ in his death, both spiritually in our baptism and physically in our bodies. We pray for a happy death in Christ because our salvation is not complete until we pass through death into eternal life.
In suffering death in union with her Son, Mary completed her passage through a perfect life here on earth into eternal life in Heaven.
St. John Damascene, around the year 740, writes in an “Oration on the Glorious Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God the Ever-Virgin Mary” that “This day” (the day of Mary’s Assumption) “the Treasure of Life, the Abyss of grace … is veiled in Life-bringing death. And she drew near to it without fear, who had given birth to death’s Destroyer … But she yields to the law laid down by Him she had borne, and as a daughter of the Old Adam submits to this inherited chastisement: since her Son Who is Life Itself had not refused it … .”
Final perseverance
In suffering death in union with her Son, Mary completed her passage through a perfect life here on earth into eternal life in heaven. That her Son chose to preserve her body from decay by assuming it into heaven and reuniting it with her soul does not diminish the lesson of final perseverance that Mary teaches us through her death. Indeed, it gives us hope in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come, because Mary has already experienced that resurrection and is living that new life that her Son, through his sacrifice, offers to all who believe. Through her union with that sacrifice even unto death, Mary has become the model for all Christians. There is nothing demeaning about the reality that she suffered death despite having been conceived without Original Sin; indeed, uniting herself to Christ in her own death is the most fitting end to a life that was bathed in the salvific effects of his own death at the very moment of her conception.
So today, as we celebrate the birth of the Mother of God, the true Ark of the Covenant, the bearer of the Tree of Life, let us pray that she will intercede for us so that, as our life draws to a close, we may approach death as she did, without fear and in the sure and certain knowledge that, if we should die in Christ as she did, we shall also share in his resurrection, as she did.
