I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your lineage and hers Thus the Blessed Virgin Mary appears associated with Christ the Redeemer in the struggle and triumph over Satan. It is the divine plan that Providence had prepared from eternity to save us. This is the announcement of the first book of Sacred Scripture, and in the last one we find again this portentous affirmation: A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, the moon for a pedestal, crowned with twelve stars. It is the Blessed Virgin, who enters body and soul into Heaven at the end of her life among us. And she arrives to be crowned Queen of the Universe, because she is the Mother of God. The king is captivated by your beauty3 , sings the responsorial Psalm.
St. John the Apostle, who surely witnessed Mary's passage, the Lord had entrusted her to him, and he was not going to be absent in those moments..., tells us nothing in his Gospel about the last moments of Our Mother here on earth. He who with such clarity and strength spoke to us of the death of Jesus on Golgotha is silent when it comes to the One for whom he cared as his mother and as the Mother of Jesus and of all men. Outwardly, it must have been like a sweet dream: "He left this world in a state of wakefulness," says an ancient writer, in fullness of love. "The course of her earthly life ended, she was assumed body and soul to heavenly glory." There her Son, Jesus, awaited her with his glorious body, as she had contemplated him after the Resurrection. With His divine power, God attended to the integrity of Mary's body and did not allow the slightest alteration in it, maintaining its perfect unity and complete harmony. Our Lady obtained, "as the supreme crowning of her prerogatives, to be exempted from the corruption of the sepulcher and, conquering death as her Son had conquered it before, to be raised body and soul to heavenly glory". In other words, the harmony of Marian privileges postulated her Assumption into Heaven.
We have often contemplated this privilege of Our Lady in the Fourth Mystery of Glory of the Holy Rosary: "The Mother of God has fallen asleep (...). But Jesus wants to have His Mother, body and soul, in Glory. And the heavenly Court deploys all its apparatus, to entertain the Lady. You and I, children, at last take the tail of the splendid blue mantle of the Virgin, and thus we can contemplate that marvel.
"The Most Blessed Trinity receives and showers with honors the Daughter, Mother and Spouse of God..... And the Lady's majesty is so great that she makes the angels ask: Who is this? We rejoice with the angels, filled also with admiration, and we congratulate her on her feast. And we are proud to be children of such a great Lady.
Frequently, popular piety and Marian art have represented the Virgin, in this mystery, carried by angels and haloed with clouds. St. Thomas sees in these angelic interventions towards those who have left the earth and are already on their way to Heaven, the manifestation of reverence that the Angels and all creatures pay to the glorious bodies9. In the case of Our Lady, all that we can imagine is very little. Nothing, compared to how it must have happened in reality. St. Teresa recounts that she once saw the hand, only the hand, glorified, of Our Lord, and later the Saint said that, next to it, five hundred thousand clear suns, reflected in the cleanest crystal, were like a sad and very dark night.
What would the face of Christ be like, his gaze...? One day, if we are faithful, we will contemplate Jesus and Saint Mary, whom we have invoked so many times in this life.