Today, Catholics and many other Christians celebrate the feast
of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This significant
feast day recalls the spiritual and physical departure of the
mother of Jesus Christ from the earth, when both her soul and
her body were taken into the presence of God. Venerable Pope
Pius XII confirmed this belief about the Virgin Mary as the
perennial teaching of the Church when he defined it formally as
a dogma of Catholic faith in 1950, invoking papal infallibility
to proclaim, “that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin
Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was
assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.” His Apostolic
Constitution “Munificentissimus Deus” (Most Bountiful God),
which defined the dogma, contained the Pontiff's accounts of
many longstanding traditions by which the Church has celebrated
the Assumption throughout its history. The constitution also
cited testimonies from the early Church fathers on the subject,
and described the history of theo