New Dogma

St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231) was strongly tempted one night to stay away from divine office in chapel the next morning. He knew that the day would be Aug. 14, the vigil of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and that the service would contain the words from the Martyrology of Usuard/-: "As yet the Church has given no decision upon the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, exercising a prudent reserve as to trivial, or apocryphal legends." St. Anthony, who steadfastly believed that Mary's body had indeed been taken into Heaven after her death, hated to hear these words.

While he was debating whether to stay away from choir, according to Biographer Leopold de Cherance, O.S.F.C., the Virgin herself appeared to him and said: "Be assured, my son, that this body of mine . . . has been preserved from the corruption of the grave. Be equally assured that, three days after my death, it was carried upon the wings of angels to the right hand of the Son of God, where I reign as Queen."

500 Bishops, 35 Cardinals. St. Anthony's vision, with the accumulated visions, insights and inspired beliefs of centuries of Roman Catholics, has built up a vast deposit of faith that this week became an official dogma of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1946 Pope Pius XII sent a circular letter to all bishops, asking whether they thought the Assumption should now be defined as church dogma. The replies were mostly favorable.

All Rome reverberated this week to the event from which the 1950 Holy Year would hereafter take its name: the Jubilee Year of the Assumption. Clergymen and laymen poured into the city to be present at that rare Catholic occasion--the proclamation of a dogma of the church.*

The celebrations and ceremonies were scheduled to last for 3 1/2 days. Crowds thronged the floodlit Coliseum to hear famed Jesuit Preacher Father Riccardo Lombardi (TIME, March 1, 1948) speak from the stones upon which Christian martyrs once died. At the Vatican the Pope held a semipublic consistory of some 500 bishops and 35 cardinals. Behind a picture of the Virgin, painted, according to tradition, by St. Luke, the church planned one of the biggest nighttime processions Rome had ever seen.

All the Faithful. The climax of the ceremonies would be All Saints' Day, when the actual definition of the dogma was scheduled to take place in an elaborate ceremony. From a throne set up before the central gate to St. Peter's, above a colorful sea of bishops' miters and upturned faces, the Pope receives the formal request of the College of Cardinals that the dogma be proclaimed. After a prayer, the Pope reads the bull/- of proclamation: ". . . The presence of Mary in soul and body in Heaven is a God-revealed truth . . . Hence if anyone deliberately presumes to think otherwise, let him know that in his judgment he stands condemned, has suffered shipwreck in faith and has separated himself from the Church's unity."

Then the Pope intones the Te Deum of thanksgiving, while St. Peter's big bell sets all the bells of Rome's 400 churches to ringing. At the Pontifical Mass in the Basilica of St. Peter's, which ends the ceremony, the Epistle (the Book of Judith, 13:23) begins: "Blessed art thou, O daughter, by the Lord the most high God, above all women upon the earth . . . Because He hath so magnified thy name this day, that thy praise shall not depart out of the mouth of men . . ."

/- Usuard, a Benedictine monk, wrote his Martyrology in the 9th Century, at the instigation of Charles the Bald. * Last such definition, in 1854: the dogma of Mary's Immaculate Conception (that she was conceived free of original sin). /- An official papal document named for the lead seal, or bulla, which papal and royal documents carried in the early Middle Ages.

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