Along with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8), the Assumption is a principal feast of the Blessed Virgin and a Holy Day of Obligation – one of the most important feasts of the Church year.Though it was al-most universally believed for more than a thousand years, the Bible contains no mention of the assumption of Mary into heaven – we have no real knowledge of the day, year, and manner of Our Lady’s death. The first known Church writer to speak of Mary being taken up into heaven by God is St Gregory of Tours in 594. On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII declared as a dogma revealed by God that ‘Mary, the immaculate perpetually Virgin Mother of God, after the com-pletion of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into the glory of Heaven’. Likewise, the Second Vatican Council taught in the Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium that ‘the Immaculate Virgin, preserved free from all stain of original sin, was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things (n. 59)’.
