For Mary, much more than for St. Paul, to live was Christ, but to die was gain (Phil. 1:21). When death overtook her, her thoughts were on Christ, as they always were. She owed no debt to death, for she had been conceived without sin. She had been exempted from bearing the guilt of Adam, and might have been exempted altogether from the experience of death. But because her Son passed through death in order to win salvation for us, he wanted to share this final experience of our humanity, and, in her own way and degree, to lay down her life for His friends. Nowhere more than in His death did Christ come close to us, and His Mother too seems closer to us for having submitted to the condition of our mortality.
We have no details about her death. No doubt St. John and his mother were at her side. It is likely that she was buried after a short interval. The earliest and most reliable tradition asserts that she died at Jerusalem, in or near the upper chamber where Jesus celebrated the Last Supper. Over this site the Benedictines have built a church and monastery called the Dormition or Falling Asleep of our Lady.
In Mary’s case, as in the case of our Lord, death proved weak; it was as powerless to hold her as it had been powerless to hold Him. For a short period, perhaps about as long as Jesus, she remained in a state of death. No mortal eye witnessed the wonderful reunion which took place between her beatified soul and her glorified body. Perhaps for a time no one on earth suspected the victory of life. But very early it was believed that her body had been glorified and 
translated to heaven. Stories were circulated about this event, stories which served to illustrate the faith of the Church in her Assumption which was soon expressed in the great feast celebrated on August 15. The solemn act of the (late) Holy Father, Pope Pius XII, at the end of the Jubilee of 1950, by which he infallibly defined that the Blessed Mother of God was elevated to heaven in body and soul, only added solemnity to what was already believed and taught in the whole Church. Since 1950 it is simply more clear that no one can be a Catholic if they refuse to believe that the Lord Jesus Christ has already transformed her lowly body and made it like His glorious body, in virtue of the energy by which He is able to subject all things to Himself (see Phil. 3:21). . . .
Our Mother’s Assumption brings before us the thought of the final destiny of her children. We are not meant to enjoy the Beatific Vision merely as separated souls. One day we too are to live before God in body as well as soul, in a body spiritualized and glorified by the power which flows to it from the soul’s vision of God as He is in Himself. The Holy Father, in defining the Assumption of our Lady, wanted us to honor her anticipated resurrection. But he also wanted to revive our faith in the resurrection of our own bodies, for this belief is a great trial to the reason of the natural man and is therefore a precious test of the seriousness of our acceptance of the revealed word of God which so clearly teaches it.
Charles J. Callan, OP and John F. McConnell, MM
from Spiritual Riches of the Rosary Mysteries
