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Pope Francis says that the Assumption of Mary into Heaven can get us through dull, repetitive, difficult days.
The Pope said this as he reflected on Mary’s humility, before praying the midday Angelus on the feast of her Assumption.
“The poet Dante calls the Virgin Mary ‘humbler and loftier than any creature’ (Paradise, XXXIII, 2),” he noted. “It is beautiful to think that the humblest and loftiest creature in history, the first to win heaven with her entire being, in soul and body, lived out her life for the most part within the domestic walls, she lived out her life in the ordinary, in humility.”
Nothing extraordinary
Taking up the name-title she was given by the Angel Gabriel, Pope Francis said that “the days of the Full of grace were not all that striking.”
They followed one after the other, often exactly the same, in silence: externally, nothing extraordinary. But God’s gaze was always upon her, admiring her humility, her availability, the beauty of her heart never stained by sin.
The Pope said that this fact is a “huge message of hope for us, for you, for each one of us, for you whose days are always the same, tiring and often difficult.”
“Mary reminds you today that God calls you too to this glorious destiny,” he said. And, the Pope emphasized, “These are not beautiful words: It is the truth.”
It is not a well-crafted, beautiful ending, a pious illusion, or a false consolation. No, it is the truth, it is pure reality, it is as real, as live, and true as the Madonna assumed into Heaven.
“Let us celebrate her today with the love of children,” he invited, “let us celebrate her joyful but humble, enlivened by the hope of one day being with her in Heaven!”
And today we celebrate...