BRISBANE Archbishop Mark Coleridge said the dogma of the Assumption proclaimed by Pope Pius XII showed God’s true plan for the human being.
“This was something that Christians had long believed – that the Mother of Christ who was untouched by sin could not be touched by death, because the Bible makes it abundantly clear that sin and death, in deep and mysterious ways, are connected,” he said at the 8am Mass at St Stephen’s Cathedral today.
“What the Assumption proclaims is that death is not native to the human being.
“We will all die, sooner or later, that is certain.
“But death was never part of God’s plan; death is never God’s doing.”
Archbishop Coleridge said the proclamation of the dogma in 1950 came in the “shadow of the twin apocalypses” of the First and Second World Wars “with its great and demonic emblems of Auschwitz and Hiroshima”.
He said it was a time when “human life seemed so cheap with millions dead and where death seemed to be dominant”.
But what Pope Pius proclaimed and “what the Church always says” is death is never part of God’s plan, he said.
“And in fact, what God has done in Jesus is to turn the tomb of death into the womb of life,” he said.
“That’s what Easter is all about.
“Today, the Assumption is really the Marian Easter – that she shares completely in the risen life of her Son.
“But we also say on this feast is that where He has gone first, and where she has gone second, we are all called to follow into that life, the life of Paradise, which was always God’s plan, not just for us but the whole creation.”
