The Assumption of Mary is the oldest feast day of Our Lady, but we don’t know how it first came to be celebrated. The Assumption is God’s crowning of His work as Mary ends her earthly life and enters eternity. It was not fitting that the flesh that had given life to God himself should ever undergo corruption. The Assumption looks to eternity and gives us hope that we, too, will follow Our Lady when our life is ended. “We pronounce, declare and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul to heavenly glory.” With these words, Pope Pius XII formally declared, in 1950, the bodily assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven to be a dogma of the Catholic Church. Like Christ, Mary too was raised bodily to reign in God’s kingdom. Her Son is “King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” so she is “Mother of the Lord” (cf. Luke 1:43)—the “Queen Mother” as it were—sharing now in Christ’s reign. Again, in this Mary is both a Model of the Church and its Precursor. Paul says of all Christians, “If we have died with him, we shall also live with him; if we persevere, we shall also reign with him” (2 Tim. 3:11, 12). Through her glorious Assumption, Blessed Virgin Mary has begun to reign with Christ as all Christians shall at the Resurrection of the Dead.