La Madonna di Mezz'Agosto

La Madonna di mezz'agosto was how my grandmother referred to today's festival of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which has been celebrated on this date for centuries

The Assumption coincides with Ferragosto, from the Latin Feriae Augusti,  established by the Emperor Augustus in 18 BC added to already existing ancient holidays celebrating the completion of the harvest and offering some time of rest at the end of its challenging agricultural work. All this fell in the old "sixth month" Sextilis, now renamed in honor of the Emperor Augustus (with an added thirty-first day to make it equal to July, named after Augustus' uncle Julius Caesar. The ancient imperial festivities included horse races, a tradition which survives most famously in the Palio held in Siena on August 16. (Palio is from pallium, a band of fine cloth which was a prize for winners of ancient Roman horse races.) Ferragosto is also traditionally associated with holiday excursions to the seaside or into the mountains, known as "gita fuori porta," a practice popularized in modern Italy by the 20th-century Fascist regime

Early traditions saw Mary's death (her ("Dormition") as somehow special. It is thought that traditions about Mary's "Dormition" and her accompanying Assumption can be traced as far back as the 2nd century. According to one of the most influential accounts, Mary's life ended in Jerusalem and was buried there by the apostles. Thomas, however, was not present. After his late arrival, the tomb was reopened and found empty, as a result of which the apostles believed her to have been taken up ("assumed") into heaven.  According to Saint John Damascene (c.675-749), the Bishop of Jerusalem, Saint Juvenal, recounted this to the emperor at the Council of Chalcedon (451).

Whatever may be said about or inferred from these narratives, Eastern Orthodox Christians affirm that, May having died a natural death, the final resurrection was anticipated in her case and she was carried completely, body as well as soul, into the glory of heaven. accordingly, they celebrate the Dormition of Theotokos on August 15, preceded by a strict 14-day fast. Roman Catholics likewise affirm faith in Mary's body-and-soul assumption and celebrate it on the same date (although without the preparatory fast). Catholic teaching, now formally dogmatically defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950, leaves it an open question whether Mary actually died and was then raised up to heaven or whether she was directly assumed into heaven without having died first.

In 1946, Pope Pius XII, in a letter to the world's bishops Deiparae Virginis Mariae, asked them:

"Do you, venerable brethren, in your outstanding wisdom and prudence, judge that the bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin can be proposed and defined as a dogma of faith? Do you, with your clergy and people, desire it?" To this inquiry, the Pope received and unsurprisingly resounding response, which the Pope characterized as "outstanding agreement of the Catholic prelates and the faithful." This showed, the Pope claimed, "the concordant teaching of the Church's ordinary doctrinal authority and the concordant faith of the Christian people which the same doctrinal authority sustains and directs" (Munificentissimus Deus, 12). 

Those were the days! Try to imagine such concordance in the conflict-ridden factionalized Church of today!

Try to reimagine the missionary self-confidence and future-oriented hopefulness expressed in that Holy Year of 1950, in the papal bull defining the by-then fully accepted Catholic doctrine declared:

For which reason, after we have poured forth prayers of supplication again and again to God, and have invoked the light of the Spirit of Truth, for the glory of Almighty God who has lavished his special affection upon the Virgin Mary, for the honor of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages and the Victor over sin and death, for the increase of the glory of that same august Mother, and for the joy and exultation of the entire Church; by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, and by our own authority, 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 into heavenly glory (Munificentissimus Deus, 44).  

(Photo: The Assumption of the Virgin, by 16th-century "Venetian School" Italian Renaissance painter Titian for the high altar of the Basilica di Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice.)