Pope Looks Ahead to Lourdes: "Global City of Life and Hope"

(15 Aug 08 - RV) Mary, taken up into heaven shows us the final destination of our earthly pilgrimage.
Marking the Assumption of Our Lady in his Angelus address this Friday, Pope Benedict XVI traced the message of this ancient Marian feast.

Speaking to groups of Pilgrims who had travelled to the hill town of Castel Gandolfo, Pope Benedict said that Mary reminds us that all of our being – spirit, body and soul – is destined to the fullness of life; and that those who live and die in love of God and neighbour will be transfigured to the image of the Risen Christ’s glorious body; that the Lord lowers the haughty and raises the humble.

Pope Benedict’s Angelus was a lesson in the history of the feast. Speaking from the balcony of the Papal Summer Residence, he said at the heart of the vacation the Latins called “feriae Augusti ”, or the August festival, the Church remembers the assumption of Mary, body and soul to heaven. Then, drawing from the bible he spoke of the last reference to Mary’s earthly existence in the Acts of the Apostles, and successively the double tradition – from Jerusalem and Ephesus – of her “dormition”, in God, the event which precedes her passage from earth to Heaven, and which has been part of faith of the Church down through the centuries. This conviction, underlined the Pope, was crowned by the dogmatic definition of the Assumption pronounced by Pius XII in 1950.
 As the Second Vatican Council teaches us, continued Pope Benedict, the Blessed Virgin is part of the Mystery of Christ and the Church. From Heaven she continues to watch over us her children, particularly in our difficult hours, just as Christ bid Her from the cross. This motherly love is apparent in the many sanctuaries dedicated to Her.

Then looking ahead Pope Benedict spoke of the “global city of life and hope” of Lourdes where in one months time he will travel to mark the 150^th anniversary of the Marian apparitions to St Bernadette.