I have a sentimental attachment to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary as my baptismal parish and the church which established my expectations of the norms of Catholicism was Our Lady of the Assumption in Claremont, California. I would guess that these days, three decades after I left Claremont, there’s nobody that I know there anymore, and the pastor who succeeded Monsignor Barry who was pastor when I was there, didn’t fully value Barry’s aesthetics which included a custom-sculpted altar, tabernacle and baptismal font, along with some other commissioned artwork, for more mass-produced decorations to the church including a full-immersion baptismal font which, as much as I appreciate that form for adult baptism, is ultimately a cross-shaped hot tub¹ which was permanently ensconced in the church’s sanctuary.
So, the fact that there’s an Assumption church in Chicago is its own appeal to me. I’ve been here for Mass a few times in the past (I remember once spotting the Chicago Tribune’s food critic there once), but I don’t know that I ever made it there for the actual celebration of the assumption which I corrected today.
The Assumption itself is one of those things that anti-Catholics like to point to as being outside scripture and (incorrectly) a recent invention thanks to its being declared as dogma for the first time in 1950 by Pope Pius XII, but the belief is a long-standing one with accounts traceable back at least as far as the fourth century. In one apocryphal account I read, I was somewhat surprised to discover that my assumption about the Assumption (so to speak), that Mary had been taken up to Heaven without dying, like Enoch, was incorrect and in fact, in at least that account, after she had died, her body was taken up to Heaven and immediately reunited with her soul.
- In Monsignor Barry’s last years as pastor, he did start doing full-immersion baptism and it was, in fact, done in a rented hot tub, although it was disguised through artistic deployment of white cloths, rocks and potted plants.
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