Dear Friends and Benefactors, allow me to address you all, less than two months after the establishment of the Exsurge Domine Association, to express my deep gratitude for your generous response to my appeal in favor of the Monastic Village project in which to provide a home for the Benedictine nuns of Pienza. And as I am convinced that the inspiration in founding this Association came from the Lord, I am sure that it will be the good Lord who will reward you with that magnificence of which only He is capable.

I take this opportunity to assure you that I have received your letters and your messages, which are so numerous that I cannot answer each one individually, but which I carry in my heart and place at the foot of the altar: you are all in my prayers and also in the prayers of the priests and religious who join me in doing that for which the Lord has called us to serve Him.

The dogma of the Communion of Saints, this admirable mystery of our holy Religion, unites us in the bond of supernatural Charity, leading us to share, just like the first Christians, the small and great treasures that Grace grants us. And it is a cause of great consolation to see how, the more we put these material and spiritual graces into the coffers of Providence, the more we are spiritually enriched by them. And this is due to the greatness of our Divine King, who awaits our nothingness as a necessary premise so that he can then provide us with His Everything.

The feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin into Heaven, proclaimed as a dogma by the Venerable Pope Pius XII in 1950, leads us to meditate on an aspect that is too often overlooked by us Catholics, namely the union of body and soul, of matter and spirit, which the Lord willed by Creating and Redeeming us. We are called to eternal glory in body and soul, even if we have to wait for Judgment Day to reunite our bodily remains with our immortal soul. This fate has known only one derogation, which Our Lord granted to His Most August Mother: welcoming the Immaculate Virgin into Heaven without her body knowing the corruption of the tomb, He wanted to honor her with a very special privilege, showing Her to us as the Mediatrix of all Graces, the Queen who intercedes for us before the throne of Her Divine Son and who, in her concern for us, her children, sits crowned by the Most Holy Trinity. The dogma of the Assumption, like all the truths of Faith that form the stones of the Catholic edifice, is not an abstract concept that changes nothing of our existence; it is rather the confirmation of our need to have in the Most Blessed Mary the model of Christian life, in the blessed hope of restoring the order which was broken by original sin thanks to the Sacrifice of Christ, the order which the Immaculate Conception preserved in the Mother of God in view of the Incarnation of Our Lord.

Let us therefore ask the Virgin Mother, who has preceded us into eternal glory with her own mortal body as well as her soul, to make us understand that this divine order of body and soul calls us to repair in the order of Grace what we have broken by our disobedience against God. And to treasure, on this earth – this vale of tears in which we are on pilgrimage towards the heavenly homeland – the precious opportunities we have to accumulate treasures in Heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes, and where thieves do not break in and steal (Mt 6:20): even using those material goods with which Providence has endowed us for high and noble purposes, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

15 August 2023
In Assumptione Beatæ Mariæ Virginis