Religion: Mary’s Death

Mary’s Death “Did the Virgin Mary die?” This question was the subject of discussion by 100 Roman Catholic theologians of the Mariological Society of America at a two-day conference in Chicago last week. In defining the doctrine of Mary’s Assumption in 1950, the Pope took no position on the question whether the Virgin was assumed bodily into Heaven after death or before it. Some, like Father John P. O’Connell. editor of the Catholic Family Bible, think that death is the result of original sin and that, since Mary was free from original sin (the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception), she was not subject to death. Another view, advanced by the Rev. William G. Most of Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, holds that Mary died of the love of God. “Such a love is like a magnet,” he said, “so powerful that it exerts a powerful desire to be with God, causing the soul to leave the body.”