By Igihe.com Reporter
Hundreds of Catholic Christians in Rwanda since Sunday 14, 2011 have been engrossed in Marian feasts to commemorate Blessed Virgin Mary’s death and her bodily assumption into heaven.
Clad in their best wears Christians flocked different Eklizia to listen to different special sermons and programs like baptizing children.
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven at the end of her earthly life is a defined dogma of the Catholic Church.
The Feast of the Assumption, celebrated every year on August 15, is a very old feast of the Church, celebrated universally by the sixth century.
“He is our role model mother and we have a role to play as Christians to be righteous at work, homes and neighborhoods and live exemplary life styles,” Bishop Nicodem Nagiziki who led the mass at St. Michael Church, Kigali.
Bishop Nagiziki also called upon mothers to emulate Virgin Mary’s life and the way she played a role in upbringing her son Jesus Christ believed to have saved human kind.
He also said another lesson to emulated from the assumption day, Nagiziki said that Christians should be obligated to bring joy to people living with them like Virgin Mary lived with Elizabeth in the bible whom they met while both pregnant and their fetus rejoiced upon meeting.
Innocent Ndagijimana a Catholic Christian in Kimisagara sector said that the day reminds him that God has a future for him.
He also said that it gives him hope because of the amazing grace that chose Virgin Mary to be a mother of world savior and not selective whether one is a Hutus, Tutsis, Twa or foreigners.
“As a believer the story of Virgin Mary, a selected girl in Jerusalem in a poor family where probably there were more beautiful girls and even those in royal families but ended up being chosen by God to be the mother of a savior,” Ndagijimana said.
The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary commemoration of the death of Mary and her bodily assumption into Heaven, before her body could begin to decay a foretaste of our own bodily resurrection at the end of time.
Because it signifies the Blessed Virgin’s passing into eternal life, it is the most important of all Marian feasts and a holy day of obligation.
The feast was originally celebrated in the East, where it is known as the Feast of the Dormition, a word which means “the falling asleep.”
On November 1, 1950, Pope Pius XII, exercising papal infallibility, declared in Munificentissimus Deus that it is a dogma of the Church 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.
As a dogma, the Assumption is a required belief of all Catholics; anyone who publicly dissents from the dogma, Pope Pius declared, has fallen away completely from the divine and Catholic Faith.
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