Friday 15 August sees the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated at St Michael’s with a Sung Mass at 7.30pm.

Music will include the Setting Missa “Dixit Maria” by Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612) and the Motet Ave Maria by Jacques Arcadelt (1505-1568).

Please join us.

Although the Assumption was only relatively recently defined as a dogma by the Catholic Church, and in spite of a statement by St Epiphanius of Salamis in AD 377 that no one knew whether Mary had died or not, apocryphal accounts of the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven have circulated since at least the 4th century. The Catholic Church itself interprets Revelation 12 as referring to it. The equivalent Orthodox Feast is the Dormition of the Mother of God.