High Mass will be celebrated on Friday 15 August at 7:30 pm, the feast day of the Virgin Mary’s assumption into Heaven. This ancient belief of Christians—commemorated in prayer and art for many centuries in both West and East—was dogmatically and infallibly defined by Pope Pius XII on 1 November 1950 in his Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus.

The image above is perhaps the most famous depiction of the assumption of Our Lady in Western art, painted by Titian between 1516 and 1518, and still housed in the Franciscan church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. [Public domain image.]