• In a relay race, there are typically four runners who have the job of passing a baton to one another until they get to the finish line. If any one of the runners drops the baton, his team is disqualified.
• The first runner begins the race with the baton; he does not receive the baton, but owns it. The other runners do not start the race with the baton. Rather, their job is to receive it from the runner behind them and then pass it on to the runner in front of them.
• This is exactly how it works with the Catholic faith. The human race is, as it were, running towards the end of time, which is the finishing of human history. That is when each of the runners will receive their reward through the resurrection of their bodies, which will rise in either a glorious state or a damned state.
• The baton that has to be passed on is the Catholic faith. The baton contains the beliefs of the Catholic faith, but it also contains the practices that enshrine and protect those beliefs.
• The first runner in the faith is Our Lord Jesus Christ. He owns the baton and puts in it all that we need to save our souls, that is, to reach the finish line and win the race. His role was only to give the faith, not to receive it. Our role is to both receive and give. We receive the faith from those who have gone before us and we give it to those who come after us.
• Already, in the first generation of Christianity, St. Paul is talking about this process of receiving and handing on. He tells the Corinthians that he received the faith from Our Lord and he handed that same faith on to them. He says, “I delivered to you a faith. You received it and are standing in it and it is saving you. I also received that same faith.”
• This is the very nature of our faith. We are traditional Catholics because our faith is a traditional faith. It is a handed-on faith, a received faith. Our faith works by way of a relay, a receiving from one and a handing on to another.

• The Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven was the effect of the way that she lived her life and, particularly, three moments of her life: the moment of Our Lady’s conception, the moment she became Mother of God, and the moment of her Son’s death.

Immaculate Conception

• The moment of her conception is important because it is the first moment of her existence, the time of the creation of her soul and the making of her body. It was the first moment of the existence of the body that would one day rise from the dead and be taken up to Heaven.
• We know that the most important aspect of this moment is that God preserved her entire person from sin. Her body was taken from two souls afflicted by original sin, Joachim and Anna, but God prevented her soul from contracting any sin. As a result, we can speak of her body as being sinless as well, as having no contact with sin.
• You know that sin is the thing that causes death. And death is the thing that causes the corruption and destruction of our body. But God prevented this cause of death from touching Our Lady, at the first moment of her existence.

Mother of God

• This blessed creature, who was conceived without any sin, began to grow up. She maintained the purity of body and soul that God had given to her. She was perfectly faithful to her gifts. She did not commit any sin. She lived in humble submission to God.
• This behavior, this holiness prepared her to become God’s mother. It prepared her to receive into her body God Himself. And of course, that was what happened on the day of the Annunciation. Her body changed. God both came inside of her and gave her the power to form His body from her body.
• Her pure body became the source of the body of God.

Co-Redemptrix

• Our Lord was born and she named Him Jesus or Savior, because He was to save the world from its sins by an act of Redemption.

• On the day of our baptism, we came to the church alive with physical life but dead in supernatural life. It was because of this fact that our soul was dead with sin that we, or our godparents, had come to ask for eternal life.
• Then, we went through the ritual of the baptismal ceremony during which we underwent a symbolic death. The pouring of the water on our heads was like a burial in water from which we then rose again to a new life. The ceremony was a symbolic dying with Christ and a symbolic rising with Christ to a new life.
• What was not symbolic was that, when the water was poured upon our heads, the death of sin was driven from our souls and a new life started to dwell there, a supernatural life.
• This is what St. Paul means in today’s epistle when he says, “we were buried with Him by means of Baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ has arisen from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.”
• What this means is that, before Baptism, our soul was not capable of doing anything in the supernatural order. It could not move in the supernatural realm and was dead to that realm.
• We know that an animal is dead when it does not move, when it does not have self-movement. We go up to a dog that we are not sure whether it is sleeping or dead. We move it with our foot and nothing happens. Because the dog does not move, we conclude it does not have physical life.
• Our soul before Baptism was like that in the supernatural order. We were not able to make any supernatural movement.
• After Baptism, our soul becomes alive with a new type of life, a supernatural life. That life does not get rid of our physical life or lay on top of our physical life; rather, it goes inside of it.
• The life of God goes inside of our spiritual soul and gives it new capabilities.
  • It goes inside of our mind and gives our mind the ability to believe the mysteries of the faith.
  • It goes inside of our will and gives it the ability to choose a supernatural good, to love God above all things, to seek the salvation of our soul above all things.
• St. Paul focuses particularly on one new ability that the new life of Christ in our soul gives us the ability to do: it gives us the capacity to be dead to sin.