"Why is the Madonna appearing? Why didn't Jesus himself or any canonized saint appear in Lourdes (as in rue du Bac, La Salette, Pontmain, Beauraing, Fatima, to name just the last century and a half and facts approved by the Church)? But it is because – answers the theology, meditated by mystics –, according to the Catholic Creed «the Immaculate Mother of God, always Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed into celestial glory in body and soul» . Thus, the words of the dogma of the Assumption, defined and proclaimed by Pius XII only in C.E.1950 but believed in its object since the times of the Fathers of the Church both in the East and in the West (the feast of the Dormition, which has in nuce the Assumption of the Virgin Mother, it is probably the most ancient of the Marian feasts that unite the universal Church). Mary, in short, having carried in her womb the One who said: «I am the resurrection and life" (Jn 11, 25), followed the Son in his eternal destiny before any other human creature; she is the one who preceded us all, already welcomed into eternity "in body and soul". Therefore, if she appears to mortals, it is also to remember that what she already is, we too will be. Her sign and pledge, in short, in the person of herself, of that salvation we were talking about and that she will give us true health: the vision of Mary's body already "saved" is a guarantee that everyone's will be. (pp. 61-62)"