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You say "they've" - but to be fair, what I quoted was from a Russian Orthodox church site. I was careful to say, "Who knows what the 'official' version is...?"

However, THIS is from CatholicEducation.org that addresses The Dormition of Mary:

So did Mary die first before being assumed? Did she fall "asleep"? Was she buried? The Church does not bind us to a particular answer because the tradition is not clear. In an apocryphal collection of stories called Transitus Mariae (The Passage of Mary), attributed to Bishop St. Melito of Sardis (d. c. 200), Mary died in the presence of the apostles in Jerusalem, and then depending on the story, her body just disappeared, or was buried and then disappeared.
St. John Damascene (d. 749) also recorded an interesting story concerning the Assumption: "St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (451), made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened, upon the request of St. Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that the body was taken up to heaven."
These stories, however, must not take precedence over the theological grounding for our belief in the Assumption of our Blessed Mother. Rather, we must remember that the Patristic Fathers defended the Assumption on two counts: Since Mary was sinless and a perpetual virgin, she could not suffer bodily deterioration, the result of original sin, after her death. Also, if Mary bore Christ and played an intimate role as His mother in the redemption of man, then she must likewise share body and soul in His resurrection and glorification.

It's all pretty clear: The "Holy Roman Catholic Church" is desperate to associate Mary with the life and work of Jesus Christ. It is a process of deification. Metmom pointed that out in THIS POST and we see it in the order and progression of "Marian Dogma." I want to also acknowledge THIS POST from Daniel1212 (my favorite post in this thread, btw).

Also, I have no problem associating the life of a Christian with the "resurrection and glorification" of Christ - but the quote above gives me the impression that the "Patristic Fathers" assign these things to Mary exclusively since it says, "...if Mary bore Christ and played an intimate role as His mother in the redemption of man, then she must likewise share body and soul in His resurrection and glorification." (my emphasis)

However, THIS is from CatholicEducation.org that addresses The Dormition of Mary:

The lack of valid early evidence for the Assumption does not matter: it is what Rome "remembers" that makes it binding doctrine.

Before Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven was defined, all theological faculties in the world were consulted for their opinion. Our teachers' answer was emphatically negative . What here became evident was the one-sidedness, not only of the historical, but of the historicist method in theology. “Tradition” was identified with what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Wurzburg…had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the 5C; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to the “apostolic tradition. And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared .

>But,

subsequent “remembering” (cf. Jn 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it has not caught sight of previously [because the needed evidence was absent] and was already handed down in the original Word” [via invisible, amorphous oral tradition] - J. Ratzinger, Milestones (Ignatius, n.d.), 58-59 .

“the mere fact that the Church teaches the doctrine of the Assumption as definitely true is a guarantee that it is true.” — Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), p. 275.