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Both love and duty today fashion my homily for your charity. It is not only that I wish, because of my love for you, and because I am obliged by the sacred canons, to bring to your God-loving ears a saving word and thus to nourish your souls, but if there be any among those things that bind by obligation and love and can be narrated with praise for the Church, it is the great deed of the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. The desire is double, not single, since it induces me, entreats and persuades me, whereas the inexorable duty...

Dormition of the Mother of God August 15 We extol you, O Most Pure Mother of Christ our God, and we praise your all-glorious Dormition. (Hymn of Praise of the Feast) The very ancient, universal and profound cult of the Most Holy Mother of God left a special mark, above all, in our Liturgical Year, which is not only rich in the variety of feasts honoring Mary, but begins and ends with her feasts. The Liturgical Year opens with the Nativity of the Mother of God, and closes with her Dormition (i.e., her falling asleep), which in our liturgical books...

On the Dormition of the Mother of God Troparion of the Feast In giving birth Thou didst preserve Thy virginity; in Thy dormition Thou didst not forsake the world, O Theotokos. Thou wast translated unto life, since Thou art the Mother of Life; and by Thine intercessions dost Thou deliver our souls from death. The great and wondrous summer holiday—the Dormition of the Holy Mother of God—from olden times has been regarded by Orthodox Christians in the light of a second Pascha. Pascha itself—the Holy Resurrection of Christ—was a turning point in the history of mankind. With His resurrection the...