Rome teaches that Mary was assumed into heaven body and soul. This is considered a divine truth of God and it is necessary for salvation. Pope Pius XII says anyone who denies it is condemned:
'We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. Hence, if anyone, which God forbid, should dare wilfully to deny or call into doubt that which we have defined, let him know that he has completely fallen from the divine and Catholic faith….It is forbidden to any man to change this, Our declaration, pronouncement, and definition or, by rash attempt, to oppose and counter it. If any man should presume to make such an attempt, let him know that he will incur the wrath of Almighty God and of the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul' (Munificentissimus Deus [A.D. 1950], 44-45, 47; taken from Selected Documents of Pope Pius XII [Washington: National Catholic Welfare Conference]).
There were two popes who rejected this dogma of the Roman church. But it has been infallibly declared by the Roman church for assured belief. There is silence in the early church about the end of Mary's life. Gregory of Tours in A.D. 590 first promoted the teaching of the assumption of Mary. He based it on the gnostic
Transitus literature. This literature came about in the fourth and fifth centuries. This gnostic writing was considered as heretical as Arius. A Roman Catholic historian and Mariologist Juniper Carol said, "The first express witness in the West to a genuine assumption comes to us in an apocryphal Gospel, the
Transitus beatae Mariae of Pseudo-Melito" Juniper Carol, ed.,
Mariology (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1955), 1:149). This gnostic writing was rejected as heretical. Gelasius and Hormisdas rejected it as heretical. Bill Webster said,
"In his decree, Decretum de Libris Canonicis Ecclesiasticis et Apocrypha, which was later affirmed by Pope Hormisdas, Gelasius lists the Transitus teaching by the following title: Liber qui apellatur Transitus, id est Assumptio Sanctae Mariae under the following condemnation: 'These and writings similar to these, which....all the heresiarchs and their disciples, or the schismatics have taught or written....we confess have not only been rejected but also banished from the whole Roman and Apostolic Church and with their authors and followers of their authors have been condemned forever under the indissoluble bond of anathema' (St. Gelasius I, Epistle 42; taken from Henry Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma [London: Herder, 1954], 69-70). Cf. Migne P.L., vol. 59, col. 162, 164."
