The Feast of the Ascension: When Heaven Received Our Humanity
Forty days after Easter, the Church lifts her eyes to the sky. The Risen Christ, who for forty days had walked again among His apostles, eating with them, teaching them, and showing them His wounds, now stands upon the Mount of Olives. He raises His hands in blessing. He is taken up. A cloud receives Him, and He passes from the sight of those who love Him.
This is the Feast of the Ascension, one of the great solemnities of the Catholic calendar, and one of the most quietly astonishing. For at the Ascension, something happens which had never happened before in the history of the world: God's human flesh, real and resurrected, is taken up into the very Heaven of God.
It is the day Heaven received our humanity.
What Is the Feast of the Ascension?
The Feast of the Ascension commemorates the bodily ascent of Our Lord Jesus Christ into Heaven, forty days after His Resurrection from the dead.
In the universal calendar of the Church, it is celebrated on the Thursday of the sixth week of Easter, known as Ascension Thursday. In Australia, as in many other countries, the celebration is transferred to the following Sunday so that the faithful might fulfil the obligation of attending Holy Mass on this great day. It falls within the fifty days of Easter and serves as the gateway to Pentecost, which follows ten days later.
The Feast of the Ascension is a Holy Day of Obligation. It is also the second of the Glorious Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. It is also one of the truths of the Catholic faith which we profess every Sunday in the Creed: "He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father almighty."
The Ascension in Scripture
The Gospel of Saint Luke records the event with the simplicity of an eyewitness: "And He led them out as far as Bethany: and lifting up His hands, He blessed them. And it came to pass, whilst He blessed them, He departed from them, and was carried up to heaven" (Luke 24:50-51).
Saint Luke returns to the scene at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. There, he tells us that Our Lord first promised His apostles the coming of the Holy Spirit and then was taken up before their very eyes: "And when He had said these things, while they looked on, He was raised up: and a cloud received Him out of their sight" (Acts 1:9).
Two men in white garments then appeared beside the apostles, and spoke the words which have echoed in Christian hearts ever since: "Ye men of Galilee, why stand you looking up to heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come, as you have seen Him going into heaven" (Acts 1:11).
The Ascension is not the end of the story. It is the promise of His return.
The Meaning of the Ascension
Why did Our Lord ascend? Could He not have remained on earth, walking visibly among His Church, settling disputes Himself, comforting His apostles with His own voice?
The Fathers of the Church answer with one mind: He ascended for our sake.
He ascended to prepare a place for us. "In my Father's house there are many mansions… I go to prepare a place for you" (John 14:2). Heaven, which had been closed since the sin of Adam, was now opened. It was opened not by an angel, not by a prophet, but by a Man. The first to enter the Heavenly Jerusalem in glorified human flesh was Christ Himself. Where He has gone, His members are called to follow.
He ascended to send the Holy Spirit. "It is expedient to you that I go," He told the apostles, "for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you" (John 16:7). The Ascension is the necessary preparation for Pentecost. The Church, which would soon receive the Holy Spirit in the upper room, had first to be weaned from the visible presence of her Lord, that she might learn to live by His invisible grace.
And He ascended to reign. Christ does not depart from His throne in order to take His seat in Heaven; He takes His seat that He might reign over every nation, every people, every soul. He is, as Saint Paul writes, "head over all the church, which is His body" (Ephesians 1:22-23). His Kingship is not a metaphor. It is the truth by which kingdoms rise and fall, and by which every Catholic heart must order its allegiance.
How Catholics Celebrate the Ascension
For nearly two thousand years, the Feast of the Ascension has been one of the great days of the liturgical year.
In the ancient Roman liturgy, the Paschal candle, lit at the Easter Vigil and burning at every Mass through the fifty days of Easter, was traditionally extinguished after the Gospel on Ascension Thursday, a visible sign that the bodily presence of the Risen Christ was no longer with His Church on earth in the same physical way, but remains with the Church in a sacramental way in the Most Holy Eucharist. Many parishes still observe this custom today.
The Mass of the Ascension is sung in white vestments, the colour of joy and triumph. The Alleluia, which has rung through the Easter season, is now joined to the Ascension Preface, which proclaims that Christ was "lifted up to heaven, not to abandon our lowliness but that we, His members, might be confident of following where He, our Head and Founder, has gone before."
In Catholic homes, the days between the Ascension and Pentecost have long been kept as a small novena: nine days of prayer in imitation of the apostles and Our Lady, who "were persevering with one mind in prayer" in the upper room (Acts 1:14). To pray a novena to the Holy Spirit in these nine days is one of the oldest and most beautiful customs of the Catholic year.
Families may also pray a decade of the Holy Rosary on the second Glorious Mystery, meditating upon the fruit traditionally attached to it: the desire for Heaven.
A Heaven Made for Us
The Ascension is, above all, a feast of hope.
It is the day on which the Catholic faith answers, once and for all, the oldest question of the human heart: where are we meant to go? For if Christ has ascended in His own true body, then Heaven is not an idea, not a feeling, not a vague consolation for the dying. It is a place. A real place. A place in which a Man already dwells in glory, and to which His brethren are summoned.
"Our conversation is in heaven," Saint Paul writes, "from whence also we look for the Saviour, Our Lord Jesus Christ" (Philippians 3:20).
This is why the apostles, in the moments after the Ascension, did not weep. Saint Luke tells us instead that they "returned to Jerusalem with great joy" (Luke 24:52). They had not lost their Lord. They had been promised His return, and they had been given a glimpse of the place to which they were going.
A Prayer for the Feast of the Ascension
Grant, we beseech Thee, Almighty God, that we who believe Thine only-begotten Son, Our Redeemer, to have this day ascended into the heavens, may ourselves dwell in spirit amid heavenly things. Through the same Christ Our Lord. Amen.
Last updated: 16 May 2026 11:24