DECEMBER 8 in 2020: Feast of the Immaculate Conception of BVM

(Gn 3:9-15, 20; Eph 1:3-6, 11-12; Lk 1:26-38)

Today, Holy Mother Church commemorates and celebrates the Blessed Virgin Mary under the title of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. This feast celebrates the Church’s dogmatic teaching that the Blessed Mother was given the gift from God of being conceived without original sin. That is to say, that from the moment of her conception, Mary was given the grace not only of freedom from original sin, but of being the only human being other than her Divine Son who lived a life without sin. The Church teaches that the Blessed Mother was given this very special Grace of liberation from the effects of sin in part because she would be the Mother of God, she would bear the second person of the Blessed Trinity in her womb for nine months. As any scholar of the Old Testament could tell us, God could not dwell in the presence of sin.

Even though the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was infallibly defined in 1854 by Blessed Pope Pius IX, the Immaculate Conception is something that has been believed as a matter of reality in our faith for many centuries. We see evidence of the reality of the doctrine that Mary was conceived without sin when the angel Gabriel greeted her to announce to her that Christ was going to be born and that she was going to give birth to him.

In the year 1846, the Bishops of the United States unanimously chose Our Lady as the patroness of the United States under the title of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. This was done some years before the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary was infallibly defined.

 

Fulton J Sheen said why Mary is made so faultless in her birth is because Jesus, her son wanted her to be so. Sheen says: Just suppose that you could have pre-existed your own mother, in much the same way that an artist pre-exists his painting. Furthermore, suppose that you had the infinite power to make your mother anything that you pleased, just as a great artist like Raphael has the power of realizing his artistic ideas. Suppose you had this double power, what kind of mother would you have made for yourself? Would you not have made her, so far as human beauty goes, the most beautiful woman in the world; and so far as beauty of the soul goes, one who would radiate every virtue, every manner of kindness and charity and loveliness; one who by the purity of her life and her mind and her heart would be an inspiration not only to you but even to your fellow men, so that all would look up to her as the very incarnation of what is best in motherhood? Do you think that our Blessed Lord, who not only pre-existed His own mother but Who had an infinite power to make her just what He chose, would in virtue of all the infinite delicacy of His spirit make her any less pure and loving and beautiful than you would have made your own mother?

 

What mattered most for Mary was God's action in her life, and the same thing matters most for us. The Immaculate Conception was God's way of giving Jesus a worthy mother on earth, and of giving us a worthy mother in heaven.

We should thank him for this great gift, and the best way to do that is to follow in our mother's footsteps, answering every call that God sends to our hearts and consciences in the same way that Mary answered her call, by saying: "May it be done to me according to your word."   God invites each one of us to continue Mary’s “Yes” by welcoming Jesus and making room for him in our lives.

 

God gave her this special privilege because he had assigned her a special mission - to be the mother of Christ and the mother of the Church.

We have not been given that same privilege, because we don't have that same mission. But we have been given a mission, each one of us is called to know, love, and follow Christ in a completely unique way. And so we have also received God's grace, and we continue to receive it. If Mary was "full of grace," we are "being filled with grace." The more aware we are of this grace, the better we can collaborate with it, and being aware of it means knowing what it looks like.

 

As we honor our spiritual Mother and receive the Holy Sacrament in this Mass, let's ask her to increase our faith, so that we can be, like her, more and more filled with God's grace.