The feast of the Immaculate
Conception of Mary was celebrated on the 8th of December.
From the very moment of her conception
she was free from the all stain of original sin and in a state of
grace. Immaculate means 'without stain'. But she still suffered
from the effects of sin – sorrow, illness, death.
How is this possible?
Well, Mary received grace same as us
via Christ's death on the cross; His death is an eternal event
meaning that the effects of it reach back in time as well as forward.
Same as with the Sacrifice of the Mass it cannot be confine to time.
God granted her freedom from sin to make her a fitting mother for
His Son.
If was officially declared on 8
December 1854 by Pope Pius IX. So does that mean that the Pope just
thought of it one day and said to himself 'that's a good idea'?
No it does not.
Let's first start with the Bible (I'm using the Dewey Rheims translation);
Genesis 3:15 “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and
thy seed and her seed: she/he
shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.”
There is a
parallel between Eve and Mary; If there is to be complete enmity
between the woman and the serpent, then she never should have been in
any way subject to him even briefly. This implies an Immaculate
conception.
Luke 1:28 “And
the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord
is with thee: blessed art thou among women.”
An angel
declared her 'full of grace'; it indicates an unique abundance of
grace in her person.
There are a lot
angels visiting people in the Bible, but Mary is the only one greeted
by 'Full of Grace”
As I've said
before the doctrine was not invented in 1854, it was defined or
declared. That only happens for two reasons; firstly being that
there is a controversy that needs to be cleared up or secondly when
the Magisterium believes that the faithful can be helped by a
particular emphasis on an already preexisting belief.
The declaration
was prompted by the latter of the two. Pius IX had a great devotion
to Mary and hoped that the declaration would inspire others in their
devotion to Mary.
Let's us now
turn to the Fathers of the Church. Now who exactly are these guys?
Simple answer: they are men who lived before 750 and are called as
such because of their leadership in the early Church, especially in
defending, expounding, and developing Catholic doctrines. For the
first two centuries, most of these men were bishops, although in
later years certain priests and deacons were also recognized as
Fathers. They were closes to the sources than we are today.
Many of them
make very blatant statements about Mary's immaculate nature.
- St. Justine
Martyr (d.165) the Church’s first major lay apologist, remarks on
Mary's obedience to God (her willingness to do His will) in opposite
to Eve's disobedience.
- St.
Irenaenus (2nd
century) Bishop in Gaul, expands on that saying that Mary's obedience
undid what Eve's disobedience brought to man.
- Origen
(184/5-253/4) calls her worthy of God, immaculate of the immaculate.
- The Syrian
Fathers wouldn't shut up (as it were) about her sinlessness.
The
Syrians were really the first to have a feast day commemorating this,
since about the 5th
century. It becomes wide spread by the 7th
century in the East and by the 8th
it is celebrated in parts of the Western Church.
The
feast day became very deeply rooted in Anglo-Saxon monasteries by the
11th
century. We even find an old calendar in Winchester dating 1030 with
'Conceptio S'ce S. Mariae'. The monks celebrated it and it was
encouraged to the devotion of the individual.
But then, cue
ominous music please, the Normans arrived.
For the Normans
the feast appeared to be very English, too English; they considered it a
product a product of insular simplicity and ignorance (the
celebration, not the idea behind it mind you). Thus we can thank the Normans
for stopping public devotion, but it lived on in the devotion of the
individual. Thank you Normans (sarcasm in abundance here).
It was reestablished, however, by Anselm the Younger,
nephew of St. Anselm (Yeah, that's not confusing).
It
is after this, going into the 12th
century, that we begin to see a confusion over the idea
of the Immaculate Conception.
St Bernard of Clairvaux protested what
he perceived to be a new way of honoring Mary and reproved the canons
(those are people of a religious order who are attached to a
particular church) of the Cathedral of Lyons for acting without the
authority of Rome when they started celebrating it in 1240. He saw
it as a foreign to the traditions of the Church, but here's the
kicker – he didn't know that the Church in Greece and Syria had
been celebrating the feast with a rich tradition regarding the
sinlessness of Mary. (There's no phone system, email, facebook, twitter, or texting)
He was not wrong in wanting a careful
inquiry into the reason for observing the feast.
Even St Thomas Aquinas, one of the
foremost philosophers and theologians of the Medieval Church, had
difficulty grasping the concept. As seen in the Summa Theologica
(III.27:2,a2), mostly along the lines of Mary's redemption, how could
she be redeemed if she had not sinned.
For some reason, the major philosophers
and theologians at the time were stuck on two possibilities:
One, the sanctification of Mary
happened before the fusion of the soul into the body; or
Two, the sanctification happened after
the union of soul and body.
None of them ever truly considered the
moment between – the
sanctification of the soul at the moment of conception. The
idea of both the sanctification and the fusion of the soul could be
simultaneous in time.
This is a good example of how science and faith work together. When conception was better defined by science it aided in a clearer understanding of the doctrine.
Of course there were some issues,
because people always have issues.
St Paul in Romans (5:12) states that
all men have sinned via Adam. That would include Mary, right? By
this declaration, St. Paul is trying to explain that all men need
redemption via Christ. Mary is no exception to this rule as stated
before.
Then the silence of the Church Fathers.
Well, as we have seen the Church Fathers were not silent, just the
ones that most people in the West were reading. There was limited
access to those sources and some were lost to them, but not to us
today.
It was Blessed John Duns Scotus (d.
1308)(a Franisican) who provided the answer of the simultaneous
sanctification and conception. He stated that God had sanctified
Mary at the moment of her conception in His foreknowledge that the
Blessed Virgin would consent to bear Christ. In other words, she too
had been redeemed—her redemption had simply been accomplished at
the moment of her conception, rather than (as with all other
Christians) in baptism. It was essentially Scotus who laid the
foundation of the doctrine that we see to day and Pius IX referenced
him when declaring the feast.
After Scotus the doctrine became
commonplace at all the major universities and the feast was fast
spreading. Most religious orders took up the celebration, except the
Dominicans – why? They're sticking with Aquinas.
In 1439 the University of Paris asked the
Council of Basle for a dogmatic definition. After 2 years the
bishops declared the Immaculate Conception : a doctrine which was
pious, constant with Catholic worship, faith, right reason and Holy
Scripture and no one could declare contrary to this.
Problem solved, right?
But wait –
this is 1441. The problem? Council of Basle was not an ecumenical
council, meaning that anything it declared only effected the area
that those bishops lead, not for the Church as a whole. So disputes
and discussions continued.
In 1661 P. Alexander VII promulgated
in 'Sollicitudo omnium Ecclesiarum' the true sense of the word
'conceptio', and that the immunity of Mary from original sin in the
first moment of the creation of her soul and its formation into the
body was the subject of the feast. This was when it was finally
universally accepted within the Church. So by the time Pius IX
promulgated the dogma on 8 December 1854 there was a ring of 'about
time'.
In the decades that followed an octave
was attached to the feast then became a holy day of obligation, then
was allowed a vigil. All of which were in practice in local
tradition in many areas.
Our Lady of Immaculate Conception was
decreed By the First Council of Baltimore (1846) as the principal
Patron of the US.
(This is a rough transcript of a lecture I gave to the RCIA class at my church for the Feast Day.)
