By Jason Godin
Dec 5, 2011
The Church commemorates the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on December 8. Did you ever wonder why the Church celebrates a distinctly Marian feast day as a holy day of obligation during the Season of Advent, when we are preparing ourselves for the Nativity of Christ? And, on a much more personal level, did you ever wonder how the Immaculate Conception can still help men of faith in the 21st century?
I must confess that I spent my entire youth and adolescence believing that the Immaculate Conception was just a cooler name for the Annunciation, when Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb. Only after consulting the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church as an adult did I receive a clearer, fuller understanding of the intimate relationship between the two and their respective places within salvation history. The Compendium teaches that “thanks to the grace of God and in anticipation of the merits of Jesus Christ” the Blessed Virgin Mary was “preserved from original sin from the first instant of her conception” (96). In other words, the Immaculate Conception helped prepared the way – literally, the human person of Mary in the womb – for the angelic salutation “full of grace” that Our Lady later received at the Annunciation (cf. Lk 1:28).
Theologians and Church historians have traced popular celebrations of this divine preparation back to the 8th century. But the actual feast date established in the liturgical calendar – December 8 – didn’t arrive until Pope Pius IX first declared the Immaculate Conception a dogmatic truth on the day itself in 1854. On the one hand, the Pope reaffirmed what the Church had already believed as well as practiced for the previous 11 centuries. But, perhaps more importantly, the 19th century pontiff also reminded the Church how the season of Advent illustrates the Blessed Virgin Mary fulfilling a divine role in Christ’s saving mission, a role first graced to her by the Holy Spirit at the Immaculate Conception.
Today, the feast of the Immaculate Conception presents all men an opportunity to pause, reflect upon the graces they’ve received in their own lives, and prepare in their own ways to use those graces to combat a culture that disregards the very meaning of life. Mississippi voters recently considered a ballot initiative to their state constitution that would’ve recognized human life beginning at conception. Not only did the voters defeat the measure, news outlets reported that it even divided “pro-life” leaders.