CHURCH IN FOCUS:
The Immaculate Conception
08 December 2011

The church celebrates the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on the 8th of December. The Immaculate Conception refers to the condition that the Blessed Virgin Mary was free from Original Sin from the very moment of her conception in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne. The doctrine of the Church tells us that Mary being chosen by God from eternity to be the Mother of his Son Jesus, was conceived immaculate, meaning that from the first instant of her existence she was in the state of sanctifying grace and was free from the corrupt nature original sin brings. In 1858 when Mary appeared to the simple girl Bernadette at Lourdes she told her name as the Immaculate Conception. This indeed has been the belief of the Church from the early days that Mary is conceived Immaculate. God in his divine plan preserved Mary without any stain of sin to prepare a proper dwelling place for his son who was to come into the world. Today this feast has become a special feast of the church to extol the greatness of Mary pure and sinless, whose virtues we Christians ought to imitate.
This feast commemorates one of the Marian dogmas that have been proclaimed by the Holy Catholic Church which teaches that from the very moment of her conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary was free from all stain of original sin. This simply means that from the beginning, she was in a state of grace, sharing in God's own life, and that she was free from the sinful inclinations which have beset human nature after the fall. The Immaculate Conception was not a precondition for Christ's act of redemption but the result of it. It is the concrete expression of God's love for Mary, who gave herself fully, completely, and without hesitation to His service. The Immaculate Conception represents Christ's saving grace operating in Mary in anticipation of His redemption of man and in God's foreknowledge of Mary's acceptance of His Will for her. The Feast of the Immaculate Conception, in its oldest form, goes back to the seventh century, when churches in the East began celebrating the Feast of the Conception of Saint Anne, the mother of Mary.
It took a long time for this doctrine to develop. While many Fathers and Doctors of the Church considered Mary the greatest and holiest of the saints, they often had difficulty in seeing Mary as sinless either at her conception or throughout her life. This is one of the Church teachings that arose more from the piety of the faithful than from the insights of brilliant theologians. Even such champions of Mary as Bernard and Thomas Aquinas could not see theological justification for this teaching. Two Franciscans, William of Ware and Blessed John Duns Scotus, helped develop the theology. They point out that Mary’s Immaculate Conception enhances Jesus’ redemptive work. Other members of the human race are cleansed from original sin after birth. In Mary, Jesus’ work was so powerful as to prevent original sin at the outset.
The origin of the feast can be traced to the 4th century, when theologians believed and taught that the Blessed Virgin Mary had been kept free of all traces of sin by the grace of God because she was to become the Mother of the Lord Jesus. This belief coexisted with the perpetual virginity of Mary, her sinless state, and her Divine motherhood. In the eighth century the feast came to the West and it became a feast of the Roman Catholic Church. It is the only one of Mary's feasts that came to the Western Church not by way of Rome, but instead spread from the Byzantine area to Naples, and then to Normandy during their period of dominance over southern Italy. From there it spread into England, France, Germany, and eventually Rome. Prior to Pope Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception as Church dogma in 1854, most missals referred to it as the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Only after the eleventh century that Mary is given the full title, the immaculate one. Pope Sixtus IV in the fifteenth century while promoting the festival explicitly described it as the feast of the Immaculate Conception in 1476, to be celebrated on the 8th of December. Later the same title was endorsed by the Council of Trent. Centuries later, after consulting all the Bishops of the world, Pope Pius IX pronounced and defined the dogma the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1854, he made the infallible statement in the Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus: "The most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful."
In simple terms, this dogma proclaims that: first and foremost the entire being of the Blessed Virgin Mary, her physical and spiritual natures, were created by God Himself at her conception; and, second, she who was to become the tabernacle of the incarnation, was never subject to original sin, but was completely preserved from all the effects of the sin of Adam. In other words, the whole being of the Blessed Virgin Mary was created by God immaculate in nature. Mary was the only new and second Eve who was created in an immaculate state which was equal to the state of holiness that the first Eve enjoyed prior to her having disobeyed the Lord God in the Garden of Eden. The Book of Genesis tells us that God created the first woman who was called Eve. She enjoyed the divine blessing along with Adam which was a conditional gift from God. This conditional gift of God is similar to someone indefinitely granting to them and their posterity an opportunity to be with God totally. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and lost the original state of holiness and justice that they enjoyed. Mary the Immaculate person is now called upon to restore that grace to the humanity.
The dogma was defined in accordance with the conditions of papal infallibility, which would be defined in 1870 by the First Vatican Council. The papal definition of the dogma declares with absolute certainty and authority that Mary possessed sanctifying grace from the first instant of her existence and was free from the lack of grace caused by the original sin at the beginning of human history. Mary's salvation was won by her son Jesus Christ through his passion, death, and resurrection and was not due to her own merits. For the Roman Catholic Church the dogma of the Immaculate Conception gained additional significance from the apparitions of Our Lady of Lourdes in 1858. At Lourdes a 14-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, claimed a beautiful lady appeared to her. The lady said, "I am the Immaculate Conception", and the faithful believe her to be the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception holds that Mary is the one fully human being preserved from original sin because she is the Mother of God. Grace intervened at the very instant in which her life began, preventing sin from touching her in any way, and so making her holy and immaculate from the moment of her conception. This made her worthy, and suggests that she was divinely chosen, to be the Mother of God. Christ preserved Mary from sin because she was his Mother. Mary, the one who is full of grace and the one whom all generations will call blessed has been viewed as a unique person since the earliest days of the Christian faith. This great gift to Mary, an ordinary human being just like us, was fitting because she was destined to be Mother of God. This simply means that from the beginning, she was in a state of grace, sharing in God's own life, and that she was free from the sinful inclinations which have beset human nature after the fall. The greatness of the special call to holiness by which Mary is enriched from the first instant of her conception comes wholly from Christ: she is redeemed, in a more exalted fashion, by reason of the merits of her Son.
The word Immaculate means without stain. One proof of this sinlessness of Mary is taken from the greeting of the angel Gabriel to Mary, calling her, Hail, Mary, full of grace. Because she was full of grace, Mary was most pleasing to God in all she was and did. The feast tells us that the whole being of the Blessed Virgin Mary was created by God immaculate in nature. Mary was the only new and second Eve who was created in an immaculate state which was equal to the state of holiness that the first Eve enjoyed prior to her having disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden. Today we are celebrating that special privilege that Mary enjoyed.
Two passages in Scripture point us to this truth of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. The book of Genesis tells us that both Adam and Eve lost the glory and beatific vision that they enjoyed in the Garden of Eden by the trick of the evil one. They were created immaculate in their physical and spiritual natures and together with their posterity would eternally enjoy the beatific vision of God. Adam and Eve disobeyed God and through their disobedience, sin entered into the world. There is total disharmony between God, man and nature. In the new Eve, the Virgin Mary, God planned to reclaim His Kingdom and save His people from death and thus bring harmony. The Gospel of Luke gives us he greeting of the Angel: full of grace which led theologians to asserting that Mary, not only at the moment of Jesus' conception, but at every moment of her existence was totally free from any kind of sin. From these words, the angel Gabriel was expressing that the Blessed Virgin Mary enjoyed a unique state of grace that far surpassed the creation of all men and the angels. Her soul, spirit and body were immaculate because of her immaculate conception.
The Immaculate Conception is often misunderstood as referring not to Mary’s conception but to the virginal conception of Jesus. Though it is possible to indicate important stages in the development of the doctrine, it is not easy to grasp the internal dynamic of the progression from the New Testament, which is silent about Mary’s conception, to the dogmatic definition. The early dogmas of Mary’s virginity and divine motherhood were Christological that is to say that they made statements about Mary in order to preserve truths about Christ. The modern dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption more directly envisage Mary. At one level they can be seen as privileges and gifts to Mary, to the woman who is Mother of Jesus who is God and man. This doctrine teaches us about our end, about the triumphant grace of Christ which overcomes sin leads to final glory. However, the most fundamental thing to say about the Immaculate Conception is the assertion that Mary was redeemed: in this world where sin reigns, she was conceived sinless, that is, she was redeemed by the merits of her Son. Jesus died for all on Calvary. We must thus say that he earned on the cross the grace of his Mother’s Immaculate Conception.
Our Christian faith tells us that salvation is a free gift of God. The infant is sanctified by baptism; the adult accepts God’s gift of justifying grace through faith. When we say that Mary was immaculately conceived we state that she was redeemed in the most perfect possible way through the divine intervention. The gift of God is pure grace, the most perfect example of “grace alone”. She did nothing to merit or to acquire this grace: it is totally gratuitous. Later at the Annunciation she would respond in faith to God’s gift. We can therefore see why this gift is so dear to Mary, why at Lourdes she gave her name in the words: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” She rejoices that she was never for an instant outside God’s love, that she was never tainted by sin. It is as reflect on her love for God and on her awareness of how much he loved her that we can have some fleeting insight into Mary’s joy at her Immaculate Conception.
In the Immaculate Conception we can see the redemption fully at work. The Immaculate Conception allowed Mary’s yes at the Annunciation to be limitless, without any unconscious restriction. In Mary the grace of redemption reaches its highest expression. What the whole church will one day become is already fulfilled in Mary through her Immaculate Conception and Assumption. These are the consoling mysteries since they are the real pledge and guarantee that God’s grace is more powerful than our guilt. The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin reveals that God loves humanity as such. It also means that God surrounds this life of humanity with loving fidelity. Most Church Fathers agreed that Mary was sinless at the time she gave birth to Christ. They disagreed as to whether Mary was made sinless at conception, birth, or when she said "yes" to God's call. Even some prominent medieval Western theologians like St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas Aquinas did not accept Mary's Immaculate Conception, although did not deny that she was sinless.
When discussing the Immaculate Conception, an implicit reference may be found in the angel’s greeting to Mary. The angel Gabriel said, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you". The phrase "full of grace" therefore expresses a characteristic quality of Mary. Mary was indeed a highly favoured daughter of God. Since this term is in the perfect tense, it indicates that Mary was graced in the past but with continuing effects in the present. So, the grace Mary enjoyed was not a result of the angel’s visit. In fact, Catholics hold, it extended over the whole of her life, from conception onward. She was in a state of sanctifying grace from the first moment of her existence and she remained faithful and immaculate to God to the end of her earthly life. Through the Immaculate Conception of Mary who fully cooperated with the Divine Plan of God, we are led to Jesus. The glorious Feast of the Immaculate Conception is a reminder that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the new Eve, our spiritual Mother, she who has become co-redeemer with Christ in our salvation by allowing her womb to become the humble instrument and Sacred Temple of the Living God.
The problem with the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that it is not taught in the Bible. Mary is described as a simple and ordinary human person whom God chose to be the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ. Mary was undoubtedly a godly woman. The Bible gives us no reason to believe that Mary was sinless. In fact, the Bible gives us every reason to believe that Jesus Christ is the only Person who was not “infected” by sin and never committed a sin. Jesus himself was miraculously protected from sin by the Father while he was in Mary's womb. The feast of the Immaculate Conception is a sign of the triumph of the Universal Church which is manifested in Mary. In her the redemptive work of God is fulfilled. She becomes an example for us and she tells us that what happened to her will happen to us too.

Fr. Eugene Lobo, S.J.