Immaculate Conception

Immaculate Conception of the BVM
8 December 2025

 Each liturgical solemnity in the calendar of observances of our Catholic faith is a major day worth celebrating, to be marked by rejoicing and even feasting.  Such is the case today, and even more so, since our country has been given the patronage of Mary under her title of the Immaculate Conception.  In other words, today’s holy day is also the patronal feast of our country and we ask Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception to pray for and intercede for our nation.  

So often, there can be suspicion about how the Catholic faith honors Mary.  We need not be embarrassed about our Marian devotion and how we venerate her.  We call her “blessed” because God chose her for a singular role, to be the Mother of our Savior.  She was given special privileges by God, gifts of grace to prepare her for her role.  The Holy Spirit brought about great things in her life as she cooperated with God’s plan by her own faith.  The Scriptures themselves reveal something quite clear that resonates with our veneration of Mary.  When Mary went to visit Elizabeth, the Scriptures say that Elizabeth called Mary “blessed”.  And what’s more, Elizabeth cried out such an honor to Mary under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  St. Luke’s Gospel reports: “Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’!”  And Mary herself goes on to proclaim, “henceforth all generations will call me blessed” (Lk. 1:41b-42, 48b).  And so, we do. 

We honor Mary and we call her Blessed.

The observance of aspects of Mary’s life reveals the depth of intellectual life, prayer, and reflection in the Catholic tradition about the truths of the faith and the implications of what we believe.  The Catechism says the following: “What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illuminates in turn its faith in Christ” (CCC, 487).  Today, we observe that we believe one special gift from God to Mary was that at the first moment of her life, at her conception in the womb of her own mother, Mary was conceived without any stain of sin.  Referring back to that Catechism quote, this belief about Mary is based on what we believe about Jesus Christ.  And what do we believe about Jesus?  We believe that He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, that He is God.  And we believe that the Son became incarnate in the womb of Mary, that he is the fulfillment from the Book of Genesis of the offspring of the woman, who would accomplish the Father’s plan of salvation by being at enmity, at war, with the devil and his offspring (cf. Gn. 3:15).  The Son of God received human flesh, his human nature, from Mary.  But with an intellectual life marked by deep reflection, we have to ask how this could happen because we immediately have a problem if Mary could only transmit a fallen human nature to the Son, if she could only transmit sinful human flesh to the Son.  You see, in His proper being, and especially in His heavenly dwelling, God cannot coexist with sin.  The Scriptures tell us repeatedly how abhorrent sin is to God, how much it offends Him.  Sin created a distance from God and heavenly life that only He, God, could bridge.  And to bridge that gap, to pay the price, Someone no less than God Himself had to die to save us.  The Book of Revelation gives us a vision of God’s dwelling and the incompatibility of sin when it says, “Nothing unclean shall enter it, nor any one who practices abomination or falsehood” (Rev. 21:27).  So, what we teach about Mary’s Immaculate Conception is in direct relationship and illuminates our faith in Christ.  In other words, the Son of God determined to become incarnate, yet He could not unite His being to sinful human nature.  Mary is a real human being existing after the fall in the Garden of Eden.  She would have contracted original sin and thereby could only have transmitted sinful human flesh to the Son, unless… Unless God somehow provided and prevented this from happening.  And this is the heart of today’s mystery.  We believe that the Son of God became incarnate in Mary.  And we believe that He could not have joined himself to sinful human flesh.  Thus, what we believe about Jesus is in direct relationship to this belief about Mary.  God must have done something to make it possible that Mary would give to the Son sinless human flesh that He would unite to Himself in the unified being born from her, who we call Jesus Christ our Savior.

In the Immaculate Conception we are saying that God gave Mary a special privilege and that he acted in an entirely unique way to save her from the most moment of her life, at her conception.  God saved her in a different way, but He still saved her.  God saved her by preserving her from sin at the moment of her conception.  In the Immaculate Conception, we are being asked to believe that God, for Whom everything is eternally present and Who knows and sees all things, could apply the value of Jesus’ saving death to Mary even before the Cross happened historically.  In other words, God  could apply the sacrificial value of the Blood of Jesus to Mary from the moment of her conception.  This feels or sounds like some sort of theological time travel, right?  At least to us due to our relationship with time.  But that is not so for God; that is not how God relates to time.  But it is not at all surprising really.  The Scriptures show, and we believe after all, that the blood of the Old Covenant sacrifices was able to atone for sin and provide some sort of remedy for all humanity who existed for centuries before the coming of Jesus.  No one believes that the blood of lambs or goats could provide eternal salvation.  Rather, Christians profess that God chose to see in the blood of the Old Covenant sacrifices a foreshadowing of the Blood of His Son.  The blood of the Old Covenant was a temporary remedy in view of what would be fulfilled in Jesus.  And if we believe that, if we believe that God could choose to see in animal blood a foreshadowing of the saving Blood of Jesus, and allow that animal blood to be a remedy, albeit a temporary one, is it really some outlandish catholic idea that God could see the saving value of the death of Jesus and apply that eternal remedy to Mary even before the historical moment of the Cross?  The Catholic faith says this is not an outlandish idea or one that is inconsistent with faith and the Bible.

Observing the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Mary we contemplate the threshold of our salvation, because we celebrate the gift of God to Mary, the one He chose to be the Mother of our Savior.  As we celebrate today how she was conceived free from all stain of sin in her mother’s womb, the womb of St. Ann, we celebrate that God was making good on His promise to save mankind.  Today we celebrate the role He prepared Mary to occupy to bring us that Savior.  Looking to Mary and counting on her prayers for us we can walk confidently toward God trusting that by sincerely doing away with sin in our own lives, by confessing it, and seeking to observe greater obedience to God now, we will be prepared one day to enjoy the fullness of obedience’s reward in the eternal life of Heaven.