The Immaculate Conception (Dec. 8th)

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, one of the greatest feast days of Our Lady in the whole of the liturgical year. It’s a day when we celebrate her beauty, her joy, her purity.

She was conceived without sin—sin which is the only real evil in the world—conceived without original sin.

St. Thomas Aquinas likes to say that Mary was pre-redeemed. It's a way of explaining the Immaculate Conception, which is a bit of a mystery, while maintaining the fact that Our Lady was a member of the human race.

If she had no original sin, how was she a member of the human race? The answer is that she was a member of the human race, but she was pre-redeemed, which means that God, who is able to do everything, was able to apply the fruits of the Redemption, fruits of the Crucifixion, to Our Lady early in time. And so, she was preserved clean from original sin, because it was not fitting that the Mother of God would have any stain of sin on her soul.

That's why Our Lady is the most beautiful creature who was ever created. Tota pulchra is said in Latin. All beauty.

The Entrance Antiphon of today's Mass says, “I exult for joy in the Lord, my soul rejoices in my God; for he has clothed me in the garment of salvation and robed me in the cloak of justice, like a bride adorned with her jewels” (Isa. 61:10).

Today the liturgy speaks of the beauty of Mary. That's why, like all the feast days of Our Lady, it can have a special place in our hearts today to say special things to Our Lady: to thank her, to admire her, to invoke her under all of her most beautiful titles.

It's a feast day that has been celebrated since the eighth century. Christians always believed that Our Lady was immaculately conceived, but it only became a dogma of the Church in 1854. Then Our Lady appeared at Lourdes in 1858.

It's an example of theological progress: how the Church comes to understand and accept these truths in greater ways. And so, this truth that we believe of Our Lady is on a very firm footing. We can celebrate her greatness today.

“Sing a new song to the Lord,” says the Responsorial Psalm, “for he has done marvelous deeds (Ps. 98:1).

Pope St. John Paul liked to call Our Lady the first Opus Dei, the greatest creation of God in the whole history of humanity.

In the Communion verse, it says, “All honor to you, Mary. From you arose the sun of justice, Christ Our Lord.”

Our Lady, when she went to visit Elizabeth, said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46-47). Very beautiful words. Today is a day for our soul to magnify the Lord and, like Our Lady, for our spirit to rejoice in God our Savior.

It's a day to do something special for Our Lady. All of her feast days are days when we can do something special for her: maybe put some flowers in front of an image of hers in your home, or say an extra rosary, or make a pilgrimage to a shrine of Our Lady, or maybe just some little aspiration to thank her for all the graces that she's given us in our life. She has to occupy a very special place.

When I was in kindergarten school, the nuns organized that December 8th was a special day, and so there was a procession in honor of Our Lady. We all had to be dressed in white and we all had to carry a flower. We had to carry a lily or a chrysanthemum.

My mother didn't like lilies, so we always had a chrysanthemum. Then we went into this big hall in the school, and in groups of six, we went up onto the stage, kneeling on the steps, where there was an image of Our Lady.

Holding the flower in our hand, we had to say, “O Mary, I give you the lily of my heart. Be thou my guardian forever.”

Then one of the teachers would take the flower and would place it in a flower vase. There were many of them on the stage around Our Lady. At the end of the hundred or so children that filed up, the whole stage was full of beautiful white flowers adorning Our Lady.

The only problem was that we had to say the words, “I give you the lily of my heart,” and I was holding a chrysanthemum. We used to ask our mother frequently to give us lilies, but no, it had to be a chrysanthemum. It felt a little bit incongruous, saying those words and perhaps meaning something else. I still remember those words sixty years later.

All the chances that you have to instill Mary and piety in children, make very good use of them. They're gold.

We're told in Genesis, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your seed and her seed. She shall crush your head and you shall lie in wait for her heel” (Gen. 3:15).

Our Lady crushes the head of the serpent. Every time he rears his ugly head, Our Lady stamps him down.

We need the presence of Our Lady in every moment of our life. She was told by the angel that she was “full of grace” (Luke 1:28), full of everything that makes her beautiful in the eyes of God.

Grace is the most beautiful reality on the planet. She was full of it. And she wants to pour all the grace that she can into our heart and into our soul so that we become beautiful in the eyes of God. So, the liturgy today calls her Tota pulchra. All beauty.

In the Furrow, St. Josemaría says, “The liturgy rejoices with the song, Tota pulchra es Maria. You are all beautiful, Mary, without original sin! In her, there is not the slightest shadow of duplicity. I pray daily to Our Mother that we may be able to open our souls in spiritual direction and that the light of grace may shine in all our behavior! Mary will obtain for us the courage to be sincere, if we ask her for it, so that we may become closer to the Most Blessed Trinity” (Josemaría Escrivá, Furrow, Point 339).

So today, ask Our Lady for special things. You may have heard of a famous cardinal in Manila called Cardinal Sin. He became a household name around the world because of his name. He participated in the conclave that elected John Paul II.

One time in his life when he was about 63, he got chicken pox. He was a person who liked to be out and about, very much in the public eye, visiting several parishes every day. But he had to withdraw himself and remain at home for three months.

When you get chickenpox as a child, it's not a major problem, but when you get chickenpox as an older person, it can be a bit more serious, and so he had to take care.

When he recovered, he made a reappearance at the Chrism Mass on Holy Thursday in the Cathedral of Manila, where there were about 400 or 500 priests. He stood up to give the homily, and he talked about the previous few months when he had his illness.

He said, “You know, when I got the chickenpox, I had all these pockmarks on my face. I looked in the mirror and my first thought was the thought of vanity. I thought, ‘how ugly you've become.’”

He said, “That made me think of something that happened when I was a kid. I was the seventh of fourteen children. But my mother was always much more attentive to me than she was to all the other children. Did I have enough to eat? Did I sleep ok? Did I have enough clothes? I couldn't quite understand this.

“One day I asked the household manager, ‘Why does Mama love me more than all the others?’ That lady looked me straight in the face and said, ‘It's because you are so ugly.’”

He said, “I learned from this, that mothers love their ugliest children most. From this, I learned that that's why Our Lady loves us when we become ugly through sin.”

She was told by her Son on the Cross to look at us. Look at your child. Behold your child. Look at your child and never stop looking at your child (cf. John 19:26-27).

So Our Lady is always looking at us. And when we become ugly through sin, she doesn't stop looking at us.

She leads us to become more beautiful in the eyes of God to get us back into the state of grace. We can always be very grateful that Our Mother is always looking at us; never lets us out of our sight. She protects us in all sorts of ways.

Recently, I read a book about the Panama Canal, a very interesting book. Fulton Sheen likes to say that when God wanted to go from the unpolluted waters of His divinity to the polluted waters of our humanity, He passed through a canal or a series of locks, as there are in that Panama Canal.

That lock or that canal was Our Lady. She's the one that brought about the mystery of the Incarnation. It was through her that it all happened. And so, with great reason, she can say, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46-47).

There's a very special radiance about Our Lady. Today, you could say we celebrate that radiance.

In the Preface of the Immaculate Conception, we read, “You allowed no stain of Adam's sin to touch the Virgin Mary. Full of grace, she was to be a worthy Mother of your Son, your sign of favor to the Church at its beginning and the promise of its perfection as the bride of Christ, radiant in beauty. Purest of virgins, she was to bring forth your Son, the innocent lamb who takes away our sins. You chose her from all women to be our advocate with you and our pattern of holiness.”

Mary was radiant. “Radiant in beauty.” What a beautiful adjective. Because of her fullness of grace and her radiance in beauty, she was the purest of virgins.

Mother, may you help us in our battle for purity. The Catechism of the Catholic Church uses that word very specifically and with great intent (Catechism, Points 2520-2533).

There's a beautiful hymn to Our Lady that you're probably familiar with that says:

“O purest of creatures, sweet Mother, sweet maid,
The one spotless womb wherein Jesus was laid!
Dark night has come down on us, Mother! and we,
Look out for thy shining, sweet Star of the Sea!” (Frederick W. Faber, O Purest of the Poor).

She's the purest of creatures. Even though we might go through some dark nights, difficult moments, battles in the storm, Our Lady is with us in those battles. We can always turn to her for help, for strength, for purity.

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided” (The Memorare).

No matter how far away we might fall, Our Lady is always there for us.

I heard of a man once in another country who made a big mistake in his life. He left his marriage, he left his family, he went to another country. And then he fell on bad times. He came back to his original country, but now he had nothing. He began to live as a tramp under a bridge.

There was a lady who used to come to see me regularly, and she had been in the Legion of Mary. She tried to do different things for different people. She became a sort of Mother Teresa in her life, and she sought out the homeless and the neglected.

One day she happened to go under this bridge to talk to some of these homeless people. She met this man, and she recognized his face. There she said, “I think I knew you thirty years ago. You used to be in the Legion of Mary with me.”

She began to talk to him and befriended him again, remembered him from times past, and then began to talk to him about Confession and how she used to come to see me in a downtown church once a week.

Then one week, she brought him. She told me beforehand that he was going to come. One day she brought him. She prepared him, and so he came, and he went to Confession.

He told me, “You know, Father, I think after all these years and all the mistakes that I've made, Our Lady has not forgotten me because I was once in the Legion of Mary. She sent this little angel to bring me here to go to Confession so that now, as I approach the end of my life, I can put things straight with God. I can cleanse my soul, and I can die in peace.”

I don't remember much more of our conversation, but I do remember those beautiful words: “Because I was once in the Legion of Mary, Our Lady has not forgotten me.”

No matter how far away we might stray or how far people we know might stray, we know that Our Lady is always looking out for those souls. She's the Comforter of the Afflicted, the Comforter of Migrants, the Solace of the Homeless, so many other things.

We can help so many people around us to find their joy, their comfort, their peace, their hope, in renewed confidence in Our Lady.

The Prelate of Opus Dei once wrote, “Now we are preparing for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception: a new opportunity to place even more firmly, in the depths of our soul, the Marian piety that is a characteristic of Catholics, and for us in Opus Dei, a very important part of the spiritual heritage our Founder left us” (Javier Echevarría, Letter from the Prelate, December 1, 2008).

We know that St. Josemaría never held himself up as an example of anything. “The only model,” he used to tell us, “is Jesus Christ” (J. Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 128). But he did say: “I don't think it out of place to say if you want to imitate me in anything, do so in the love I have for Our Lady.”

That's how great his filial affection was for Our Mother.

Let us ask through his intercession that in these days of preparation for the great Feast of December 8^th^, each of us may grow steadily in our Marian piety and our apostolic zeal.

Let us also encourage others so that through a more trusting conversation with Our Lady they may enter on the path of interior life or make progress along that path. Our Lady is very concerned with souls. She wants us to reach out to them. We have something to say to them. That other hymn that we may know that says to her seems very relevant:

“O maid conceived without a stain,
O Mother bright and fair!
Come thou within our hearts to reign,
And stay forever there.
Hail, Mary, ever undefiled!
Hail, Queen of purity!
Oh, make your children chaste and mild,
And turn their hearts to you” (O maid conceived without a stain).

With all sorts of childlike phrases, we can turn to Our Mother.

Quoting some Fathers of the Church, Blessed Álvaro del Portillo said, “I'd like to call Our Lady the Dawn. As the dawn heralds the coming of the new day, so Our Lady heralds the coming of the sun of justice, Christ, Our Lord.”

He says in a letter in 1987 in a Marian year for the Universal Church: “The Virgin Mary, from the very first moment of her earthly existence, is the star which shines in the night of humanity.”

Mary is the star. She is the morning star, a star that can shine for us in all the moments of our life, particularly difficult or dark moments. A star that lights up the way.

Like the Magi on their way to Bethlehem, “they rejoiced when they saw the star” (Luke 2:10). The star meant everything. When they found that star, they left everything that they had, their homes, their country, their possessions, and they took their finest possessions in following the star.

Mary is also our star. She leads us to the Christ Child. She leads us to Bethlehem.

“She is the bright star,” he continues, “which illuminates the darkness in which we creatures have desired and still desire to enter through sin. That star is our hope. No matter how far away we may drift, or what mistakes we may make, we always have a way back through the star.”

With her coming into the world 2000 years ago, a bright flame of purity and goodness was lit on earth. “Like the dawn which announces the new day, so Mary from the time of her Immaculate Conception preceded the coming of the Savior, the rising of the ‘Sun of Justice’ in the history of the human race” (John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, Point 3, March 25, 1987).

From this Immaculate Virgin is born “the offspring, who will crush the head of the serpent” (Gen. 3:15). The great role that Mary has to play in the history of humanity is to crush the head of the serpent and to help us conquer sin in our lives. She gives us the graces, the strength, the ability, the confidence when we turn to her with the faith of children.

“This is Christ Our Lord,” he says, “who has come down from heaven to rescue us from sin and to give us His own life, together with the Holy Spirit, so that we can live for God” (cf. John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, Point 24, March 25, 1987).

For this reason, so that she would be worthy to become the Mother of God, Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin. She was preserved immune from any type of personal sin, even the slightest, and was endowed with all manner of gifts and graces by the Holy Spirit.

These gifts and graces are the jewels in the crown that we look at today that enhance her beauty and her virtues. That's why the Fathers of the Church used to say, “Look at Mary, turn your eyes once again to Our Lady.”

You can never have too much of Our Lady. And that's why it's very salutary to try and have a picture of Our Lady wherever we may live, where we may work, in our room, in the bedroom, in the kitchen, wherever it may be, so that from time to time, they can cast little glances there, like a little child glances at his mother and reminds himself that he’s in the presence of his mother. Therefore, there are no fears; there's serenity, there's peace, there's joy.

How wonderful is Our Mother, my children. Greater than you, only God! How much we enjoy repeating this to her, knowing that it is taught by the tradition of the Church. We can never praise or exalt the Blessed Virgin as she really deserves. Let us now dare to say to her—she really does hear us:

Mother, deliver us, your children, each one of us, from every stain, from everything which might separate us from God, even if we have to suffer, even if it costs us our lives.

With the beauty of this day, the joy of this day, we can begin again our devotion to Our Lady. Try to find some little concrete way of celebrating this day in our family, to help our children to be more aware of the beauty of Our Lady, so that they too, from a very early age, can come to register December 8th as a very special day in the whole of their year, particularly of the liturgical year.

At Nazareth, he continues, “we contemplate the divine mission of Gabriel, to whom Mary responds with heroic faith, interwoven with a limitless humility, confessing her own nothingness, Ecce ancilla domini. Behold, the handmaid of the Lord (Luke 1:38).”

The Virgin Mary shows herself to be identified with God's plan, to the point of immediately assenting, with unshakable trust in God. Like Our Lady, we could try to say those words frequently—"Behold, the handmaid of the Lord”—particularly when we see some special plan of God in our life, in our marriage, in our family, in our work, in our health.

Our Lady didn't just say these words at the moment of the Annunciation in Nazareth; she said those words on every step of her journey to Bethlehem, when they didn't know what was going to happen, when the future was uncertain, when there were grave risks.

They didn’t know anyone in Bethlehem; otherwise they would have stayed there. The future was full of uncertainties. And yet they launched out into the deep (cf. Luke 5:4), and threw themselves into this great adventure of God with men, holding nothing back.

This is the way our faith should be, my children, whenever we are confronted by obstacles in our Christian mission. It must be a firm and humble faith, born of a sincere conviction of our incapacity before such a great task, and at the same time, full of assurance that what God asks of us can be done, because we count not on our own poor strength, but on God's omnipotence.

Our Mother, bright and fair, is there beside us all the time, to encourage us, to cheer us on, to give us the graces that we need so that we don't get discouraged, so that we know how to stand up again when we've fallen like small children.

St. Josemaría used to say, “What is needed today are men of faith” (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 586). He calls our attention to it. He expressly demands it from each one of us.

When difficulties grow enormous, when we lower our sights, when human considerations, often artful considerations, make us turn back and seem to force us into reasoning with worldly logic.

Though apparently coherent, this logic is born of our love of comfort. It responds to the cries of the old person who resists facing God, because to live in this way would make him see the need to cut the fine threads of the heavy cables that try to shackle us to the mirages of earthly existence.

Faith, my child, faith. Faith like that of Mary. Even if at times you don't understand, be convinced, certain, that everything worldly is nothing. It's sadness, egoism, and sensuality, compared to the task of God to which we are called.

Our Lady and St. Joseph seem to echo these words all the way to Bethlehem: journey of faith, pilgrimage of faith. In spite of the contradictions, the rejection, they're knocking on doors.

The people of Bethlehem, their hearts are too full of other things. They go down very badly in human history. They have no hospitality for a woman who's about to give birth. It's really the pits.

Yet sometimes we have been those people in Bethlehem. We've closed the door on Our God when He comes knocking, when He asks us for certain things, a bit of our time, a bit of our energy, a bit of our daring, a bit of launching out into the deep, a bit more seriousness in our apostolic task of the evangelization of culture, a bit more daring when it comes to the moment to launch ourselves into the souls of our friends and place great challenges in front of them to help us in this great task of implanting Christlike values and truths in the middle of the world with the Social Doctrine of the Church and with so many other beautiful things.

We can turn to Our Lady, immaculately conceived, Tota pulchra, and ask her that we might keep our eyes trained on her, that we might never lose sight of that beauty, so that her joy may always be in our soul.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

JSD