Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Lectionary: 689

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him. 

On New Year's Day 1987, Pope Saint John Paul II initiated a Marian year, from June 7, 1987 (Pentecost) to August 15, 1988 (the Feast of the Assumption), in preparation of the forthcoming millennium. On March 25 of that year, he published the encyclical, Redemptoris Mater. 

Like many Americans of my generation, I had some skepticism about Marian devotions. The winds of change, if not reform, were sweeping through both the Church and America, and I was as ready as anyone to purge Catholicism of its redundancies and excesses. Why should a church have several images of Mary when Jesus had only one mother? How many statues of the One Lord should there be? If the Eucharist is all about the Mass, why do we need a tabernacle? Aren't my ideas better than old ones? 

One of my professors told me, "You would make a good Lutheran." 

Redemptoris Mater changed my thinking. I found Pope John Paul's style challenging but I was fascinated, as I read it several times. I was especially delighted with his finding her in scriptures passages I had not associated with Mary -- especially today's first reading, the song from Paul's Letter to the Ephesians. Like nearly everyone, I was familiar with the Mother of Jesus who appears in the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew, but the Pope showed me the Woman of Faith who received the Word of God into her being. As Saint Augustine said, "She conceived the Word in her heart before she conceived him in her body." 

I began to read more about Mary as she is discovered in the scriptures, the woman who is the Church and not simply a symbol of the Church. I also read eyewitness accounts of her appearances in Mexico City, Knock, Lourdes, La Salette, and Fatima. When the Woman in Medjugorge predicted a sign that the entire world would see, I was intrigued. When the Iron Curtain collapsed in 1990, I saw the prophecy fulfilled. 

I reflected on my own relationship with Mary: born on October 7, ordained a deacon in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, and ordained a priest in the province's eponymous shrine in Carey, Ohio: Our Lady of Consolation. I rediscovered the daily rosary, which my family had recited every evening. A dozen years after I was ordained, I became a Catholic. 

From its first conception as God's people, through the first four centuries, and to the present day, the Church devotion to the Blessed Mother remains constant. Theologically, she is the anchor for the humanity of Jesus, a characteristic we might forget in our enthusiasm for his divinity. But she remains always before us as woman in her own right, a mother who sharply reminds us at Guadalupe, "Am I not your mother?" 

I don't suppose my story of Mary is unusual, nor is that of Pope Saint John Paul II. Each of us, as we love her Son, come to admire and then revere her. We plead with Saint Bernard that she will receive the Angel's invitation. We hope she will come to visit us as she visited Elizabeth. We love her for showing us her beautiful son, as she displayed him to the shepherds, the magi, Simeon and Anna. We stand with her in mute silence on Calvary as she supports her son in his agony. She offers her only begotten son to God for our salvation and we must thank her for bringing us to him. Finally, she reigns over us as the Holy Spirit, which she knew all her life, is given to us at Pentecost. 

Our knowledge of her begins in gratitude and affection, and grows through study of the scriptures, stories of the saints, and our daily prayers. If we meet Jesus face to face in the Mass we hold hands with Mary as she walks with us through the twenty mysteries of the rosary.