December 8 - Solmenity Of The Immaculate Conception

In Her appearance to Bernadette Soubirous, Our Lady of Lourdes "asked for a chapel and processions, but Fr Peyramale, the local parish priest, insisted that the Lady would have to reveal her name before anything could be done about such matters. [In 1858,] [e]arly on March 25, the feast of the Annunciation, Bernadette made her way to the grotto, where the beautiful Lady was already waiting for her. Bernadette asked the Lady her name and after joining her hands at the breast and looking up to heaven she said, 'I am the Immaculate Conception.'" [1]

Four years earlier, "[i]n 1854, [Pope] Pius IX solemnly proclaimed: '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 savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin.'" [2]

According to franciscanmedia.org, "[a] feast called the Conception of Mary arose in the Eastern Church in the seventh century. It came to the West in the eighth century. In the 11th century it received its present name, the Immaculate Conception. In the 18th century it became a feast of the universal Church. It is now recognized as a solemnity." [3]

Furthermore,  franciscanmedia.org  noted as follows:

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 of Clairvaux 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 pointed 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.

Imagine what Thomas Aquinas thought to himself when he realized the Truth, that the Blessed Virgin Mary was preserved from Original Sin at the moment of conception and that She had remained sinless Her entire life.  Maybe he was in Purgatory at the time and decided to stay there longer to purify his thoughts before entering Heaven to meet the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Immaculate Conception.  Then imagine all the Protestants in Purgatory who do not believe that the Blessed Mother is the Immaculate Conception and is sinless who will choose to do the same.

A Protestant minister and his wife once told this blogger that the Blessed Virgin Mary was a sinner and had children.  He did not know that the Protestants believed differently and was shocked.  After protesting a bit, knowing that he was not able to convince them otherwise, he suggested to them that perhaps everyone ought to have a genetic ancestry test [4] to find out if any one is related to the Mother of God.  With this suggestion, the conversation on this topic turned from passionate discourse to silence.


[1] http://www.theotokos.org.uk/pages/approved/appariti/lourdes.html
[2] https://www.franciscanmedia.org/solemnity-of-the-immaculate-conception/
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/testing/ancestrytesting