Dec. 9, 2013 Monday: Immaculate Conception / St. Juan Diego
Why pray to Mary?
“The Hail Mary…is the most perfect compliment you can offer to Mary, because it is the compliment which the Most High God Himself made to her, through an Archangel, in order to win her heart.” The motivation behind our affection is identical to that of God: “We do not love the Blessed Virgin specifically because of what we obtain, or hope to obtain, from her; but we love her because she is worthy of our love.” In fact, God’s heart is so given over in love for Mary that we would miss out on something of God’s love if we did not share his predilection for her. As Louis de Montfort expresses it: “I do not believe that any person can achieve intimate union with Our Lord…unless he has established a very deep union with the Blessed Virgin and a great dependence on her help.”
The best reason for practicing Marian devotion is obedience. Our Lord Jesus Christ from the cross commanded, “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:27). The need to esteem Mary as our Mother is a tenet of revelation. Thus St. Bernard of Clairvaux (+1153) exhorts us, “Let us venerate Mary with every fiber of our being, from the deepest part of our heart, because this is the will of him who wanted us to receive everything through Mary. St. Louis de Montfort echoes this: “It is the most decided wish of her Son that we should come to him through his Blessed Mother.”
To rescue us from the ever-present threat of self-reliance and self-contentment so dominant in us as a result of original sin, God gives us Mary to be the “dispenser” of graces. The age-old chorus of accord on this point is awesome: St. Ildephonsus: “O Mary, God has decided on committing all good gifts that He has provided for people to your hands, and therefore He has entrusted all treasures and riches of grace to you.”
Immaculate Conception
One way to understand the mystery of the Immaculate Conception is to think back to the Beijing Summer Olympics, to the day swimmer Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal. It was August 17, 2008, and the event was the four-hundred-meter medley relay. If Phelps finished first he would break the world record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics, set by Mark Spitz in 1972.
Phelps’s victory was our victory; his triumph was our triumph; his glory, our glory. Somehow we were personally involved—implicated—in his history-making event. His breakthrough established a heretofore unknown degree of human greatness. We could say with pride: “We are the people from whom came the greatest Olympic champion of all time, Michael Phelps!” The “miraculous” gold medal he brandished in some way belongs to us as well.
This dynamic is at the heart of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. The solemnity celebrates the supernatural fact that when the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived in the womb of her mother Anne, she was conceived without original sin. At the moment of her biological conception (and ever after), Mary’s human existence was endowed with an absolutely immaculate purity. And God worked that miracle of holiness in Mary for us.
God ingeniously restores what was lost through the sin of Adam and Eve by employing the very method through which it became lost. He invites us back to the original friendship with him by way of a conception: Mary, the Immaculate Conception. The conception that leads us back to paradise is a human person! God offers us, again and again unfailingly, what our first parents were so ready to throw away: a relationship with him, that is, our happiness. And to be certain that we will never again misconceive or deprecate that relationship, he offers it to us by means of a mother. The eighth-century Benedictine abbot Ambrose Autpert exclaims, “[I]t is right that we extol [Mary] as blessed in a unique proclamation, since she brought the world a unique relationship [with God].” Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is herself the living, breathing conception of God’s ineffable goodness, truth, beauty, fidelity, compassion, justice, mercy, peace, and love.
Mary the Immaculate Conception is the means by which God communicates how he conceives of his own holiness. Through our relationship with Mary, we can recognize that there is no greater paradise than what the Lord offers us through her. St. John of Damascus (+749), speaking of Mary, says, “The serpent never had any access to this paradise.”
Mary, the New Eve, undoes the deception that drastically duped Eve of Eden. The Catechism speaks of Adam and Eve becoming afraid of God, “of whom they have conceived a distorted image” (CCC, 399, emphasis added). In Mary the Immaculate Conception we are given a corrected conception of the image of God: The Mother takes away all our fear in the way that only a mother can. The desire so deep in us to be like God is fulfilled when we remain obedient to God, united with the Immaculate Conception. The privilege of doing this in a way surpasses the prospect of our being “immaculately conceived,” precisely because it leads us to do what Adam and Eve refused to do: to depend on God in total self-donation. In Mary the Immaculate Conception
we cannot help but be reminded of what Adam and Eve forgot: God wants us to be like him; God himself is the one who planted that desire for divinization in our hearts!
Cameron O.P., Peter John. Mysteries of the Virgin Mary: Living Our Lady's Graces (pp. 16-17). St. Anthony Messenger Press, Servant Books.
“The Hail Mary…is the most perfect compliment you can offer to Mary, because it is the compliment which the Most High God Himself made to her, through an Archangel, in order to win her heart.” The motivation behind our affection is identical to that of God: “We do not love the Blessed Virgin specifically because of what we obtain, or hope to obtain, from her; but we love her because she is worthy of our love.” In fact, God’s heart is so given over in love for Mary that we would miss out on something of God’s love if we did not share his predilection for her. As Louis de Montfort expresses it: “I do not believe that any person can achieve intimate union with Our Lord…unless he has established a very deep union with the Blessed Virgin and a great dependence on her help.”
The best reason for practicing Marian devotion is obedience. Our Lord Jesus Christ from the cross commanded, “Behold, your mother!” (John 19:27). The need to esteem Mary as our Mother is a tenet of revelation. Thus St. Bernard of Clairvaux (+1153) exhorts us, “Let us venerate Mary with every fiber of our being, from the deepest part of our heart, because this is the will of him who wanted us to receive everything through Mary. St. Louis de Montfort echoes this: “It is the most decided wish of her Son that we should come to him through his Blessed Mother.”
To rescue us from the ever-present threat of self-reliance and self-contentment so dominant in us as a result of original sin, God gives us Mary to be the “dispenser” of graces. The age-old chorus of accord on this point is awesome: St. Ildephonsus: “O Mary, God has decided on committing all good gifts that He has provided for people to your hands, and therefore He has entrusted all treasures and riches of grace to you.”
Immaculate Conception
One way to understand the mystery of the Immaculate Conception is to think back to the Beijing Summer Olympics, to the day swimmer Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal. It was August 17, 2008, and the event was the four-hundred-meter medley relay. If Phelps finished first he would break the world record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics, set by Mark Spitz in 1972.
Phelps’s victory was our victory; his triumph was our triumph; his glory, our glory. Somehow we were personally involved—implicated—in his history-making event. His breakthrough established a heretofore unknown degree of human greatness. We could say with pride: “We are the people from whom came the greatest Olympic champion of all time, Michael Phelps!” The “miraculous” gold medal he brandished in some way belongs to us as well.
This dynamic is at the heart of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception. The solemnity celebrates the supernatural fact that when the Blessed Virgin Mary was conceived in the womb of her mother Anne, she was conceived without original sin. At the moment of her biological conception (and ever after), Mary’s human existence was endowed with an absolutely immaculate purity. And God worked that miracle of holiness in Mary for us.
God ingeniously restores what was lost through the sin of Adam and Eve by employing the very method through which it became lost. He invites us back to the original friendship with him by way of a conception: Mary, the Immaculate Conception. The conception that leads us back to paradise is a human person! God offers us, again and again unfailingly, what our first parents were so ready to throw away: a relationship with him, that is, our happiness. And to be certain that we will never again misconceive or deprecate that relationship, he offers it to us by means of a mother. The eighth-century Benedictine abbot Ambrose Autpert exclaims, “[I]t is right that we extol [Mary] as blessed in a unique proclamation, since she brought the world a unique relationship [with God].” Mary, the Immaculate Conception, is herself the living, breathing conception of God’s ineffable goodness, truth, beauty, fidelity, compassion, justice, mercy, peace, and love.
Mary the Immaculate Conception is the means by which God communicates how he conceives of his own holiness. Through our relationship with Mary, we can recognize that there is no greater paradise than what the Lord offers us through her. St. John of Damascus (+749), speaking of Mary, says, “The serpent never had any access to this paradise.”
Mary, the New Eve, undoes the deception that drastically duped Eve of Eden. The Catechism speaks of Adam and Eve becoming afraid of God, “of whom they have conceived a distorted image” (CCC, 399, emphasis added). In Mary the Immaculate Conception we are given a corrected conception of the image of God: The Mother takes away all our fear in the way that only a mother can. The desire so deep in us to be like God is fulfilled when we remain obedient to God, united with the Immaculate Conception. The privilege of doing this in a way surpasses the prospect of our being “immaculately conceived,” precisely because it leads us to do what Adam and Eve refused to do: to depend on God in total self-donation. In Mary the Immaculate Conception Cameron O.P., Peter John. Mysteries of the Virgin Mary: Living Our Lady's Graces (pp. 16-17). St. Anthony Messenger Press, Servant Books.
