The Immaculate Conception

The dogma is one sentence, and it is worth reading whole. Pius IX, in the bull Ineffabilis Deus, given at St. Peter’s on December 8, 1854:

“We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance 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, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.”

Each clause answers an objection.

• “In the first instance of her conception”: not cleansed later, before her birth, as some medieval theologians held, but from the very first moment of her existence.
• “By a singular grace and privilege”: a gift, given to her alone. Nothing about it is owed to her or earned by her.
• “In view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race”: it comes from Christ, and from his Cross. She needed a Savior like everyone else.
• “Preserved free from all stain of original sin”: preserved, not rescued. The same grace everyone else receives at baptism reached her before the stain did.

The Catechism restates it in its own words: Mary, “full of grace” through God, “was redeemed from the moment of her conception” (CCC 491), and “by the grace of God Mary remained free of every personal sin her whole life long” (CCC 493). For when and how the Church celebrates it, see the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8.

Three different teachings about Mary and Jesus are routinely run together. Side by side:

• The Immaculate Conception is about Mary’s beginning. She was conceived in the ordinary way by her parents, traditionally named Joachim and Anne, and preserved from original sin from that first moment. Defined in 1854; feast December 8.
• The virginal conception of Jesus is about Christ’s beginning. He was conceived in Mary’s womb “solely by the power of the Holy Spirit”, “without human seed” (CCC 496), as Gabriel told her: “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). It is in the Creed (“born of the Virgin Mary”); the Annunciation is kept on March 25.
• The virgin birth, in the narrow sense, is that Jesus was born of a virgin (Matthew 1:23, quoting Isaiah 7:14), and the Church also holds Mary’s perpetual virginity. Christmas, December 25.

The easiest way to keep them apart is the calendar. December 8 is nine months before September 8, Mary’s birthday; March 25 is nine months before December 25. Each conception feast points to its own birthday.

Honestly: it is not stated in so many words, and the Church has never claimed it is. It is a doctrine the Church holds to be revealed and reads in Scripture as Tradition has understood it. Two texts carry most of the weight.

Genesis 3:15. After the fall, God says to the serpent: “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. She shall crush your head, and you shall lie in wait for her heel.” The Catechism calls this passage the Protoevangelium, the “first gospel” (CCC 410), and adds that “Mary benefited first of all and uniquely from Christ’s victory over sin: she was preserved from all stain of original sin” (CCC 411). The woman at total enmity with the serpent is the one sin never touched.

Luke 1:28. Gabriel greets her: “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.” The Greek word, kecharitōmenē, is a perfect participle, one already and lastingly filled with God’s favor; the Church’s tradition renders it “full of grace”, and the Catechism builds on exactly that (CCC 490–491). Gabriel uses it in place of her name.

Behind both stands a principle the whole New Testament assumes: that God prepares what he intends to use. Paul says it of every Christian, “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and without defect before him in love” (Ephesians 1:4). The Immaculate Conception says it was done for Mary first, and completely.

This was the real difficulty, and some of the greatest saints stumbled on it. St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote a sharp letter in the twelfth century against the canons of Lyon for introducing the feast. St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic Encyclopedia records, “at first pronounced in favour of the doctrine” and then in the Summa Theologica “concluded against it”, because he could not see how she could need redemption if she never contracted sin.

The answer came from the Franciscan John Duns Scotus at the end of the thirteenth century: preservation is itself the most perfect form of redemption. To pull someone out of a pit is to save them; to stop them falling in is to save them better. Mary was redeemed, by her Son’s merits foreseen, before the fall could reach her. The Catechism puts it in the words of the Second Vatican Council: she is “redeemed, in a more exalted fashion, by reason of the merits of her Son” (CCC 492). That is why she can call God “my Savior” in the Magnificat (Luke 1:47) without contradiction.

The argument then took five centuries to settle. Sixtus IV adopted the feast for the whole Latin Church in 1476; Clement XI made it a holy day for the entire Church in 1708; Pius IX defined the doctrine in 1854. The belief was not invented in 1854; the definition closed a question the Church had been answering for a very long time.

It is a Catholic dogma, and not every Christian holds it.

• The Eastern Orthodox honour Mary as Panagia, the All-Holy, the same title the Catechism cites (CCC 493), and hold that she never sinned. But they do not accept the 1854 dogma, largely because they understand original sin differently; one Orthodox bishop called the Latin dogma “not so much erroneous as superfluous”. Both Churches keep a feast of her conception, the Latins on December 8 and the Byzantine East on December 9.
• The Oriental Orthodox differ among themselves; the Ethiopian and Eritrean Tewahedo Churches hold it.
• Most Protestants reject it as not found in Scripture and as seeming to exempt Mary from “all have sinned”. Some Anglicans hold it as a pious opinion.

What unites all of them with the Catholic Church is more important: the faith that Mary is the Mother of God (see Mary, Mother of God) and the mother of the Savior, “blessed among women”.

The shortest prayer of this doctrine was given twenty-four years before it was defined. In 1830, in the chapel of the Daughters of Charity at the rue du Bac in Paris, St. Catherine Labouré saw the design of a medal ringed with the words “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” Millions still wear it; see the Miraculous Medal novena, November 18 to 26. Four years after the definition, at Lourdes, the lady in the grotto told Bernadette, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

The prayers below are the medal’s invocation and a short prayer of our own, addressed to God and asking Mary’s prayers: