Chosen in Christ to Be Holy and Without Blemish, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Campus Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady
December 8, 2023
Gn 3:9-15.20, Ps 98, Eph 1:3-6.11-12, Lk 1:26-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

The following text guided the homily: 

• With joy today we come together to celebrate God’s extraordinary work in the life of the woman God the Father chose to be the Mother of his Son and that Son from the Cross chose for us. St. Paul, in today’s second reading from his Letter to the Ephesians, exultantly wrote, “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.” That divine will, in our case, is meant to be fulfilled through “adoption to himself through Jesus Christ,” in which by Baptism, we are wiped clean of original and personal sin and given the help to persevere in a holy life. In Mary’s case, that same divine will from before the world’s creation was fulfilled in a unique and miraculous way. It’s important for us not just to know the fact of her Immaculate Conception in the womb of her mother Saint Anne, but to know the grounds for this truth, first, so that we can better appreciate God’s plan for the world’s redemption and Mary’s part in it, but also because, frankly, some of our Protestant brothers and sisters are presently and consistently challenging it as a means to try to dissuade some of those who have expressed the desire to become Catholic from doing so as well as to try to undermine the faith of campus Catholics. To attack the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is a means, some of them seem to think, by which they can undercut Catholic veneration of Mary, the dogma of papal infallibility, since it was employed in 1854 solemnly to define the Immaculate Conception, as well as sacred tradition and Catholic theology more generally. So, sharing Jesus’ love for his mother and ours as well as having a robust desire to defend other mother’s dignity, honor and special privileges in salvation history, let’s examine what today’s feast is about and how and why the Church proclaims and celebrates Mary’s Immaculate Conception.
• Some of our Protestant brothers and sisters argue that Mary’s Immaculate Conception is unbiblical, but today’s reading suggest why the Church has long argued for Mary’s sinlessness. In the first reading, in Genesis’ account of the original sin of Adam and Eve, God responds to the serpent by prophesizing that he would “put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers.” The earliest saints in the Church are unanimous in recognizing that this refers to Mary and her offspring, Jesus, often referring to Jesus, like St. Paul, as the New Adam and to Mary as the New Eve, in a state she had before the Fall. It’s unsurprising that the Evil One would have enmity — scorn and hatred — for Jesus and for Mary and, in fact, for all of us. It’s likewise not a surprise that Jesus would have enmity for the evil one, for his lies and works, as we see in the way Jesus responded to him in the desert. But the third Chapter of the Bible also asserts, in what tradition calls the “proto-evangelium” or “first Gospel,” that Mary would share God’s enmity and be totally opposed to the serpent’s work of getting us to distrust God and choose against him. We see the fulfillment of that divine prophecy and plan in today’s Gospel, when the Archangel Gabriel, on behalf of God, greets Mary at the annunciation. In St. Luke’s Greek original, he greets her, “Chaire, kecharitomene,” “Rejoice, you who have been filled with grace.” Biblical scholars, ancient and contemporary, recognize in this expression that Mary was filled with grace, which means filled with God, in such a way that there was no room within her for sin, for idols, for anything opposed to God. To call her kecharitomene was to say that she was sinless — and that’s how she was referred to by saints and fathers of the Church throughout the earliest centuries of the Church, as the “sinless Virgin Mary,” the woman whom they said was like Eve before the Fall.
• So there was never a debate as to whether Mary was a sinner. The question was when she became “full of grace,” when she was “holy and without blemish” before God. Some of the earliest saints and theologians thought that if she were free from sin from the first moment of her life, then she would not have needed to be redeemed by her Son and asked, how could she have been freed from sin if her Son, the Redeemer of the World, still hadn’t even been conceived in her. Others argued that if she were not conceived with the consequences of original sin, then why would she have even needed to be redeemed in the first place. So while they were unanimous in saying that she was sinless in that she had never chosen to sin, they couldn’t grasp how she could have been preserved from original sin. And so the topic was debated until, basically, Blessed Duns Scotus, in the early 1300s, gave brilliantly compelling answers to both questions. He taught that since Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection were temporal acts with eternal consequences, such that the redemption he won could save even the ancient patriarchs who had died centuries before him, those eternal graces could be applied in an anticipated or prevenient fashion to Mary at the moment of her conception. At the very moment she was conceived in the womb of St. Anne with the loss of the inheritance given before the Fall to Adam and Eve, the graces of her future Son’s triumph on Golgotha would be applied to her, so that she might be fully free to say a whole-hearted “fiat” or “yes” to God when the Archangel Gabriel appeared and so that, in her womb, no sin might ever touch her sinless Son. Blessed Duns Scotus gave an analogy with regard to quicksand that said that there are two ways one can be saved from quicksand. The first is when someone is sinking in it; the second is by preventing someone from falling into it in the first place, and the latter is what happened to Mary from the first instant of her life. This is what led Blessed Pope Pius IX, after centuries of devotion to Mary’s Immaculate Conception in the Catholic world and a solicitation of all the bishops of the world, to dogmatically define, in the first formal extraordinary exercise of papal infallibility, that “the doctrine that 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.”
• But it’s not enough to stop with the dogmatic decree. We need to relate to Mary. We need to relate to her as a disciple who shows us how to love, with a sinless heart, the One who would become the blessed Fruit of her immaculate womb. No one shows us how to be a better Christian than Mary and she wants to help each of us relate to her Son better, to live up to our baptismal promises and become “holy and without blemish” in his sight. We need to relate to her as Mother. Jesus on Calvary entrusted her to his “beloved disciple” and him to her and each of us, like the beloved disciple, is supposed to receive Mary into [our] home,” into our life. If we seek to follow Jesus and Jesus kept the fourth commandment honoring his mother, how could we not seek to imitate his love for her, he who praised her above all for her faith, for hearing the word of God and observing it. And we’re also called to relate to her as an intercessor. We see in Cana of Galilee how Mary brings the needs of others to her Son. In that case, they had run out of wine and, at her intercession, before the couple was even aware of its impending crisis and even though Jesus protested it wasn’t yet his hour, he worked his first miracle, turning 180 gallons of water into the equivalent today of 912 750-millileter bottles of wine. We have every confidence that Mary is interceding for us before we even know what we need. That’s why, from even before the dogmatic definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Christian faithful have turned to Mary for the help of her prayers with words inscribed on the miraculous medal, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.” As we have recourse — run time and again — to Mary, she responds.
• But in this beautiful Church dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes, it’s important for us to grasp that it’s really not enough for us just to relate to Mary as fellow disciple, spiritual mom and champion before her Son. We also need to relate to her as the Immaculate Conception, because that’s how she identified herself to St. Bernadette Soubirous in the Grotto of Massabielle where Mary appeared to her 18 times in in 1858. It was there that Mary prayed with Bernadette, just as she comes here to pray with us. It was there that the “Belle Dame,” the Beautiful Lady asked her 14 year-old chosen one to ask the Church authorities to build a Church so that people would be able to come to adore her Son, and here, just about 50 years after the apparitions, a chapel and then a Church was built so that we, too, might adore that same blessed divine Redeemer. It was there that Mary asked Bernadette to dig in the ground and drink, and Bernadette after a few minutes digging in the soil accessed an underground stream that now flows with water into baths where over the course of the last 165 years many have been miraculously cured. Here, thanks to a special arrangement with the Basilica in Lourdes we received regular shipments of that water with which to pray for healing. But what I think is most significant is a dialogue Mary and Bernadette had there that is key to what we celebrate today. There was a buzz in Lourdes when Bernadette’s friends said that she had been seeing a Beautiful Lady dressed in white in the Grotto of Massabielle. It was threatening to create what the local authorities feared might become a public disturbance. Her benevolent pastor, Fr. Peyramale, found Bernadette sincere, but needed to fulfill the Church’s task to test everything to ensure that what she claimed she was seeing was of heavenly origin. So he asked her to inquire of the Beautiful Lady what her name was. After several requests, the Lady told her, responding in the local patois, Que era soy a Immaculada Concepciou, or in French as we see in the words enveloping her head in the image here, “Je suis l’Immaculée Conception.” “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Bernadette, who had never been taught to read and had received very little education, had no idea what the big words “Immaculate” and “Conception” meant. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception had just been formally defined four years before and while all Catholics in the Pyrenees already believed that Mary was the sinless Virgin Mary from the beginning of her life, few had heard of the dogma. So when she told Father Peyramale how the Beautiful Lady had responded to her question, and carefully tried to be faithful to repronouncing the sounds of what seemed like a foreign language, im-mac-u-la-da-con-cep-ci-ou, he was stunned. He asked her if she knew what these words meant and she humbly and with embarrassment confessed she had no clue. And that was the verification he was looking for. When Mary was asked for her name, she didn’t respond, “Mary of Nazareth” or “The Mother of God.” She humbly gazed at the ground, then looked up serenely to heaven as she raised and folded her hands and said, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” She identified fully with the grace God had given her from the first instant of her life in the womb of St. Anne. She announced that the core of her identity was the triumph of grace over sin and evil that her Son accomplished her at the first instant of her life. Relating to her this way as fellow disciples, we learn better our vocation to be “holy and immaculate.” Referring to her this way as sons and daughters, we recognize this is the great inheritance she wishes us to share with her Son. Addressing her this way as intercessor, we have confidence that in this recourse she will gain for us what we need to have enmity toward the serpent and with her Son’s grace to triumph over the evil one in life and in death.
• As we prepare on this great Solemnity to receive within us the same Son for whom Mary was immaculately conceived in order to bear for nine months, let us ask the Immaculate Conception personified, our fellow disciple and beloved Mother, to intercede for us, that we, like her, may have the true enmity against the devil, that we may say and continue to repeat all our days a wholehearted “yes” to God, that we may respond to God’s superabundant grace to be “holy and immaculate in his sight” and “live for the praise of his glory,” and that one day we may come to experience true joy with her and all the saints where the redemption begun on this day reaches its fulfillment.

The readings for today’s Solemnity are: 

In him we were also chosen,
destined in accord with the purpose of the One
who accomplishes all things according to the intention of his will,
so that we might exist for the praise of his glory,
we who first hoped in Christ.

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