Holy and Immaculate Before God, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
December 8, 2021
Gen 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: 

• Twenty-five years ago in his beautiful exhortation Vita Consecrata, St. John Paul II described the connection between the reality of Mary’s Immaculate Conception and the life of everyone consecrated to God through baptism and especially those who live the more intimate form of consecration that is religious life.  “Mary,” he wrote, “is the one who, from the moment of her Immaculate Conception, … is the sublime example of perfect consecration, since she belongs completely to God and is totally devoted to him. Chosen by the Lord, who wished to accomplish in her the mystery of the Incarnation, she reminds consecrated persons of the primacy of God’s initiative. At the same time, having given her assent to the divine Word, made flesh in her, Mary is the model of the acceptance of grace by human creatures.” She is the model of God’s initiative, the model of acceptance of that initiative, and the sublime example of the consecration that flows from that initiative.
• We see all of those realities in today’s readings. In the first reading, after Adam and Eve sinned, God took the initiative and announced the redemption, what’s called the “first Gospel,” telling the serpent he would place “enmity between you and the woman and between her offspring and yours.” Mary is the one who had nothing to do with the devil and her Offspring, Jesus, was the one who defeated him once and for all. Mary received the fruits of Jesus’ triumph 47 years in time before he accomplished it eternally on Calvary. The prevenient grace she received from the first moment of her existence is this sign of God’s initiative and the beginning of the final phase of the unveiling of God’s plan of redemption. We see that initiative continue to be proclaimed in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, in which we learn that “before the foundation of the world,” God the Father ” blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, as he chose us in him … to be holy and without blemish before him.” God has these blessings in store before we were conceived, before the world was created. We see God’s initiative likewise with Mary, sending the Angel Gabriel to announce to her, “Rejoice, you who have been filled with grace.” She was filled with God by God before even she had even developed the faculties to make her first choice. She was filled with every spiritual blessing and the greatest of all, God himself, in her soul, then her heart and then her womb.
• But we also see in her how to respond. After having her questions about God’s modality answered — essentially asking how she would be a mom while remaining true to her consecration to God as a virgin — she replied, “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word.” This points not only to her receptivity of the grace God was extending, but to the way she sought to live her entire life: as a handmaid of the Lord, consecrated to the Lord’s service, not just allowing but with all her heart wanting her life to develop according to God’s will. She shows an unequivocal response to God’s blessing. Mary so identified with God’s initiative at the beginning that when, in 1858, St. Bernadette asked her what was her name, she didn’t reply, “Miriam,” or “I am the Mother of God,” or “Ecce Ancilla Domini,” but rather “I am the Immaculate Conception.” Her whole life was defined by this singular grace and her correspondence to it. And when she appeared to the three shepherd children in Fatima in 1917, she told Lucia and SS. Francisco and Jacinta that, in response to the evil continuously caused by the serpent, the remedy was consecration to her immaculate heart, a heart that, like hers, was full of God, full of grace, wholeheartedly intent on love and trusting obedience. She wants to help us have a heart like hers. She wants to help us to cooperate with God’s grace, in the Sacrament of Baptism, in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and in all the Sacraments, to become holy and immaculate in God’s sight. Today as we commemorate the beginning of the life of our spiritual mother and her spiritual greatness, as we rejoice at the beginning of our redemption in the womb of St. Anne, we also celebrate how Mary continues her consecrated life, interceding for us and helping us to imitate her in receiving God’s initiative, in responding to it with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and in consecrating ourselves to God’s service and glory.
• Someone who was intimately associated with the mystery of Mary’s living holy and immaculate in God’s sight, who venerated and protected her as the Immaculate Conception, and who sought to help her fulfill the vocation and mission that corresponded to her having been filled with grace, was Saint Joseph, whose special holy year concludes today. The same Pope Blessed Pius IX — who in response to the petitions of Catholics throughout the world and in line with the deposit of faith — had solemnly declared the dogma of the Immaculate Conception on this day in 1854, likewise on this day 16 years later declared Saint Joseph the patron of the universal Church. He chose to make this proclamation on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, because St. Joseph was intimately espoused and connected to this Mystery, through his chaste loving union with the Immaculate Virgin. St. Joseph shows us how to relate to Mary under this title and reality. He shows how to love her with tender affection as a fellow disciple of the Lord, as a spouse of the Holy Spirit, as a Mother of God and of all believers (including Joseph himself!), and as a powerful intercessor. His life was dedicated to assisting her to to grow as a faithful Jew, as a fervent disciple, as a physical and spiritual mother, as an intercessor. He helped her to imitate her Son’s self-giving love, by permitting her to love him in accordance with her vocation as a virginal spouse and Mother of God and to live out her vocation as Queen of Heaven and Earth for whom to reign is to serve. He shows us how to share her commitment to Jesus, as together they centered their whole lives on him and helped him to fulfill his Messianic mission. He shows us how to share in Mary’s enmity for sin and in her hunger to live “holy and immaculate” in God’s sight; as a “just man,” who was right with God and others, he constantly sought to “ad-just” his life to God’s will, echoing and reinforcing Mary’s fiat by his own “Amen.” In a home where the incarnate God and the Immaculate Conception both lived, Joseph strove to live in such a blameless way. He shows us how to receive Mary’s love and to consecrate ourselves to her, allowing her to train us in the school of grace and learn the lessons of the primacy of God’s initiative, the acceptance of grace, and of perfect consecration. He is the greatest alumnus of that school of holiness and the foremost partaker of grace’s victory.
• On this day in which we ask Mary conceived without original sin to pray for us who have recourse to her, we likewise turn to St. Joseph with gratitude, trust, and recourse to his protection and patronage, and we ask them both to teach us how to live the Eucharistic dimension of Christian life. Their whole existence was centered on the Real Presence of God in their midst, whom they held in their arms, loved with affection, and adored. In Bethlehem, Egypt, and Nazareth, their home was like a corporal in which they participated with Jesus in the oblation of his entire life, as they offered their daily work as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God the Father. As we prepare on this great Solemnity to receive within us the same Son for whom Mary was immaculately conceived and bore within for nine months, the same Jesus whom Joseph wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger, we ask them lovingly to intercede for us, so that we, like them, receiving God’s grace-filled initiative and responding with wholehearted, lifelong consecration, may be “holy and immaculate in his sight” and “live for the praise of his glory” — and come with them to the eternal Eucharistic feast where we will experience the full triumph of what Mary’s Immaculate Conception is the first installment.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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