Learning From Archbishop Sheen To Love Mary Immaculate, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 9, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Campus Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady
December 8, 2024
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: 

• One of the joys I have had serving as chaplain to the Catholics at Columbia has been the privilege to be able to celebrate Mass each day here at the Church of Notre Dame. It was one of the big decisions I made upon becoming chaplain, that we would move daily Mass from the transept of St. Paul’s Chapel on campus here to Notre Dame, conveniently located next to where the Merton Institute would be built in the former rectory. I did so, first, so that we would be able to offer what I called “full-menu Catholicism” in a Catholic setting, with Jesus in the Tabernacle and, therefore, the opportunity for daily Adoration, with confessionals to offer God’s mercy before Mass, with padded kneelers so that students wouldn’t have to kneel on marble floors. Another advantage was a built-in remedy to one of the dangers that can plague campus ministry at top universities: the danger of a faith that remains too intellectualized, without passing from the head to the heart to the knees, hands and feet. I had a strong hunch that celebrating Mass looking at the image of our Lady of Lourdes lifted up high in the Grotto, singing a Marian antiphon to her at the end of every liturgy, praying the Rosary before her during October and May, would help students, faculty and everyone else become truly devout. Mary shows us that what’s important in life is not to be Mary of Nazareth, Ph.D., but to emulate her as a fellow disciple and apostle of the Blessed Fruit of her womb, to invoke and imitate her intercession, and to receive her maternal love. I’m convinced that one of the biggest reasons for the growth of Columbia Catholic Ministry over the last few years has been that Mary has been interceding for us and helping us to become, through her maternal influence, ever more a true family of faith. Today I would like to thank her publicly and to ask for her continued help as Columbia Catholic Ministry prepares for a big pastoral transition.
• Since we started celebrating daily Mass here at 12:10 during the week, a few students have come up to me gently to inquire whether my watch is fast, because they’ve noticed I’ve routinely started Mass a couple of minutes early. That’s always been intentional, not just as a sign of eagerness and an inducement to try to get people to arrive at Mass early, but because of the symbolism of starting Mass, here, at 12:08. 12:08 is an explicit link to the twelfth month and eighth day, to December 8, to the Immaculate Conception, which is not just a homage to Our Lady, but an explicit link to what is depicted in this Grotto, which is a replica of the Grotto in Lourdes where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette Soubirous in 1858. When Bernadette was asked by her pastor, Fr. Peyramale, to ask the “beautiful Lady” appearing to her what her name us, Our Lady told the 14-year-old girl, 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 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 Belle Dame 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 replied no. And that was the verification Father Peyramale was looking for to help authenticate what Bernadette said was happening. When Mary was asked for her name, she didn’t respond, “I am Mary of Nazareth” or “I am the Mother of God.” She humbly bowed her head to the ground, then looked up serenely to heaven as she raised and then 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 her mother St. Anne. And so today we commemorate far more than the beginning of the life of our spiritual mother and her spiritual greatness. We do more than rejoice at the beginning of our redemption, when God, through the merits of her Son on the Cross from 47 years later, preserved her “preveniently” from all stain of original sin from the first moment of her life. We celebrate what Mary herself believed was the core of her identity, which gives witness to the triumph of grace over sin and evil.
• We see in the first reading what seems to be the triumph of sin and evil. Satan gets our first parents to distrust in God, saying that only reason why they couldn’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was because God was jealous to preserve his power. Once they distrusted God and disobeyed the one restriction he had given, everything changed and there was a three-fold rupture: a rupture with God, shown in the fact that they were trying to hide from him in the Garden; a rupture with each other, manifested by how they covered their most vulnerable parts lest the other hurt them and how neither could accept responsibility for his or her immoral decisions, with Adam’s trying to blame Eve and Eve’s blaming the serpent; and a rupture within themselves, revealed by how their body and soul would no longer easily align with what God was asking and how both work and childbirth would be done through the struggle to overcome toil, sweat and pangs.
• But the reason why Genesis 3 is today’s first reading is because we also see in this passage the beginning of the redemption, what tradition calls the “proto-evangelium” or “first Gospel.” God promises that he will put enmity between the serpent and the woman and between her offspring and the devil’s. Enmity is scorn and hatred. It’s obvious that God didn’t have to do anything for the serpent to have enmity toward us: he already hated us and wanted to bring us down, just as he was showing with our first parents. But he put a real enmity in the new Eve, Mary, for the serpent; between her Offspring — Jesus — and the “children” of the evil one, the other demons; and, insofar as we all became adopted children of Mary on Calvary when Jesus said, “Behold your mother!,” God’s plan was also to put enmity between the devil and us — an enmity that would recognize Satan’s evil works and empty promises, an enmity that would say no to the supposed lure of sin.
• This all comes to fruition in the Gospel, when we see Mary, having been filled with grace, says a consequential a “yes” to God in response to Eve’s “no.” By her “fiat,” her “let it be done to be according to your word,” Mary showed that it was possible for grace to triumph over sin, for God to triumph over Satan and evil in the human heart. Mary’s enmity for the serpent out of total love for God was not a one-time declaration. She would continue to reject Satan, all his empty promises, and all his evil works throughout her life into eternity, which is what her self-identification as the Immaculate Conception suggests. This is God’s calling and plan for each us, too, that we have a true enmity for evil so that we, like Mary, through the gift of the redemption we receive not at our conception but at our baptism and thereafter in the sacraments, might be full of grace, full of God, full of joy, full of life.
• In today’s second reading, St. Paul reminds us that God the Father “has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens,” choosing us in Christ before the beginning of time “to be holy and immaculate in his sight” and to “live for the praise of his glory.” Just like Mary was chosen by God, so we have chosen. Just as by her “yes” the history of the world was changed for the better, so through our “yes” God can change the world, saving us and others into eternity. Like Mary, however, this won’t happen without our constant consent. We need to spurn the devil and all his allures not just once but continuously. We need to stomp on his head. We need to reject him, just as was said at our baptism by our parents and godparents and we renew at least every Easter. That’s what we do whenever we come to the Sacrament of Confession, when, after having fallen like Adam and Eve fell, we come to ask for forgiveness and help. And I think it’s highly significant that the confessional here rests under the statue of St. Anne, Mary’s mother, in whose womb the miracle of the Immaculate Conception happened. It suggests that through the grace of the miracle of the Sacrament of Confession, we are able to become anew “holy and immaculate” in God’s sight just like through the miracle we celebrate today Mary was conceived without sin.
• This year we celebrate the Immaculate Conception not on December 8 but December 9, because this year December 8 fell on a Sunday and the Second Sunday of Advent takes liturgical precedence. Whenever that happens, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is moved to December 9. That’s a providential happening this year, because today, December 9, we mark the 45th anniversary of the death of the greatest American Catholic preacher of all time, the Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who thundered from the pulpits of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Agnes Church and elsewhere for more than 16 years as he served (as my predecessor!) as the National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith. Archbishop Sheen had a towering intellect and had received an extraordinary education, but he was marked far more by his piety, which featured a deeply devout love for Our Lady. Today is a fitting occasion to profit from some of the fruits of his prayerful appreciation for Our Lady and her Immaculate Conception.
• First, Archbishop Sheen said that in eternity God has two pictures of us: who we are by our choices and who he really intended us to be. There’s also some disproportion he said between God’s original plan to be holy and blameless in his sight and the way we by our free choices have worked it out. Mary, he said, is the one person in all humanity for whom there was a perfect conformity between God’s ideal and who she was. God thought of her before she was born, like a poet thinks of his poem before he commits it to writing. “The melody of her life,” he stated, “is played just as it was written.” God had this image of her not only in eternity but at the beginning of time, as the response to the first sin and every sin. God conceived her in His eternal mind before she was conceived in the womb of her mother, St. Ann. That was, Sheen would say, her first “immaculate conception.”
• Second, Sheen said that God chose her with particular qualities. “If you could have preexisted your mother, would you not have made her the most perfect woman that ever lived?,” he asked. “Why, then, should we think that God would do otherwise?” He commented, “If God [the Father] labored six days in preparing a paradise for man, He would [obviously] spend a longer time preparing a paradise for His Divine Son. As no weeds grew in Eden, so no sin would arise in Mary, the paradise of the Incarnation. Most unbecoming would it be for the sinless Lord to come into the world through a woman afflicted with sin. A barn door cannot fittingly serve as an entrance to a castle.” Mary was therefore, chosen to be immaculate, holy and blameless before him. “The closer one gets to fire, the greater the heat,” he said, and therefore, “the closer one is to God, the greater the purity. Since no one was ever closer to God than the woman whose human portals He threw open to walk this earth, then no one could have been more pure than she. … This special purity of hers we call the Immaculate Conception.”
• Third, he insisted that the Immaculate Conception “does not imply that Mary needed no redemption. She needed it as much as you and I do.” Whereas we receive the fruits of redemption in our soul at Baptism, “She was redeemed in advance, by way of prevention, in both body and soul, in the first instant of conception… as a result of the merits of Our Lord’s Cross being offered to her at the moment of her conception.” She had this privilege, he said, not for her sake but for Jesus’, because she was an image of the goodness that existed before sin took over. She was an image of the separation, the enmity, between God and sin.
• Finally, he said, Mary is given to us as a model. While insisting that Jesus is the image of the invisible God whom we are always to follow, he added that Jesus’ divinity can sometimes intimidate. “There ought to be, on the human level,” he said, “someone who would give humans hope, someone who could lead us to Christ, someone who would mediate between us and Christ as He mediates between us and the Father.” That’s who Mary is by God’s design. “One look at her,” Sheen said, “and we know that a human who is not good can become better; one prayer to her, and we know that, because she is without sin, we can become less sinful.” He added against those who say that invoking her somehow takes us away from Christ, “Love for Mary no more derogates from Christ’s Divinity than the setting robs the jewel, or the hearth the flame, or the horizon the sun. She exists but to magnify the Lord, and that was the song of her life.”
• 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 grace to be “holy and immaculate in his sight” 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 Mass were: 

Alleluia See Lk 1:28

R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you;
blessed are you among women.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.

Gospel Lk 1:26-38

The angel Gabriel was sent from God
to a town of Galilee called Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph,
of the house of David,
and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And coming to her, he said,
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”
But she was greatly troubled at what was said
and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
Then the angel said to her,
“Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favor with God.
Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”
But Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.
And behold, Elizabeth, your relative,
has also conceived a son in her old age,
and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren;
for nothing will be impossible for God.”
Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.

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