Relating to Mary as the Immaculate Conception, Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, December 8, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady
December 8, 2022
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 my joys as chaplain to the Catholics at Columbia is to be able to celebrate Mass each day here at the Church of Notre Dame that only features extraordinary architecture inside and outside, but as the reredos of the altar a replica of the Grotto in Lourdes where Mary appeared to St. Bernadette 18 times in 1858. It was there that Mary prayed with Bernadette, just as she comes here to pray with us. It was there that 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 Fruit of her womb. 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 164 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 chaotic public incident. 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 Belle Dame what her name was. After several requests, the Lady told her. She said 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 Beautiful Lady had responded to her question, and carefully tried to be faithful to reprouncing 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 said no. And that was the verification he was looking for. 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 looked down at 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 from 47 years later on the Cross, 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. And reflecting on that triumph in her life, we are able to ponder how we’re called to share in, and help others to share in, that victory.
• 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, shown in 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, shown in 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!,” and in the person of the beloved disciple told her, “Behold your son!,” 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 plan for each us, 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 have 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 “holy and immaculate” in God’s sight just like through the miracle we celebrate today Mary was conceived without sin.
• 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 her 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.
• “O Mary conceived without original sin. Pray for us who have recourse to thee!”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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