Homily for Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

What are we doing here on a Monday anyway? Haven't we gotten used to Holy Days of Obligation being moved for our convenience? What about the 'new rule' that we think now exists, that if a Holy Day is on a Saturday or a Monday it is either moved or dispensed with? What are we doing here today anyway?

Well, the fact that the Immaculate Conception of our Lady is a holy day that is not moved for any reason, tells us how important it is. By the simple fact that the Immaculate Conception is a Holy Day that is never abrogated, we know it is the most important of all the Holy Days of obligation outside of Sundays that we celebrate. The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception is never abrogated because She is the patronness of the Americas, and in particular the patronness of the United States. Her patronage of our country represents the early piety of our colonies, and the great devotion Americans have always had for the Virgin Mary, from the time the first missionaries arrived on our shores. Bishops from our country attended the pronouncement of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. Her patronage of our country was declared shortly thereafter. You can see from all of this that today is a singularly important solemnity for us particularly in the United States, and a day that we never abrograte because of its importance for us to gather and pray for the protection of our country. We pray as well for growth in wisdom and virtue, among our citizens and especially within our leaders. We pray that our country, under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, may retain its status as a great light shining in the darkness.

When a priest is ordained, Holy Chrism is poured, usually quite liberally, upon his hands, to sanctify those hands and to denote that he is now a man set apart especially to celebrate the Eucharist and to forgive sins. The same oil used for baptism and confirmation is used on the hands of a priest, but it is poured so liberally at the time of ordination that there is usually quite a residue that is traditionally wiped away by a linen cloth, called a maniturgium. This maniturgium is presented to the mother of the priest, and tradition calls for this maniturgium to be kept by the mother of the priest until the day of her funeral. On that day, the maniturgium is placed within the coffin of the priest's mother, and represents her free ticket to heaven, for having given birth to a priest.

Now of course this is pious tradition, and there is no guarantee that a mother of a priest has a 'free ticket to heaven. She may. She may not. Yet the tradition gives light to the Solemnity we are celebrating today. We say that the merits of Christ's victory over sin and death, were given to His mother, Mary, from the first moment of her conception, and thus Mary was conceived without sin. Just as placing the priest's maniturgium within the coffin of his mother represents the priest's desire to offer all the fruits of his priesthood first to his mother who gave him birth, so that she may go to heaven, so also we say naturally that Christ Himself gave the fruits of his priesthood first to His mother Mary. Just as we can and do today offer prayers and sufferings for our deceased relatives and friends, counting on the author of time to carry our offerings and to place them within the lives of our loved ones making up for anything that was lacking in their life, so too the dogma of the Immaculate Conception relies of God's 'time machine,' which works much better than any flex capacitor, by the way, to carry the merits of Christ's passion backwards in time and to apply them to His mother Mary from the first moment of Her conception. Thus, Mary, as we hear in the Gospel, is the one who is full of grace, because of this gift Her son made to Her.

In the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by our Church in 1854, we see the Church defining something as true that had been believed by people for centuries, ordinary believers who spend thousands of hours on their knees contemplating the mystery of how God redeemed the world through His Son. In meditating on the Scriptures, and the meaning of the words 'full of grace' as applied to Mary, believers, not theologians, were through their piety the first to define that Mary shared in the grace of Christ in a way that far surpassed all the angels and saints combined. She alone is the only creature who was full of grace. It was up to the theologians, then, over the course of many centuries, to find a way to reasonably explain this faith of the people, the sensus fidei, as we say, which pointed toward the truth of Mary's being conceived without original sin. Only when the Church was ready and able to explain why and how we believed that Mary's fullness of grace implied Her Immaculate Conception, did the Church define the dogma, almost 1900 years after the death of Christ and hundreds of years after the faithful had begun celebrating this great truth. This, my friends, is for all aspiring theologians among us, a definition of theology, faith seeking understanding, at its very best. Theology is not making up abstract theories about who God is, it is trying to use all human learning to show how the beautiful faith of people is consonant with human reason.

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception shows forth the beautiful way that the order of our salvation builds upon the order of nature. The theological principle is that grace builds upon nature. The supernatural is not separate from the natural, but always goes on top of nature. In other words, even when sin entered the world through Adam and Eve, God chose not to abandon His creation, but to redeem it. God chose not to scrap everything, but to re-create the world beginning with His chosen instrument, Mary. And so, just as in the order of nature all of us began our lives being completely dependent upon our mother, so in the order of grace each one of us begins our lives being completely dependent upon Mary, just as Jesus Himself was. We who are the adopted sons and daughters of Jesus Christ, we who make up His body today, are as dependent on Her for life as Jesus Himself was, who was born of the Virgin. We are as dependent upon Mary for our supernatural life as we are on our birth mothers for our natural lives. No matter what our current relationship with our moms is, the fact is that we would not be here if they had not given us birth. God in choosing Mary from the first moment of Her conception to be the mother of Jesus, desired us to be given life eternal in the same way that we are given life on earth. And so the Lord during his last moment on earth, told John at the foot of the cross - Behold, your mother! +m