This year is the 170th anniversary of the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pope Pius IX in his encyclical Ineffabilis Deus (1854), which declared that the Virgin Mary, “from the first moment of her conception … was, by the singular grace and privilege of Almighty God, and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of Mankind, kept free from all stain of original sin.”
And of course, it was just four years later in 1858 when Mary appeared to the young French peasant girl Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, and declared to her, “I am the Immaculate Conception” in a manner that indicated she was offering this as a definitive title for her deepest identity.
What the Immaculate Conception Means
Many Protestants, and indeed not a few Catholics, confuse the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception with the virginal conception and birth of Jesus. And so we need to be very clear about what it is we are celebrating this Dec. 8.
In essence, what we are commemorating is the affirmation that Mary was sinless throughout her entire life, and that this began at the very moment of her conception. From the beginning of her existence, God engraced her fully and preserved her soul from any “stain” of original sin, thus preserving her from the spiritual and moral entropy it creates in all the rest of us.
What this means is that Mary was not only without sin, but that she was free from all disordered concupiscence in her life and was not prone to any inherent moral weaknesses of any kind. She was granted the grace of living in the presence of God through an immediacy in her soul that allowed her to live a life of perfect, ongoing, moral and spiritual integrity.
However, she, like her son, had to live within the regime of sin created by the Fall, and she too was the target of the Tempter’s outward assault on her inner holiness. She too was capable of suffering (“A sword will pierce your soul,” Luke 2:35).
But she, unlike Eve, persevered to the end. Eve was also created without concupiscence and without sin, and yet she still freely chose to sin. But Mary did not sin, and thus she is the “New Eve” who is now the mother to all the baptized who have sacramentally died and risen with Christ. She is the living Ark of the Covenant whose very body was the nurturing home to the flesh of her Son, and not a mere box that was a passive repository for the stones of the Law.
Two Common Misunderstandings
But let us be clear about a few things that are often misunderstood.
First, Mary did need to be “saved” by Christ insofar as she, too, would have been born with original sin had God not preveniently applied the merits of Christ’s atoning death to her. Christ alone is the human being who did not need to be saved from original sin.
Mary is not, therefore, some kind of goddess figure who, in a sense, stands side by side with Christ as the feminine consort to his masculinity, as one often saw in ancient paganism where male and female deities were portrayed as divine duos that exemplified the masculine and feminine principles of existence. There is no hint of that in the biblical Revelation, and certainly, the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception is in no way a divinizing of Mary or an exempting of her from the economy of salvation completed by Christ.
Second, the theological reason her Immaculate Conception is “fitting” in the economy of salvation is not rooted in the idea that Jesus, being sinless, could not have been conceived by someone who was a sinner. Such reasoning suggests he could have been “contaminated” by her sinfulness, either in utero or during his upbringing. But this logic would require that Mary herself be conceived and raised by a sinless person, and her mother, St. Anne, as well — leading to an endless regress of sinless ancestors.
Why the Immaculate Conception Is Fitting
The issue, therefore, is not one of contamination or the theological impossibility of the sinless savior being born of a sinful mother. The answer as to the fittingness of the Immaculate Conception in the economy of salvation can be seen in the Church’s selection of the Gospel of Luke’s account of the Annunciation for the liturgical celebration of the event (1:26-38).
The Church is highlighting the fact that the purpose behind the Immaculate Conception was precisely to prepare Mary for this moment. To make her fiat — “May it be done to me according to your word” — the perfect “Yes” to God and the perfect covenant response to God’s many overtures to Israel.
This covenant aspect is precisely why Mary’s perfect fiat is so central to the narrative of salvation and thus, to our understanding of the nature of Revelation and the Tradition that flows out of it. God would not enter fully into human history until Israel freely and fully accepted God’s overtures of grace in the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants. But due to sin, Israel could not give that perfect and free “Yes” to God.
Truths about God had indeed been revealed to Israel, but they were theological truths that were constitutively relational insofar as their entire internal structure and logic tied “truth” to the very mystery and personhood of God — a God who desired communion with his creatures. Thus, God could not force or coerce a free response out of Israel to his “truth” without violating the very internal logic of that truth. The communion he sought was a free one, born in the heart, and not merely a forensic application of the various “obligations” of the Law.
How often did the prophets drive this point home in their insistence that God desires not sacrifices of bulls and sheep, but a humble heart that freely embraces his love? And is this not what made Israel’s covenants with Yahweh so radically different from the ancient Mesopotamian treaties that emphasized strictly forensic and servile obedience to the king in exchange for favorable treatment?
The Quiet ‘Yes’ That Shook Creation
Mary is thus, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger pointed out, the “Daughter Zion” who represents all of Israel — indeed all of humanity as well — when she, in her sinlessness, offers to God the first fully and truly free “Yes” to his request to be allowed into human history in a complete way. And the importance of her “Yes” can be seen in the fact that after she utters it, the narrative tersely, but sweetly, ends: “Then the angel departed from her” (Luke 1:38).
The world took no notice of her “Yes,” uttered as it was in the quiet solitude of her home in Nazareth. Caesar slept soundly without disturbance. But Heaven shook, its portals opened to the earthly depths below, and the angels wept for joy.
As the future Pope Benedict XVI notes, the term the Angel Gabriel applies to Mary in his greeting, which we translate as “full of grace,” was the Greek term kecharitomene, which means one who has been uniquely favored with a fullness of divine grace. It was a term associated with the “Daughter Zion” motif of the Old Testament. Cardinal Ratzinger therefore makes the point that Luke is portraying Mary here as the typological fulfillment of all of God’s covenant expectations of Israel:
“The salutation to Mary (Luke 1:28-32) is modeled closely on Zephaniah 3:14-17: Mary is the daughter Zion addressed here, summoned to ‘rejoice’, informed that the Lord is coming to her. Her fear is removed, since the Lord is in her midst to save her. … In the address of the angel, the underlying motif in the Lucan portrait of Mary surfaces: she is in person the true Zion, toward whom hopes have yearned throughout all the devastations of history. She is the true Israel in whom Old and New Covenant, Israel and Church, are indivisibly one. She is the ‘people of God’ bearing fruit through God’s gracious power.”
Therefore, as we celebrate this beautiful feast of the Church this year, let our prayer also be that of Mary, our Mother: “May it be done to me according to your word.” And with her fiat centered in our spiritual lives, let us “allow” the Holy Spirit into our souls “to make straight the way of the Lord.”
