Thursday 8th December at 6pm. CBS Mass for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. All are welcome at this Plainsong Mass with Propers and Hymns for the day.  Fr David Hastings will be Celebrant as Superior of the local St Clement’s Ward of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament.

The belief that Mary was sinless and conceived immaculate had been widely held since Late Antiquity, and celebration of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 long established in popular devotion, but the doctrine was not dogmatically defined until 1854, by Pope Pius IX.

So, the Immaculate Conception, according to the teaching of the Catholic Church, was the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the womb of her mother, Saint Anna, free from original sin by virtue of the foreseen merits of her son Jesus Christ.

This Feast of the ICBVM has been a source of controversy for theologians down the centuries. Thomas Aquinas didn’t like it, but around 1300 Duns Scotus squared the causal circle of how Mary could have been born sinless before Christ had accomplished Salvation on the Cross so that she was suitable to be the Mother of God conceiving Jesus by the Holy Ghost.

Although it sounds a bit “timey wimey”, it’s a closed causal loop so we don’t have to worry about recursion and whether Blessed Annie, God’s Grannie (as a special edition of the Church Times once termed her) was worthy to be the mother of Our Lady.

Mary herself was conceived by normal biological means, by Saints Joachim and Anna, named in the apocryphal Gospel of James, but God acted upon her soul, keeping her “immaculate”, i.e. free from original sin, at the time of her conception.

While this is fun for theologians, what matters more than Mary’s difference from us is our similarity to her in saying yes to God and knowing Jesus.  This special Feast of Mary early in Advent is the logical precursor of, and pointer towards, the great Feast of the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, at Christmas.