‘Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary’, by Father Miguel Vasconcelos
170 years ago, in the name of the whole Church, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the feast of 8 December: the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Mary, the mother of God, was preserved from original sin from the very first moment of her existence. And while these formulations may sound a little heavy and, for some, even anachronistic, it is no less true that this is a light and topical day.
This is a light day because it shows the faithfulness of God and his choices. The Immaculate Conception signifies a yes spoken not only with Mary's conscious words, as would happen later when she is visited by the angel who announces the birth of the Saviour, but also a yes proclaimed by God, when he chooses the whole Virgin Mary and elects her, in the totality of her person, for the mission he wants to entrust to her. Indeed, because God looks at her with a primordial yes, Mary is, all of her and from the beginning, a yes answered and returned to God. Mary was born immaculate through no merit of her own, but she remains immaculate because all her freedom was put into action when she gave herself into the hands of the One who had chosen and prepared her from the beginning.
This is also a topical day, because it shows a promise that God wants to continue to fulfil: just as he did in Mary, preserving her from original sin, God wants to bring us back to the original Grace with which he created the world. God's ‘yes’ is already echoed in the Creation story, where everything is created by God's affirmative word, without there being a single ‘no’. In fact, everything that God did in Mary, he wants to do with us too; the original yes that fell on her is the same yes that God wants to fall on each of us at every moment of our lives.
In the midst of Advent, with our eyes fixed on Christmas, this is the invitation we have to respond: God wants to build true holiness in me, bringing out all the possibilities of good that are within me; God wants to teach me the lightness of clear and free gestures, and the current relevance of a project of love. What about me? And what about me?
Padre Miguel Cabedo e Vasconcelos