Immaculate Conception

Immaculate Conception – 8^th December

Today’s Solemnity  of the Immaculate Conception brings us in a journey back through time. It begins in us to Lourdes in 1858 where the unlettered Bernadette Soubirous appealed to l’Abbe Peyremale that a woman declaring herself to be the Immaculate Conception had appeared in the quarry of Massabielle desiring that a chapel be built there. Imagine his astonishment and how convinced he must have been and determined from that moment on to be Bernadette’s defendant in the face of so many Commissions and Inquiries held in the years to follow in order to establish the authenticity of the apparitions of Lourdes! How could this girl possibly hear of such a phrase, let alone understand it. It is a scene replayed for us in the award-winning movie - 70 years old this year - The Song of Bernadette. The year of Lourdes was 1858, and four years earlier in 1854 in a statement for the Holy Father, it was declared to be an infallible dogma of the Church.

We must then go back to 1830 to the apparitions at Rue de Bac in Paris where Our Lady had asked of Catherine Laboure that a medal be struck in honour of the Immaculate Conception representing another stage of our journey. This journey brings us to the dawn of human creation and the Fall - what was described for us in the First Reading of the woman crushing the head of the serpent. With the Miraculous Medal we can, invokw her and ask for all the graces we need for salvation, wearing the medal with great confidence. If we didn’t have and wear one, let us begin!

The Solemnity and the Gospel refer to three miraculous conceptions, involving divine intervention – the intervention of God that Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without original sin’; that Jesus was conceived in Mary’s womb without man (virginal conception); that Mary’s ‘kinswoman Elizabeth, in her old age, whom men had considered barren, was now in her sixth month’(Luke).

The Solemnity also has huge ramifications for us in today’s culture and society.

Because such mystery, hushed reverence and sacredness surround these conceptions and particularly today the Conception of Mary, then how wonderful and awesome is every human conception. As we honour Mary’s conception, we should reverence every conception, in the context of marriage. Today’s culture needs to hear this. How many couples through ignorance, heartache, and sheer desperation, not knowing where else to turn, defer the role of the marital embrace to a laboratory induced fertilisation of several embryos. These conceptions – these lives – are at scientists’ and technicians’ mercy, and literally, disposal.

Let us speak up for the dignity of every life from natural conception – as well as the dignity to be accorded these embryos in vitro.

Let us pray for all couples, the one in six, who have difficulties in this area of morality, many of whom are ignorant of the moral implications of what they are doing.

Mau this Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception remind us of the wonder of every conception and may we honour every human life upholding the dignity of marital love and human life. Let us also invoke Our Lady anew through our confident wearing of the Miraculous Medal of the Immaculate Conception.