“I Am the Immaculate Conception”

Note: On Tuesdays and some Sundays, you can find me at Your Daily Tripod, owned by my friend TonyD. A longer version of the post below appears there. 

It was a December 8, 1854, a Friday, to be exact, when Pius IX set forth as dogma that Mary “at the first instant of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace of the Omnipotent God,” was conceived without original sin. The belief had been generally accepted by theologians for a couple hundred years, though earlier, there had been some debate as to Mary’s pre-redemption.

While any statement of dogma is important to faithful Catholics, it is doubtful a fourteen-year-old French peasant girl had heard of it, much less understood it, four years later. After all, the sickly Bernadette Soubirous was functionally illiterate and had yet to make her First Communion. Yet, it was Bernadette to whom a beautiful lady appeared on February 11, 1858. And it was on March 25, 1858, a Thursday to be exact, that the lady, after being asked four times by Bernadette who she was, answered, “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

Bernadette may not have understood all the theology behind what the lady told her, but she knew the lady was love, and that she wanted to do whatever the lady asked. Whether others thought she was a fool was of no concern to her; after all, people had been ignoring or discounting her all of her short life. Interrogations by lay and church authorities could not move her from her account of what she had seen, what she had heard, and what she had been asked to do.

May we learn from Bernadette’s example. May we listen to Mary. May we open our hearts and souls to her beauty.