The Immaculate And Her Faithful Servant

A happy feast day to you all.  Today is a wonderful celebration, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady.   It is one of two unique feasts within the Christian faith where we celebrate conception and the destiny of the child conceived: two pro-life feasts which remind us of the personhood of the child in the womb. 

On the 25th March we celebrate the Annunciation which is the feast of the Incarnation - when "the Word was made flesh".  Our God became man and it happened at the moment of conception.  On this great solemnity we marvel at the awesome privilege God gave to Mary which she was preserved from Original Sin and personal sin from the first moment of her life - i.e. when she was conceived. 

In these times we turn to the Holy Virgin and ask her prayers for all our children, especially those who are most vulnerable, and among them the little ones in the womb.

As we celebrate today, let us also honour Blessed John Duns Scotus (pictured above with Our Lady and St Francis).    Blessed John was one of the great defenders of the Immaculate Conception and preached the dogma throughout his life even when great theologians like St Thomas Aquinas and St Bernard of Clairvaux disagreed with him. 

Blessed John was a Scotsman, born in Duns, Berwickshire, Scotland, around the year 1266.  He entered the Franciscans and was ordained on the 17th March 1291.  He was educated in Oxford and was renowned for his ability and learning.  He taught at the University of Paris, but was expelled in 1302 for siding with the Pope in a feud the King of France was conducting with the Church.  However he returned to the university in 1304 and taught until he was transferred to Cologne in October 1307, where he died on the 8th November 1308.

Blessed John was an important philosopher and theologian who has lived under the shadow of St Thomas Aquinas.  Many of his works were unfinished at the time of his death, yet he was influential enough to found a school of thought - Scotism.  He was an arch-rival to William of Ockham, not a bad thing since Ockham gave us Nominalism which would eventually lead to modern relativism: Scotism actually allied itself with Thomism in combatting Nominalism.  Blessed John was known for his subtlety in thought and earned the title "Doctor Subtilis".  Much neglected, his work has been praised by Blessed Pope John XXIII who recommended that theology students should study him.

Pope Benedict wrote a beautiful Apostolic Letter to celebrate the seventh centenary of the Blessed's death in 2008.    It begins with a most joyful greeting: "Rejoice, City of Cologne, which once welcomed within your walls John Duns Scotus, a most learned and devout man, who passed from this life to the heavenly Homeland...and whose remains you preserve with admiration and veneration".

I am sure Blessed John can glory in many titles, but I think the one he would covet and cherish above all the rest is "faithful servant of the Immaculate", and it is one he richly deserves.  This solemnity today is a triumph for him, as it is for all of us, for in this privilege given to Our Lady we see, as did Blessed John, a sign of hope for all humanity: what she was at her conception, was throughout her life and is now in the heavenly kingdom, we hope to be one day: free from all sin.

O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Blessed John Duns Scotus, pray for us.

The tomb of Blessed John Duns Scotus in Cologne.

All In The Words

The great Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception!  A marvellous feast day.  In Ireland, traditionally, it is the country people's shopping day, when they travel up to Dublin to do their Christmas shopping.  While that may sound awful to those who realise the importance of a day of rest - this day was, traditionally the only day the country people could get off.  Farmers work six days a week, Sunday was the day of rest: the Solemnity was the day they did not work even when it fell on a week day, and so they availed of the opportunity to get some of the presents bought for Christmas.  In Dublin some saw it as "Culchie Day" - culchie being the term for country people.  In America you would say "Rednecks". I'll stop there lest this post turn into a dictionary of abusive terms for non-city people, i.e. those who live in "the sticks", etc. (Ahem..)

Moving on quickly.....This wonderful feast day of the Immaculate Conception should be one which unites Christians around the world: it should not just be Catholics who celebrate it, after all the event which we mark is revealed in Sacred Scripture.  Here we come to one of my bugbears - translation!  As we read the Gospel today the Scriptural basis for this feast is, I feel, undermined by the translation.

In Luke 1:28 the Angel Gabriel greets Mary as "kecharitomene" which is translated in the Gospel today as "highly favoured one".  Now while that translation "will do", it is not wholly accurate for the term.  The better translation of the word is "full of grace", and even that lacks the depth of the word which is even more fulsome.  The word means that Mary is now already filled with God's grace in preparation for the role she is to play in human salvation, and that of course points to the Immaculate Conception.   I think we need a better translation for this Gospel.

Today may also be the day when St Bernard and St Thomas Aquinas hang their heads at the celestial banquet and sip their wine in silence, as Blessed John Duns Scotus takes the toast with the Holy Mother.  Blessed John defended the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception when St Bernard and St Thomas had their issues.  Indeed Bernard was up in arms when some churches of the West were celebrating the feast.  No doubt all are friends now, and I'm sure Blessed Pius IX will pop over for a little ribbing at the two Doctors and tell them they took their eyes off the ball.  The lesson: humility.

Indeed that is one of the messages of this feast day: she who was most humble, the handmaid of the Lord, has been raised to great heights and all generations call her blessed, for her dedication to the will of God.  

Happy feast day!

Ah..MARIA! Immaculata!

What a beautiful feast day - the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary - wow, that even sounds great.  This feast is so rich in so many ways: for one thing it celebrates a dogma that Our Lady herself came to confirm - in her apparitions to St Bernadette in Lourdes, she confirmed what Blessed Pope Pius IX had defined in 1854, resolving the theological debate which had exercised the minds of many great theologians over the centuries.  Of course this was a debate in which Our Lady took a major part. In her apparition to St Catherine Laboure in 1830 she gave us the prayer "O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee": let's face it, that's a major contribution if ever there was one.

Lots of stories surround this dogma.  I find the one concerning St Bernard interesting.  Few saints loved Our Lady as much as St Bernard.  Spiritually he was nourished on her milk, as an apparition of Our Lady reveals.  Yet he did not believe that she was conceived without sin - born sinless, yes; cleansed of original sin the womb, yes, but conceived as we all are with the sin of Adam.  The story goes that Bernard appeared to a monk with a black stain on his habit.  When asked what the stain signified, Bernard responded that it was his refusal to believe in the Immaculate Conception.  True or false, not sure, but interesting. 

Blessed John Duns Scotus

The unsung hero of this feast day has to be the Scottish Franciscan Blessed John Duns Scotus.  He believed in the Immaculate Conception and wrote a great deal about it - his theology helped the Church in her reflections.  I imagine if he was ever made a Doctor of the Church (no word of it, as far as I am aware), he could be the Doctor of the Immaculate Conception, or perhaps, the Marian Doctor (although that title could be given to St Louis Marie de Montford - why hasn't he been declared a Doctor?  His writings have been hugely influential in the Church, even inspiring the thought of the one greatest popes in the Church, John Paul II).   Blessed Duns Scotus was beatified by Pope John Paul in 1993. 

In honour of our Holy Mother today, one of the most beautiful poems ever written about her - by Dante Aligheri from the Paradiso of The Divine Comedy.

Maiden yet a mother,
daughter of thy Son,
high beyond all other,
lowlier is none;
thou the consummation
planning by God’s decree,
when our lost creation
nobler rose in thee!

Thus his place prepared,
he who all things made
‘mid his creature tarried,
in thy bosom laid;
there his love he nourished,
warmth that gave increase
to the root whence flourished
our eternal peace.

Nor alone thou hearest
when they name we hail;
often thou art nearest
when our voices fail;
mirrored in thy fashion
all creation's good,
mercy, might, compassion
grace thy womanhood.

Lady, lest our vision
striving heavenward fail,
still let thy petition
with thy Son prevail,
unto whom all merit,
power and majesty,
with the Holy Spirit
and the Father be.