Feast of the Immaculate Conception -

There are many who have a mistaken understanding of this title given to Our Lady. They think it relates to the virginal conception of Christ. Not at all! It is a statement of the truth that Mary, unlike any other creature, other than Christ, at no stage shared in the guilt of original sin.

Point 1: One of the more complex problems confronting theologians down through the centures has been to understand the nature of evil - its origins and, above all, its place in God's plan for creation. For us the beginnings of sin and, consequently evil, are described in the Book of Genesis. Sin was the result of the exercise of free will. God's creation chose to disobey rather than to obey. Why this choice was made remains a mystery, just as the reasons for so much of the evil in to-day's society, remains a mystery.

From that point onwards, people have been affected by and attracted to evil. Because of this choice, we have the power to scandalise - to lead others to sin. This contagion of sin is responsible for the underming of our sense of values. In a covetous family, children find it natural to be grasping; in a selfish society, individuals easily become selfish; colonialism produces exploitation and racism produces racists. Because of the original choice, the whole of humanity is in a condition in which its values are obscured. And worst obscured of all is the supreme value - the value of being able to respond to love.

By St. Augustine's time, approximately 400 A.D., the term to describe this general sinfulness was given the name "original sin".

Point 2: But counter-balancing this power to sin is the Christian belief that the power of grace is greater than our tendency to sin. This superiority of grace over sin has been gained by Christ's redemptive death.

This happy conviction of the superiority of grace is brought out forcibly in a truth which only became clear to the Church in a long, slow process. Early theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bernard could not see how it could be properly asserted. But the Church arrived gradually at the truth by meditating on the whole of revelation and it was solemnly defined by Pope Pius 1X in 1854 that Mary was free from the guilt of original sin. She was conceived immaculate. Living in a sinful world, she shared the pain of the world, but not its wickedness. She shared our suffering, but not our evil. She overcame evil by her goodness through Christ's redemption. In Mary, we see the chance of a new beginning.

Point 3: In the Old Testament, there was a style of speech which allowed whole groups to be identified with a single person - the Chosen people were identified in Abraham, or Moses or David, depending on the time frame. The "Daughter of Zion" represents the whole Hebrew people. In to-day's gospel, Mary is identified as the new "Daughter of Zion" and represents the whole Church of which we are part. In her, the human race has found a new beginning through the Son she brought into the world.

Conclusion: On this day in 1933, Pope Pius X1 canonised St. Bernadette, the peasant girl to whom Our Lady appeared eighteen times at Lourdes in 1858. The year is significant in that it is four years after the proclamation of the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception in 1854. When told to ask the Lady who she was, Bernadette, an uneducated, peasant girl of fourteen years of age, reported that the Lady had replied -"I am the Immaculate Conception". It is most unlikely that Bernadette could have known of the Church's teaching or what it meant. From those encounters has grown the phenomenon which is Lourdes to-day, arguably, "the city that Our Lady built.

To-day we honour Our Lady under the title of the" Immaculate Conception" seeing in her our opportunity for new beginnings when we have the misfortune to be affected by the contagion of sin. "Vergine Immacolate! Aiutateci!" (O Immaculate Virgin - help us)