Happy and Holy Advent Season to you all! With this weekend, we enter the second week of this four-week season. We take this time to prepare our hearts for Jesus’ Second Coming and to prepare to celebrate His birth among us.
This week we have a Holy Day of Obligation! On December 8th we celebrate the Immaculate Conception of Our Blessed Mother. We’ll have the Vigil Mass for this Holy Day on Wednesday, December 7th, at 6 pm. The next day, we’ll have Mass at 6:30 am and 8 am. Please make sure to come to pray.
Catholic Answers has a nice little summary to explain this feast for us:
The Immaculate Conception is a Catholic dogma that states that Mary, whose conception was brought about the normal way, was conceived without original sin or its stain. That’s what “immaculate” means: without stain.
The essence of original sin consists in the deprivation of sanctifying grace, and its stain is a corrupt nature. Mary was preserved from these defects by God’s grace; from the first instant of her existence she was in the state of sanctifying grace and was free from the corrupt nature original sin brings.
When discussing the Immaculate Conception, an implicit reference may be found in the angel’s greeting to Mary. The angel Gabriel said, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28). The phrase “full of grace” is a translation of the Greek word kecharitomene. It therefore expresses a characteristic quality of Mary.
The grace given to Mary is at once permanent and of a unique kind. Kecharitomene is a perfect passive participle of charitoo, meaning “to fill or endow with grace.” Since this term is in the perfect tense, it indicates that Mary was graced in the past but with continuing effects in the present. So, the grace Mary enjoyed was not a result of the angel’s visit. In fact, Catholics hold, it extended over the whole of her life, from conception onward. She was in a state of sanctifying grace from the first moment of her existence.
We are so blessed by the wisdom of Scripture and the Church Fathers that teach us how to love God and this feast is one example of it. Let’s thank God for preparing Mary for Jesus and ask God to prepare us each day to receive Him and share Him with the world.
I’m so grateful to God for each and every one of you.
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