www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology The Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary

Dear Friends of Chirst,

Many of the Eastern Churches celebrate this feast on December 9th. The Armenian Church is one of them. As we celebrate this I would like to ask you all, Eastern Catholic, Orthodox and Roman Catholic, what this feast means to you personally. (Please allow people to just share their faith about this feast without taking them on, if possible.) I'm looking forward to being enriched in my faith by you all sharing yours.

Thank you.

In Christ's Light,

Ghazar

Dear Ghazar,

Yes, this year RC's get to celebrate this Feast with Eastern Catholics on the same day!

We Old Calendarists celebrate it on December 22nd, as you know.

This feast celebrates the Holy Conception of the Mother of God in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne.

For the Orthodox East and for Byzantine Catholics and others, this feast is not about the Spirit somehow preventing the Mother of Christ from contracting a share in the actual sin of Adam.

It is about the Spirit totally sanctifying the soul of the Mother of God at her Conception to prepare as the true new Ark and Temple of God the Word Incarnate, Who took flesh from her.

This is why we celebrate the feast - only feasts of Saints may be celebrated.

Interestingly enough, the OCA Lives of Saints discusses this feast day and says that the Orthodox icon of the "Conception of St Anne" portrays the Mother of God with hands downward,standing on a serpent, with Sts. Joachim and Anne on either side of her in the frame etc.

In other words, the Orthodox iconography of this Feast is IDENTICAL to that of the Catholic West.

Alex

Dear Friends:

The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is a National holiday in Portugal.

The feast was established in 1647 when King John IV proclaimed the Immaculate Conception as a formal state belief in the Kingdom and Territories of Portugal.

Anyone taking an oath of office had to accept this doctrine unconditionally.

This was about 200 years before Pope Pius IX formally defined the doctrine for the Roman Church.

And people wonder why Fatima ever happened in Portugal.

defreitas

Dear Defreitas,

Yes, and the Kingdom and Empire of Spain also defined it as a "local doctrine" for the Spanish holdings throughout the world too.

This is why the Ursuline Convent Church in New Orleans, formerly under the Spanish, is dedicated to the Immaculate Conception and this years before it was formally defined.

But the East has ALWAYS believed that the Mother of God was conceived in total holiness and this feast comes from the East.

So we've beaten the entire Iberian Peninsula hands down!

Alex

Dear Alex:

All Spanish things aside, I bet no one in the East ever did this:

In 1640 Portugal began a dynastic war against the Spanish Crown.

The King of Spain petitioned Rome to have the Duke of Braganza (the Portuguese claimant) excommunicated for going against his oath of allegiance to the Spanish King.

King Philip III (the fourth according to Spain) complained that the Duke was a vain and ambitious man who just wanted to wear a crown.

The Duke responded by making a public vow that if providence made him King of Portugal he would dedicate the Kingdom to the Mother of God, place a gold crown on the head of her statue in Villa Viscosa, establish royal titles and benefices on her, and decree that henceforth no Portuguese sovereign would ever wear a crown.

The Duke won his war and became "His Most Faithful Majesty, John IV, King of Portugal".

We take God and his Mother very seriously in Portugal.

defreitas

+ Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, by the prayers of Thy Most Pure Mother, have mercy on us and save us. Amen!

Dear Defreitas,

O.K. Jose!

St Yaroslav the Wise dedicated the Church of St Sophia to the "Sophia of the Mother of God."

Before him, his father St Volodymyr took the miraculous icon of what is today called the "Smolensk" Mother of God that was in his Church of the Tithe and placed her in a shrine at the source of the River Dnipro-Slavutych.

It is because of this River's connection to that icon (and the Baptism) that the River is considered holy.

There are over 1,000 miraculous icons of the Mother of God throughout the territories of Kyivan Rus' with new ones added yearly.

And . . . and . . .

Good for Portugal!

Alex

Dear Ghazar,

This feast is especially special to me. As a Protestant I was vehemently anti-catholic and spoke blasphemies against Our Lady. Moreover, I explicitely taught others that she was sinful. When I began to be drawn toward Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, I also began to be drawn to Our Lady. At the same time, a Roman Catholic friend was praying rosaries for me.

Our Lady prayed for me and obtained many graces for my poor soul. I eventually became Anglican (which I still am) but the concept of the Immaculate Conception still seemed foreign to me. I had come to believe in her divine motherhood, her perpetual virinity, and even her glorious assumption. But I still felt uncertain about her sinlessness.

I had a dinner with my wife and a Catholic priest and told him that my major hang up with Rome was the Immaculate Conception. He explained to me that Genesis 3:15 (the proto-evangelion) describes the "Woman" and her "Seed" as having perfect enmity with Satan. Jesus the "Seed" has perfect enmity with Satan, and this enmity is shared by Mary. Mary never broke down and submitted to Satan by sinning, otherwise she would not be at enmity with the ancient serpent. Thus she was and is sinless.

Shortly thereafter I was reading St Ephrem the Syrian's hymns. I came to a hymn in which St Ephrem lauded St Mary's purity and all-sanctity. I was cut to the heart and suddenly firmly believed that she was indeed all-holy. It was almost a mystical revelation. I have never lost this conviction. Needless to say, I put down the book and drove immediately to the Catholic store, and bought a Miraculous Medal with the inscription: "O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." I have never ceased to wear it and I wear it over my heart in reparation to her immaculate heart.

Thus, today is special for me. I celebrate my total defeat to the love of the clement, loving, and sweet Theotokos - my Mother in Christ. May she pray for all those who love and serve her divine Son.

yours in Christ,
Marshall

Dear Defreitas,

If I am not wrong that is the Church of Spain which has got the pontifical privilege of using blue ornaments (the Western Church like the Eastern one had blue ornaments till the Renaissance) during the Eucharist of the Feast of the Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary and the 8 days after the feast because of her secular devotion to the “Immaculate” Mother of God. Yes, the Virgin Mary did appear herself in Portugal but that was in Spain that the Virgin did appear herself for first time (before her death) to the Apostle James in the city of Zaragoza. I hope that you would had already understood that I am writing this with a lot of Iberian humor. By the way I love very much the blessed land of Portugal, may the Mother of God (Madre de Dios, Madre Deus) bless our two Iberian countries and the whole world!!!

+ Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us - Amen!

Dear Marshall,

I was deeply moved by your account!

I too wear a Miraculous Medal, one I got at Rue du Bac in Paris, and never take it off.

The Anglican saint, King Charles the Martyr, always bowed his head at the mention of the name of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

And there is the magnificent Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. Our Lady of Canterbury is popular and when I was there, there were a lot of orders for carved wooden replicas.

Fr. Stephen Walinski of the Western Rite Orthodox Church in Omaha, Nebraska, has a beautiful copy of Our Lady of Walsingham that he has carried in procession in the immediate neighbourhood of his parish!

(And he dedicates the Mass of every last Sunday of the month to her).

In fact, we know that the early Protestant Reformers continued to venerate the Virgin Mary and pray the Hail Mary.

It was only the later Protestants that jettisoned Marian devotion altogether.

And yet someone of the spiritual calibre of John Wesley could go to Walsingham and preach a sermon asking for God's forgiveness for Protestant iconoclasm (a Methodist Church was built on the spot where he preached).

Protestants are discovering the Mother of God today more and more.

And what they are finding out is that devotion to the Mother of God is part and parcel of the Incarnational perspective of Christianity, devotion to God Incarnate, Jesus Christ.

Christ is not an abstraction - He has a Mother.

And this Mother, as you know, has tremendous influence over Her Son, especially at weddings!

And when our Lord gave us His All on the Cross, when He had nothing more to give us from Himself, He gave us His Mother.

Incarnational Christianity is about finding God in the Humanity of Christ. It is also about finding Jesus in the Saints and in ourselves.

Alex

Thank you all for your replies. They were very informitive. Here's a link to my web-site which contians a link to a "Homily On The Nativity Of The Most Pure Theotokos" by St. Demetrius, Metropolitan of Rostov. If interestedd, check it out and tell me if this coincides with your understanding of the significance of the celebration of St. Mary's conception and birth.

In Christ's Light,

Ghazar

http://www.geocities.com/wmwolfe_48044/other_articles.html

Dear Ghazar,

Yes, it surely does!

St Demetrius of Rostov was a representative of the somewhat Latinized spirituality of the Kyivan Baroque period in his time.

He actually wore a medal of the Immaculate Conception sent to him from Paris, he made the bloody vow - to defend to his dying breath the (Western form of) the Immaculate Conception and he belonged to one of the Orthodox Kyivan Brotherhoods of the Immaculate Conception whose prayer was: "All Immaculate Theotokos - save us!"

He prayed the Rosary daily and recited the "Hail Mary" at the turn of each hour, including a Slavonic translation of Bonaventures' "Psalter of the Virgin Mary" and a Slavonic translation, published at Venice, of the "Little Hours of the Virgin Mary."

He was even recalled by the Russian Synod to be examined on his views concerning the Immaculate Conception.

But Ukrainians can be pretty stubborn, you know . . .

Alex

If the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is good enough for St Dimitri of Rostov, it is good enough for me.

"O Mary Conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee." (from the miraculous medal)

in Christ,
Marshall

Dear Friends,

I think I finally got it through my thick head the main differences between "The feast of the Conception of the Holy Virgin Mary" (as it is called in the Armenian and Eastern Churches) and that of the feast of "The Immaculate Conception" (as it is called in the West). If interested, go to the East-N-West forum and look under Eastern Orthodox & the Immaculate Conception page 6 or click:

https://www.byzcath.org/cgibin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000753

In Christ's Light,

Ghazar

Dear Marshall,

The RC Church actually allows for two ways of understanding the Immaculate Conception.

One way is to understand it as the way God kept Mary from ever contracting the "sin of Adam>

The other, much older and traditional way, is to see it in a more positive light, the sanctification of the Mother of God in the womb of her mother, St Anne (the Grandmother of God, as we call her).

We also believe that John the Baptist was likewise sanctified in the womb of his mother.

Some liturgical prayers also see St Nicholas and St John the Theologian as having been likewise conceived. Our Church celebrates liturgically the taking up into heaven, body and soul, of St John the Theologian.

Alex

Dear Alex,

Okay, but even the "positive" version speaks of Mary being "sanctified" at the beginning of her existence. Hebrew's qadash, Greek's hagios, and Latin's sanctus all entail the concept of being set apart from someone or something.

St Mary was sanctified at conception, I was not. Now then, what was she sanctified from and what did I remain in? There is something unnatural and nasty that God prevented at Mary's conception that he did not prevent at mine. Call it whatever, but I am uneasy about those who wish to dismiss "it" altogether.

My patron is St John the Divine. I chose him because he is the beloved disciple, he stood at the cross with Our Lady, who took Mary into his home to care for her, and he is the most mytical Apostle as his Gospel and Apocalypse reveal. Where can I read these liturigcal texts about the "assumption of St John". I had heard that he died and was laid in a grave. However, afterward his body was missing. Are there other stories that describe his actual assumption?

Are there any claimed relics of St John? What about St John Baptist. E.g. does anyone have his holy head?

yours in Christ,
Marshall