THE MEANING OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION IN THE 150TH YEAR OF LOURDES
The feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary is linked in our minds with Lourdes. This year
marks the 150th anniversary of the appearances of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, where she called
herself the Immaculate Conception. The celebration has been honored by the presence of the
bishop of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI, on the 14th September, and by the Anglican bishop of
Canterbury (Rowan Williams). They and many others came, and still come to a holy place
soaked in the hopes and prayers of millions. There is life and healing.
LOURDES
In the small village of Lourdes, in the south of France, 150 years ago, from February 11 th until
July 16th, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared many times to a 14 year old peasant girl, Bernadette
Soubirous. A sense of wonder filled the whole place. It still does. Ever since, people from all
over the world go there to feel that wonder, and to receive healing from what ails them. It has
been one of the great global centers of devotion to the BVM in our time. It is one of ‘the’ places
where people pray to Mary, and sing their hymns to Mary. It is one of the Catholic Church’s
main sites of pilgrimage.
We are always hearing of unexpected events at Lourdes, usually healings. Some are declared to
be beyond the usual range of possibilities known to medicine in such cases. Some are rigorously
investigated and confirmed to be special. Their exceptional character is confirmed. (During
2005, the last year for which we have statistics, 40 were referred for further investigation.
Medical experts, many of them not Catholic, have given sworn testimony to 67 miraculous cures
of pilgrims who have come to Lourdes for healing since February 1958. ) They leave us with a
sense of wonder….
I like to distinguish between marvels (about which I wonder) and miracles (in which I believe).
A marvel is something for which I have no adequate explanation at the moment. There are
marvels all around us. We don’t live in a universe in which we understand everything. There are
many things that we can’t understand or explain. We need to cultivate a sense of wonder about
them all. It was Chesterton who once said, we have too many wonders, but not enough wonder.
Miracle is a word that religious people use about some of these marvels. They make an act of
religious faith about them. In faith, they sense that God is active in these marvels in a
particular way. They think God has intervened outside what we see as normal, regular or natural
processes, to set up that marvel. No one can ever prove that. No one can argue his or her way
into believing it. No one can disprove it either, especially to someone who believes it. It is a
personal thing, a personal act of faith. Either you have it or you don’t. If you do, you know you
are personally close to God, and you have felt God personally close to you because of what
happened. A miracle is a place where people of faith experience God loving and helping them in
special and unusual ways.
In the Christian tradition, there are often miracles of healing. Jesus himself did many of them for
sick and suffering people. Without them, he would not have had the following that came around
him. In later Christian devotion, the BVM has been often credited with obtaining such miracles
of healing from God for those devoted to her, in response to their prayers. Lourdes is a very
special place where her devotees have continued to gather, and where they have felt a sense of
wonder, and often experienced a miracle of healing, for themselves or others.
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It has become fashionable in recent years, to downplay the miraculous, the supernatural or the
other-worldly aspects of our faith – at least among some Catholics. For them, Lourdes is a
difficult thing to grasp. Let me say this: we need to be exceedingly careful about saying what
God can and cannot do, how God does and does not act, and how God should or should not
act. Let me say this too: if God can create the universe and raise Jesus from the dead, something
like Lourdes is rather simple by comparison.
At Lourdes, there is something more than healing happening. All the world comes there, and is
welcome as it is. No one is excluded, whatever their state of life. All those who suffer are given
peace. Lourdes is a church with an open sky and open arms. It is exactly the opposite of a sect!
It surrounds everyone with the tenderness of the Mother of Sorrows. There, Mary suffers with
those in trouble of any kind, and hopes with them, and strengthens them. She has in her heart all
those wounded by life – broken families, young people in moral dilemmas, older people with
physical suffering. I think you could say that beyond the miracles of healing, there is the greater
miracle of inclusion, and with it the miracle of peace. Not all are healed, but all are at peace.
This wonder, and this faith, make people pray together. It is good to recall that at Lourdes Mary
did not ask for prayer to herself. She asked for a deeper devotion to Jesus in the Eucharist.
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.
The ‘Lady’ who appeared to Bernadette at Lourdes called herself ‘The Immaculate Conception’.
Bernadette naively told people that. People didn’t like it. Her neighbors and teachers and priests
thought they knew all they needed to know about the Mother of God. To their surprise, an
inarticulate, powerless, marginal teenager was trying to teach them and show them who Mary
really was. She was ‘The Immaculate Conception’. Bernadette as a young girl did not speak or
read French – she spoke a Basque dialect. She had been in a class preparing for first communion.
The catechism was in French, and she was refused permission to make her first holy communion
because she did not ‘know her catechism’. Her betters were not going to listen to her about ‘The
Immaculate Conception’. It had been defined as dogma four years earlier (1854) but most
ordinary people did not understand the term, even if they had heard it.
Catholics today know the term, but they don’t understand it. You might think that 99% of them
refer it to the physical virginity of Mary – her virginal conception of Jesus. They don’t realize the
immaculate conception of Mary is not the same as Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus. Being
immaculate from her own conception means that Mary has an immunity from evil included or
virtual in the very fact and character of her existence, in the basic meaning of who she is. She
doesn’t just behave ‘immaculately’, she IS Immaculate. In her womanhood. In her very person.
It is about her identity, not her actions.
The medieval theology of the immaculate conception refers to the idea of original sin created by
St.Augustine. It was spread around in catechisms, but only in the Latin (Western) world. The
habitual presentation of this notion, about which there was no difficulty prior to the advent of
modern science, has become obsolete. Every educated person knows now that our human race is
the not the consequence of a single human couple created on the sixth day of a first week, some
6000 years ago. Educated people now find it hard, indeed almost impossible to believe that we
have all inherited the damage done to humanness by whatever this primitive couple allegedly did
once. So they are puzzled by ‘original sin’ and even more by a claim to ‘exemption’ from it –
which is the way they hear the teaching of the ‘immaculate conception’. We need then to present
differently the story of salvation and of the presence of sin in our world, and the meaning of both
original sin and immaculate conception.
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In very basic terms, salvation is God’s gift of freedom to us, and sin is our bad use of our Godgiven freedom. Our ‘life-world’ is affected and indeed set up by the historical bad use of human
freedom, over many generations and many centuries. Every human person coming into this ‘lifeworld’ or network of human relations, tends – to various extents – to compromise with this
prevailing bad use of human freedom.
If there were a person who could be called ‘the
immaculate conception’, that person would live without ever entering into such a compromise.
More, that person, because of that person’s original and deepest make-up, in their very identity,
would be such a person that could never so compromise with it. Original sin could be understood
as the inherited and ongoing tendency to so compromise. Immaculate conception is an original
absence of compromise with that sin of the world. The contrast is beautifully spelt out in the
Magnificat. [We often rightly say that Mary is the model of the Church, and that the Church in
its meaning as God wants it to be, should act without that kind of compromise with the distorted
politics of humanity. Unfortunately, historically, it hasn’t, and that clouds our understanding of
Mary, its model.]
Bernadette can also teach us what it means to avoid this compromise. An episode in her life is a
good example of how to do that. When she told of the appearances, she was suspect, and the civil
authority tried to keep her silent by making her afraid. She was summoned by the public
prosecutor, and went to his office with her mother. They remained standing in the presence of
this important person. He overpowered them with humiliating threats for the whole family. He
underscored their poverty and their precariousness in this situation. He accused the girl of
making it all up, of fantasizing, of wanting to say what was interesting to get attention. He spoke
of their lack of education. He threatened them with prison. After two hours of affronts,
Bernadette – whose health was not good – felt ill. This man became aware of it, and invited the
mother and daughter to sit down on the lounge in his office. Bernadette replied: no, it would get
dirty, and she sat on the ground. Humiliated by the public authority, she was not destroyed as a
person. She kept her dignity and her spirit. The humiliation did nothing to her purity of heart and
her sense of what was right inside her, indeed to her sense of identity. It wasn’t just a case of not
putting her dirty on the clean lounge. It was much more a case of not letting the dirty politics of
that office stain her own original integrity.
What Bernadette did is actually an echo of the immaculate conception in practice. Mary
Immaculate is in the world as a figure of that kind of purity, not just in the things she did, but
much more in the deepest part of her own personality: the evil, the corruption, the lying, the
claims on power that reign in the world have not left any mark on her and have found in her no
complicity or collusion with them. This is not just a matter of actual behavior, as if Mary in fact
never did anything like that or accepted it as ok. It is a matter of her identity, of who she really is.
Catholic faith says she is the only one – after Jesus – who is like that in the deepest level of her
being. She IS the immaculate conception. God conceived her like that, and that’s who she is.
So we can’t imitate the immaculate conception? No, we can’t, in our being. But yes, we can, in
our life-style. As Christians, we resist what we call the spirit of the world: its hedonism, its
eroticism, its cult of money, its corruption. We are often humiliated, treated as naïve and retarded
people who don’t know anything about the real world, but this humiliation does not make us lose
heart, thanks to the Holy Spirit given to us. We can and do make our own the prayer of Mary in
the Magnificat when she said that God comes to overturn the proud and lift up the lowly.
In Luke’s gospel, the first person to realize who Mary was, and to recognize what we call her as
the immaculate conception, was Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. She – and the unborn
John – leapt with joy when they met Mary in the visitation. Down the centuries, there have been
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lots of believers like them. They have had what we could call ‘Elizabeth moments’. They are a
mix of joy and hope.
We can learn something here about the reception of the Good News (the Gospel). . Joyful hope
rides ahead to prepare the way for it. Mission begins not in the verbal delivery of a message, but
in a journey towards another person with Jesus in your heart, in living without compromise with
‘the way things go around here’. We need the strength to carry the novelty of Jesus wherever we
go, in the hope that joy will leap from heart to heart. To do that, we need the strength to look for
and listen to the hope-filled joy in our own depths, and not settle for a compromise with the
political mediocrity (and worse) around us. That wouldn’t be a bad way of participating in the
mystery of the immaculate conception….
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