The Virgin Mary has appeared at Lourdes to Bernadette Soubirou in 1854. When Bernadette asked her who she was, she said: “I am the Immaculate Conception”. Thus, this Truth was a revelation from Heaven. This Truth was and still is confirmed by miracles.
Many people do not totally understand the real significance of this fact. They believe that Immaculate Conception means that Mary gave birth to Jesus, while virgin, without being sexually with a man: “She was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1,18). Therefore, Mary would not have been at fault, having marital relations with Joseph her legitimate spouse. Moreover, this refers to Jesus’ Conception in Mary’s womb and not to Mary as a person.
At the very moment of her conception in Anna’s womb, her mother, Mary is an Immaculate Conception in her own person. She was immaculate, meaning without having Adam and Eve’s scar or stain, a stain inherited by all men.
Adam and Eve were both an “immaculate conception” before having been seduced by the enemy of humanity. But, they have fallen, inspired by Satan (Genesis 3). Through them, the entire mankind inherited this great fault. God promised that the woman will seek vengeance and strike the snake’s head (Genesis 3,15).
It is through Mary the Mother of the Messiah, the Word of God, that God accomplished this vengeance. The divine Verb had to incarnate in order to save men who believed in Him. He could not be incarnated in a perturbed womb by the consequences of the original sin. The feminine receptacle of the World of God had to be spared for God’s Glory. This receptacle was Mary. She was no Immaculate for her own glory, but for the glory of the divine plan.
Thus, Mary alone is the Immaculate Conception through God’s intervention to fulfil the divine father’s plan. She is the Immaculate, because the Messiah could not be conceived in a “trouble room”. Therefore, this is why the Virgin has been spared from this sin, not for herself, but for the divine Plan. Mary did not stop respecting this plan and being in perfect harmony with the Father’s Will, never challenging God, as the first parents of mankind did. She was and she will always be Immaculate. The Coran testimonies very explicitly on both Mary’s and Jesus’ condition of “Immaculate Conception”. In the following verses, the woman of Imran, who is Mary’s mother (Mary’s parents are the family of Imran) says: “Lord, I have devoted to you the fruit of my womb: receive it because you hear and you understand everything. When she delivered, she said: Lord I gave birth to a girl and I have named her Mariam (Mary) I put under Your protection her and her posterity (Jesus), so that you preserve them from Satan’s tricks” (Coran III ; The family of Imran, 35-36).
God listened to Mary’s mother prayer and exhausted her wish: Mary and Jesus were the only to be protected from Satan, as Mohammed reported in his “Noble Discussions” (see the Coranic interpretation of “Jalalein” of the above verses):
“No man is born without the Devil catching him since his birth, and yelling because of this Satanic attack (the fault of the original sin), with the exception of Mary and her Son”.
(See the texts “A look of Faith on the Coran” and “Jesus’ brothers”).
Thus, after Adam and Eve, only Mary and of course Jesus Christ were of Immaculate Conceptions.
Article published on www.pierre2.org
We celebrate today Mary’s glorification, that is to say, the complete and definite influence of the Spirit upon her body and her soul.
Since the first moment of her existence, by her Immaculate conception, she had been under the range of action of the Spirit:
- At the time of the Annunciation, it is the Spirit who has realized in her the embodiment of the Word.
- At the Pentecost, it is the Spirit who, taking possession of the Apostle College, had anointed her Queen of the Apostles and Mother of the Church.
- At the Assumption, it is still the Spirit who takes possession of her: as he had brought back to life the Son, he brings back to life the Mother.
What interest has this belief in our spiritual life? If the Church has defined this dogma, it not only to exalt “Mary’s greatness”, but it is also to remind men and women of the dignity of human body destined to Glory.
The usual man, and not only the nowadays man, is divided between the cult of the body (the stadium and show business gods, the flesh idols), and the contempt for the body (considered as a tool for the visual and flesh pleasure, which one can consume and abuse of).
Mary’ glorification, body and soul, invites us to respect our and others’ bodies. Our bodies have been created, like hers, by our Father, they have been redeemed by the Son, consecrated by the Spirit, and they are destined, like hers, to the glory, because survival is not the soul immortality, but the resurrection of the flesh, that is to say of the human being as a whole. In the Biblical language, the spirit is not the soul, and the flesh is not the body, but the spirit is the man in his soul and body when he is vivified by the Spirit. This is what Saint Augustine too says: “As the Spirit, when it has fallen under the slavery of the flesh, has deserved to be called carnal, so that the body deserves well to be called spiritual when it is perfectly subject to the Spirit”.
In the Assumption the triumph of the new Eve related to the new Adam is produced. It is the woman’s triumph uniting to the man’s triumph. God did not want the ideal of the human ultimate aims to come true in advance in a man, as it could have favoured the idea of a male exclusivism and obscured female values in the human community.
The first human ideal has been written in a man and in a woman; it has been lost by the complicity of both; it needed to be restored, following the divine plan, through a similar collaboration. The Assumption testifies that the woman is neither left in the shadows, nor put aside, and that she has been definitely restored in her female dignity. A woman accomplishes from now, next to the new Man, the extreme perfection that is prescribed to manhood.
The Assumption, far from appearing to us a sort of apotheosis and exception, is the Christian’s normal destiny: Mary precedes us in the glory as she did in the faith: what She is now, the whole Church will be some day. Mary is indeed “the first and last icon of the Church”. What has come true in her, will come true in each of us, in all of us, if we know, like she does, how to agree with the Spirit”.
Celebrations – by Jeanine Friburg, National Institute of Eastern Languages and Civilizations
