Back in the 1980s, the church in Malta for some unexplained reason, eliminated a few holy days of obligation, including the feast we celebrate today, the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Still Mary is a dominant figure in our Catholic church, and just within a month, we have 4 major feasts in her honor. Besides today, we honor Our Lady of Guadalupe, the apparition to Juan Diego in 1531, we celebrate also the birth of Jesus and the feast of Mary, Mother of Jesus and all of us on January 1st. Today I also like to acknowledge two persons who are overlooked on this feast day, that is St. Anne and St Joachim, Mary’s parents. It was in 1854 that Pope Pius IX, after consulting with all the bishops of the world, pronounced and proclaimed the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception. This was a rare event and it took another 96 years to have another Dogma proclaimed, this time the Assumption of Mary in 1950. Then another event happened that affirmed the Immaculate Conception of Mary, only 4 years later, when in 1858, the apparition at Lourdes took place, Mary revealing herself to Bernadette Soubirous as the Immaculate Conception. The Encyclical Ineffabilis Deus that proclaimed the Dogma proclaims that the Blessed Virgin Mary, “in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.”
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