Our Hope in Terrible Days

 

Just 171 years ago in 1854, while guiding a Church still struggling to recover from the calamitous experience of the French Revolution, Blessed Pope Pius IX formally defined the Church’s faith in the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception – Mary's fullness of grace from the very beginning of her earthly existence, "Adorned from the first instant of her conception with the radiance of an entirely unique holiness" [Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, 56]. Mary’s fullness of grace, Pius IX taught, exists because she received it freely, before any action on her own part, “in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race” [Apostolic Constitution Ineffabilis Deus (December 8, 1854)]. 

Almost immediately after that dogmatic definition, San Francisco's Old Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception, the first purpose-built California Cathedral and now a parish served by the Paulist Fathers, was dedicated at Midnight Mass that Christmas. Not long after, the parish where I pastored for 10 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, dedicated the following September, was also one of the early churches dedicated to the Immaculate Conception.

Already in 1846, the Bishops of the United States had unanimously placed the United Sates "under the special patronage of the holy Mother of God, whose immaculate conception is venerated by the piety fo the faithful throughout the Catholic Church" [6th Provincial Council of Baltimore, Pastoral Letter, 1846]. Much more recently, in the mid-20th-century, the famous American Catholic convert and Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who was one of the four famous Americans Pope Francis mentioned in his address to Congress in 2015, wrote in his Journal that the definition of the Immaculate Conception “was a turning point in the modern history of the Church." Merton continued: "The world has been put into the hands of our Immaculate Lady and she is our hope in the terrible days we live in.” [November 10, 1947]          

What exactly did Merton mean by that seeming indulgence in mid-20th-century American Catholic triumphalism? Although a feast honoring Mary's conception had originated in the Eastern Church by perhaps as early as the fifth century, was celebrated in the West by the ninth century, and was extended to the Universal Church as a feast of obligation in 1708, intellectuals had argued - as intellectuals do - about the meaning and truth of the doctrine for centuries before it was finally definitively defined. 

Once the doctrine had been defined, the Immaculate Virgin Mary herself seemed to weigh in on the issue. In February 1858, she appeared to a poor, rather sickly girl in a riverside grotto in an off-the-beaten-track town in southern France, and surprisingly identified herself with the mysterious words, “I am the Immaculate Conception.” That title was surprising and mysterious to the young visionary, Bernadette Soubirous, who did not at that time understand the meaning of those strange-sounding words.

Even today, many may wonder at this unique title of Mary, which might easily be misinterpreted almost as some sort of esoteric advantage Mary was awarded apart from any immediate connection with the rest of us. Yet, as Mater Populi Fidelis, the recently published "Doctrinal Note on Some Marian Titles Regarding Mary’s Cooperation in the Work of Salvation," has reminded us "grace makes us like Christ." As "the most perfect expression of Christ’s action that transforms our humanity," Mary manifests "all that Christ’s grace can accomplish in a human being." 

That, I think, is what it means  to call Mary "our hope in the terrible days we live in.”

Indeed, these are "terrible days." So much that was not so long ago taken for granted - whether in religion or politics or human relations -  has now gone so seemingly wrong. Inevitably, we are left wondering what has happened and why and how (if at all) we can get our conflicted world back on track. Yet however "terrible" these days may appear, the Immaculate Conception is a salutary reminder of the far more promising reality which has entered into our troubled world.

As today's liturgy reminds us, Adam and Eve experienced "terrible days." It is comforting to consider that our salvation in Christ and Mary's role in it were all already in process from the time when sin first entered our world, which means the human race was never beyond hope. The distresses and difficulties we currently endure may be particular to our time and place, but the experience of distress is seemingly universal. We have, however, been delivered from distress by the possibility of solidarity - a solidarity in grace which overcomes our solidarity in sin. That solidarity is signified powerfully by Mary's initial and permanent fullness of grace.

I was born less than a year after Merton's "terrible days" Journal entry. I grew up in the New York City borough of the Bronx, a few blocks from the small cottage to which the poet Edgar Allan Poe had moved in the same year that the U.S. Bishops had proclaimed Mary the patroness of the United Sates under the title of her Immaculate Conception. The cottage, which still bears Poe's name, was within walking distance of St. John's College (now Fordham University), where Poe became friends with the college's Jesuits and enjoyed the vibrations of the college's church bells.

In his poem, A Catholic Hymn, which referenced the daily Marian prayer announced by the ringing of those bells, Poe prayed Mother of God, be with me still. Appreciating how God's grace given to Mary signifies our solidarity with her and with her Son, may help us too in these "terrible days." Or, as the poet put it:

Now, when storms of fate o’ercast

Darkly my Present and my Past,

Let my future radiant shine

With sweet hope of thee and thine!

Photo: Immaculate Conception Window, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN.