Some months before I went to seminary, I was having dinner with some friends and talking about the Catholic faith. One friends was a Catholic who attended daily Mass and the other was a self-acknowledged agnostic. During the course of our conversation, the agnostic asked me: “what would it do to your faith if it could be proved that Jesus was conceived and born in the normal way? What if the Immaculate Conception never happened?” I told him that he was confusing the Incarnation with the Immaculate Conception, and that the Immaculate Conception was the belief that MARY was conceived in HER mother’s womb without the stain of original sin. My friend, the Catholic, jumped in: “you don’t know what you’re talking about; the Immaculate Conception is the conception of Jesus!” So I asked him if he wanted to bet. He pulled out a hundred dollar bill, and put it down on the table. And I went to my office and pulled out my Webster’s Ninth Collegiate Dictionary, and opened it to “Immaculate Conception: “the conception of the Virgin Mary in which as decreed in Roman Catholic dogma her soul was preserved free from original sin by divine grace.” So I won the bet.

This doctrine was revealed through the Scriptures (“full of grace”), and the long Tradition of the Church. But it was finally declared as dogma on December 8, 1854. Why that date? Because it’s exactly nine months before the celebration of the Birth of Mary on September 8, a feast that has been celebrated since the 7th century. But the doctrine is quite logical. How could the flesh of the Son of God be formed through the flesh of one who was a slave to sin? So Jesus redeemed his mother’s soul before her birth. In other words, He applied His death on the cross to the Blessed Mother before it happened in time. How did He do that? As one theologian stated: “Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit, or, in English: “God could, it was appropriate, therefore, He did it.” O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us!