Beloved Family:
As we enter this weekend, we are offered a “double-decker” of celebration. With the vigil on Saturday evening and the Masses on Sunday, we mark Second Sunday of Advent. Immediately following, Monday, December 8, we observe the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, the patronal feast day of our parish and our nation. We will offer a full complement of Masses on that day (7 am. 9:30 am, and 7 pm), to facilitate parishioners’ fulfilling the obligation to worship on that day. Additionally, our neighboring parish, Saint Agnes, will celebrate Mass at 8:15 am, 12:15 pm and 6 pm. Providentially, the two schedules together cover quite a range.
No doubt, some among us have had the opportunity to visit the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, located in Washington, D.C., which was established in 1920. I have a vague memory—supplemented by photographs—of visiting there in 1965 with my family, a trip that also included a moment of prayer at the burial place of President John F. Kennedy in Arlington National Cemetery.
There is wonderful parallel within the history of that church edifice and our parish in Wooster. From the shrine’s website:
Although its foundation stone was laid in 1920, this great shrine seems to have been conceived of as early as 1846, the year the Bishops of America declared the Blessed Virgin Mary the patroness of the United States under her title of the Immaculate Conception.
Indeed, this more or less coincides with the establishment of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Wooster (the cornerstone of the first church was laid in 1847).
Calling on the work of a past pope, Pope Pius X (one of the figures depicted in the round window in the choir loft of our church), and in conjunction with Week 2 of our Advent preaching on the kerygma— “Why is everything so messed up”— I encourage reflection on the following, wherein the Holy Father explains the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin as the most powerful bulwark against modern unbelief:
What truly is the point of departure of the enemies of religion for the sowing of the great and serious errors by which the faith of so many is shaken? They begin by denying that man has fallen by sin and been cast down from his former position. Hence, they regard as mere fables original sin and the evils that were its consequence. Humanity vitiated in its source vitiated in its turn the whole race of man; and thus was evil introduced amongst men and the necessity for a Redeemer involved. All this rejected, it is easy to understand that no place is left for Christ, for the Church, for grace, or for anything that is above and beyond nature; in one word the whole edifice of faith is shaken from top to bottom. But let people believe and confess that the Virgin Mary has been from the first moment of her conception preserved from all stain; and it is straight- way necessary that they should admit both original sin and the rehabilitation of the human race by Jesus Christ, the Gospel, the Church, and the law of suffering… It is moreover a vice common to the enemies of the faith of our time especially that they repudiate and proclaim the necessity of repudiating all respect and obedience for the authority of the Church, and even of any human power, in the idea that it will thus be more easy to make an end of faith. Here we have the origin of Anarchism, than which nothing is more pernicious and pestilent to the order of things, whether natural or supernatural. Now this plague, which is equally fatal to society at large and to Christianity, finds its ruin in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception—by the obligation which it imposes of recognizing in the Church a power before which not only the will must bow, but the intelligence must subject itself. It is from this sort of subjection of the reason that Christian people sing thus the praise of the Mother of God: “Thou art all fair, O Mary, and the stain of original sin is not in thee” (Mass of the Immaculate Conception).
And thus, once again is justified what the Church attributes to this august Virgin: that she has exterminated all heresies in the world. {Ad Diem Illum, 22}
Let His Peace be with you,
Fr. Stephen
