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Sacred Scriptures/Liturgy- Commentary on Sunday's Readings |
The
Virgin Without Sin
Feast of the Immaculate Conception
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap, Pontifical Household Preacher
www.zenit.org
With the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the Catholic Church
affirms that Mary, on account of a singular privilege bestowed by
God and in view of the merits of Christ's death, was preserved from
contracting the stain of original sin and came into existence
already completely holy.
Four years after being defined by Pope Pius IX, this truth was
confirmed by the Madonna herself at Lourdes in an apparition to
Bernadette with the words: "I am the Immaculate Conception."
The feast of Mary Immaculate reminds humanity that there is only one
thing that truly lowers man -- sin. It is a very urgent message to
repeat. The world has lost the sense of sin. We joke as if it were
the most harmless thing in the world. The world presents its
products and spectacles as sinful to make them more attractive. It
talks about sin, even the gravest sins, in terms of endearment:
peccadilloes, little vices, etc. The expression "original sin" is
used in the advertising world to indicate something very different
from the Bible: A sin that confers a bit of originality on the one
who commits it!
The world is afraid of everything but sin. It is afraid of
pollution, the obscure maladies of the body, nuclear war, terrorism;
but it is not afraid of the war against God, who is the eternal; the
all-powerful; love. Jesus says, however, not to be afraid of those
who kill the body, but only of him who after he has killed has the
power to cast into Gehenna (cf. Luke 12:4-5).
This way of thinking exercises a tremendous influence even on
believers who want to live according to the Gospel. It produces a
sleep of conscience in them, a kind of spiritual anesthesia. There
is a drug that skews our understanding of sin. The Christian people
no longer recognize its true enemy, the master that enslaves it;
this is because what we have is a gilded slavery.
Many who speak of sin no longer have an entirely adequate idea of
it. Sin becomes depersonalized and is projected only onto
institutions; we end up identifying sin with the position of our own
political and ideological adversaries. An investigation about what
people think sin is would probably have frightening results.
Instead of liberation from sin, all efforts today are focused on
liberation from regret over sin; instead of fighting against sin we
fight against the idea of sin, replacing it with something very
different, namely, "guilt feelings." We do precisely that which in
every other sphere is considered the worst thing of all, that is, we
deny the problem rather than resolve it, we push back and bury evil
in the unconscious instead of removing it.
It is similar to believing that we can eliminate death by
eliminating the thought of death, or worrying about bringing down
the fever rather than curing the sickness when the fever is only a
providential revelatory symptom of the sickness. St. John says that
if we claim to be without sin, then we deceive ourselves and we make
God a liar (cf. 1 John 1:8-10); God, in fact, says the contrary, he
says that we have sinned.
Scripture says that Christ "died for our sins" (cf. 1 Corinthians
15:3). If you take away sin, then Christ's redemption itself is made
futile, you have destroyed the meaning of his death. Christ would
then have been tilting at windmills, he would have spilled his blood
for nothing.
But the dogma of Mary Immaculate also tells us something very
positive: God is stronger than sin and where sin abounds grace
abounds even more (cf. Romans 5:20).
Mary is the sign and guarantee of this. The whole Church, after her,
is called to become "glorious, without spot or wrinkle, or any such
thing, that she might be holy and immaculate" (Ephesians 5:27). A
text of the Second Vatican Council says: "But while in the Most Holy
Virgin the Church has already reached that perfection whereby she is
without spot or wrinkle, the followers of Christ still strive to
increase in holiness by conquering sin. And so they turn their eyes
to Mary who shines forth to the whole community of the elect as the
model of virtues" ("Lumen Gentium," 65).
[Translation by Joseph G. Trabbic]
Fr.
Raniero Cantalamessa is a Franciscan
Capuchin Catholic Priest. Born in Ascoli Piceno,
Italy, 22 July 1934, ordained priest in 1958.
Divinity Doctor and Doctor in classical literature.
In 1980 he was appointed by Pope John Paul II
Preacher to the Papal Household in which capacity he
still serves, preaching a weekly sermon in Advent
and Lent.
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
Mary