As a Catholic, who was once a Sacristan, I must confess that at some point I lost the distinction -- which I suppose we were once as catechists taught, taught when our English was still raw (which is not the same thing as the English in us) and when, perhaps, our attention was raging to be elsewhere -- between the immaculate conception of Mary herself and the virginal birth of her son, and God's son, Jesus Christ the Redeemer. The point being made to us was that she conceived and delivered Him when/while/though she was a virgin, but her own mother had not herself been a virgin.
Over the years I have fused the two notions, forgetting (and presently and belatedly surprised) that we were in our youth asked to believe that Mary herself was born without original sin, essentially taking the immaculate conception to be about the conditions of Jesus' own birth. I totally missed that fine point. No wonder I didn't become the priest my late father, a devout Catholic who must now be in heaven, had dreamt that I, his eldest, would be.
As it turns out, however, I was not alone in this. It is even possible that many and perhaps most Catholics, nowadays, wallow in that confusion. To re-frame Santayana's notion of chaos, that distinction is an "order of thought", a liturgical order, which brings confusion in our minds.
Though her conception was shorn of the "stain" of the original sin, which Adam and Eve committed somewhere here in Africa and perhaps East Africa (if the human-origin narrative of DNA experts is to be tagged to the biblical account of the Garden of Eden and the goings on at the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge), it was the product of sexual intercourse. In contrast, Jesus was conceived as a result of the Word, relayed to Mary by God's own angelic emissary, Gabriel. His was virginal conception, and just as endowed with grace.
When first mooted by Sixtus IV, the concept of the Immaculate Conception was not labelled a dogma of the Church; that is, as something which believers must believe. This left Catholics, who chose to, free to treat it as untrue, without the risk of excommunication on grounds of heresy. It was declared a dogma only in the 19th Century -- more precisely on December 8th, 1854 -- by Pope Pius IX.
That dogma was taught to my parents, both devout; and later to us, but perhaps only in passing. I think the confusion in our minds arose from the fact that we were being asked to believe two very ngumu ("hard"), very counter-intuitive, ideas rolled up essentially into one. A choice was made. And since Mary was not the Daughter of God, nobody went that far, it was easier to take away from her the more poetic and graceful notion of immaculate conception, which was indeed her's, and to attach it to Jesus -- whose own label of "virginal birth" somehow rang too mundane. Perhaps I am projecting a present thought-process into a past in which we thought rather more at face value, rather more intuitively. But perhaps the point here is that the two thought-processes meet at the very same standpoint.
I stop here, for I simply wanted somehow to link this day with a part of my youth, to toss up ideas which continue to puzzle. To learn more about all this, the reader must click here: A History of the Immaculate Conception.
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