The Immaculate Conception

Mary and Jesus, from an altarpiece in

the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine

Florence, Italy

Well, triggered by the word “prevenient” in the new translation for the feast of the Immaculate Conception, we have been looking at original sin in order to better understand how the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception developed.  It is a fairly late doctrine and despite its being infallibly defined we will see that it cannot claim, at least historically, to have been part of the Tradition handed down from the Apostles.  
     As I mentioned in my previous post, while the idea of original sin can be traced back through Augustine to even earlier patristic sources, it is a theological concept that never developed in the Christian East and is unknown in Orthodox and Eastern Catholic sources.  Without a concept of original sin, there is no doctrine of the Immaculate Conception because the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary was conceived in her mother’s womb without the original sin that has affected the rest of the human family.  Mary is unique in this regard.  The Church says that she was saved from original sin through the merits of the death and resurrection of her Divine son even though that passion, death, and resurrection had not yet taken place in time: hence “prevenient.”  Although the Eastern Churches did not celebrate Mary’s Immaculate Conception they did celebrate her conception, affixing the date  (originally) to December 9—nine months (minus one day) before the feast of her birth.  In the same way the Church celebrated the conception of her Son nine months before the Church celebrates his birth.  (March 25^th is nine months before December 25^th.)  These are the only two “conceptions” I know of being celebrated in the Church calendar.  The feast of Mary’s Conception originated in the Church of Syria (which included the Holy Land) in about the sixth century but soon was celebrated throughout Eastern Christianity. 
       How did the feast come to the West?  Scholars agree that it was the Normans who introduced the feast to the Western Church.  In the eleventh century Normans conquered Sicily and Southern Italy where the Church, at that time,  followed the Greek Rite rather than the Western Latin Rites.  It was probably at this time that the Normans became familiar with the feast of the Conception of Mary.  There was a problem though in the west.  Western theologians, including Augustine, saw that Mary was, like the rest of us, conceived in original sin.  How can we celebrate a sinful conception?  (Remember the East, not believing in original sin, saw no sin in the conception.)  Immediately a theological debate broke out.  Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a great devotee of the Blessed Virgin insisted that she, like us, was conceived in original sin.  Saint Thomas would pick this up and affirm that Mary was conceived in sin.  The Franciscans and Carmelites however, came to Mary’s defense and insisted that she had been spared original sin in order to prepare her for being the Mother of Jesus.  The debate raged through the Middle Ages.  When Pope Sixtus IV put the feast of Mary’s Conception on the universal calendar in the fifteenth century it was simply called the Conception of the Virgin.  The Dominican Pope, Saint Pius V, in revising the Roman Calendar also simply called it “The Conception of the Virgin.”  In Franciscan and Carmelite Churches, and several dioceses, however, it was called “The Immaculate Conception.” 
       The doctrine remained an open question for centuries with Catholics free to believe that Mary suffered the consequences of original sin or that she had been preserved from it by a special dispensation of “prevenient” grace.  In much the same way, while Catholics today must believe that Mary was assumed body and soul at the end of her earthly life, we are free to believe that she died or that she did not die before her assumption.  The matter is undefined.  In regard to the Immaculate Conception,  however, Pope Pius IX closed the issue in 1854 by defining the doctrine that Mary was conceived without sin through a dispensation on the merits of her Son’s passion, death, and Resurrection.  Thus today this is a defined dogma for the Church, though the Eastern Churches—the various rites that comprise the Eastern Churches in union with Rome as well as the Orthodox Churches, sort of nod their heads in ambiguous assent and go on their way thinking that we westerners argue over the darnedest things.  And perhaps we do. 

When women ruled the Churches 3

The Modern Abbey and Abbey Church
at Bingen in the Rhineland

We have seen that at times—and by historical standards fairly recent times—women have exercised considerable authority in the Catholic Church.  We looked initially at the abbey of Quedlinburg and then at Saints Bridget of Kildare and Hilda of Whitby.  In our last blog we had a detailed example of the ceremony of obeisance given by the clergy in the prelacy of Conversano to the Abbess who was their prelate nullius.   We can return to the Abbey of Quedlinburg and a bull issued by Innocent III.  (We will be looking at Innocent, who reigned from 1198 until 1216, in our series of Reformations.  Innocent was responsible for what is probably the second most successful internal reform of the Church, second only to Trent.) This is what Pope Innocent wrote in a Bull concerning the Abbess of Quedlinburg:

Our daughter beloved in the Lord, the Abbess of Bubrigen [Friedberg says in a footnote that this should be read as Quedlinburg in the diocese of Halberstadt] has set forth the following in a petition sent to us: Sometimes when she suspends her canonesses and the clerics who are subject to her jurisdiction [clericos suae iurisdictioni subiectes], because of disobedience and other lapses, from their office and benefice, they do not observe a suspension of this sort because they are strongly convinced that she cannot excommunicate; hence, their excesses remain uncorrected. So that the said canonesses and clerics show obedience and respect to the above named abbess and obey her good admonitions, we consign therefore to your discrimination to what extent you — according to previous admonition — wish to inflict on them ecclesiastical censure under exclusion of appeal.  

The Abbey of Santa Maria la Real de las Huelgas
in Burgos, Spain--the seat of a very important
abbess in medieval Castile

Quedlinburg had been founded by the Abbess Matilda, the widow of King Henry the Fowler and mother of the Emperor Otto.  Otto, you may remember from an earlier blog, placed his daughter Matilda as its second abbess.  He richly endowed the Abbey with lands and properties and exempted it from all external jurisdiction, including exemption from the Bishop of Halberstadt who was the local ordinary. This is not the only Abbey with such exemption.  About thirty years before Pope Innocent wrote to the
Abbess of Quedlinburg, Adrian IV had issued the following Bull to the Abbess and nuns of Herford in Germany:

We forbid that in the said monastery any bishop outside the Roman pontiff exercise jurisdiction, and indeed in the sense that he never — unless he will be so invited by the abbess — may presume to celebrate solemn Masses there. 

While these prelatial abbeys were most common in the Holy Roman Empire, they were by no means limited there.  The most important of these Abbeys where the Abbess exercised ordinary jurisdiction not only over the nuns but over the surrounding area with its churches, clergy, and faithful was the Royal Abbey of Las Hueglas in Spain, a Cistercian foundation.  The Abbess was declared to be , a "noble lady, the superior, prelate, and lawful administratrix in spirituals and temporals of the said royal abbey, and of all the contents, churches, and hermitages of its filiation, of the villages and places under its jurisdiction, seigniory, and vassalage, in virtue of Bulls and Apostolical concessions, with plenary jurisdiction, privative, quasi-episopal, nullius diacesis."

According to the original Catholic Encyclopedia: By the favor of the king, she was, moreover, invested with almost royal prerogatives, and exercised an unlimited secular authority over more than fifty villages. Like the Lord Bishops, she held her own courts, in civil and criminal cases, granted letters dismissorial for ordination, and issued licenses authorizing priests, within the limits of her abbatial jurisdiction, to hear confessions, to preach, and to engage in the cure of souls. She was privileged also to confirm Abbesses, to impose censures, and to convoke synods.  Basil Pennington once told me that these prerogatives, or at least the canonical ones, were still in place at the opening of the Second Vatican Council.  I don’t consider Pennington to have been a reliable source of information as he tended to go on the principle of “don’t let the truth spoil a good story,” but I can’t say that he wasn’t right on this.  

Perhaps the most significant Abbess of the Middle Ages was the famous Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179).  Though not officially canonized, she is regarded as a saint by the Catholic Church.  She is an immensely popular figure in certain circles today and she certainly was an accomplished woman—a musician, scientist, physician, poet, philosopher, theologian and who knows what else— she was actually authorized to preach by Pope Eugene III at the recommendation of his mentor, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (who, in turn, was no fan of women nor advocate of their cause).  I have no idea of what prompted Bernard’s recommendation but here we have papal authorization for a woman to preach, a license that would be rather difficult to obtain today.  Why aren’t women authorized to preach today?  I know nuns (and laywomen as well) who are far better preachers than many priests and deacons (and even some bishops.)  Perhaps I just answered my own question.