Vigils Reading – Immaculate Conception

IMMACULATE MARY

By Fr Hugo Rahner

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From the first instant of Mary’s human existence until her assumption

into heaven, every detail of her life that Revelation has provided is a ‘type of

what is to come.’ The Church is symbolized in Mary.

That is true of the first and underlying mystery of her life, which we know

from the sources of Revelation and from the solemn declaration of the Church,

namely that Mary in the first instant of her conception, in virtue of the

redemptive death to come of her divine son, was preserved free from all stain of

original sin. She possessed from the beginning also, precisely as a member of

the human race redeemed by Christ, that gift of sanctifying grace which was

destined originally for the whole human race from Adam and Eve, and restored

to every believer by the death of Christ, the son of Mary. Thus it is that Mary

Immaculate is already an essential symbol of the restoration to grace, a work

which began on the Cross and will have its entire fulfillment at the end of time

by presenting to the eternal father the family of our first parents, redeemed into

the one glorified Body of Christ: a symbol therefore of the Church. This is how

the early fathers saw in Mary Immaculate the Ecclesia Immaculata, and in this

figure of the Church Immaculate the glorious conclusion of the work of

redemption, which will be revealed on that day when God who is able to

preserve you without sin will present you spotless before the presence of his

glory with exceeding joy, in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God’s first word of salvation, spoken outside the locked gates of Paradise,

already indicates a woman, a single woman, who could never be overcome by

Satan: I will put enmities between you and the woman, and your seed and her

seed. This woman was first of all Eve, to whom the astounding promise was

made that the Redeemer should come from her race. But the full meaning of the

prophecy is only realized, when we see foreshadowed in Eve the other Mother of

all the living, who herself should actually give birth to the Savior. But already

then, said Augustine, Mary was included in Eve; yet is was only when Mary

came, that we knew who Eve was. The woman who crushed the serpent’s head

was the mother of God Incarnate. From the beginning of catholic theology the

text has been thus interpreted. Christ, the son of the woman of the promise,

would conquer Satan, and therefore God put enmities between the serpent and

the woman, until the promised seed came to crush its head, the seed of Mary.