Today, December 8th, is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. The name alone is startling, and what makes it worse, the doctrine itself can seem severely abstract. Contrast this with the mysteries of the Rosary that are so concrete: the Visitation, the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Coronation; I have long seen and loved Mary in [...]

For the last two daily posts, I’ve shared personal aspects of becoming Catholic. Today I move to one of the most difficult parts of that decision, the judgment of your family. For most people, this is the largest obstacle to becoming Catholic.

Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. Last year, immediately preceding this Solemnity, Taylor posted “Mary Without Sin (Scripture and Tradition),” and on the Feast I posted “Mary’s Immaculate Conception, in which I included podcasts of Prof. Lawrence Feingold’s lecture and Q&A on this dogma. Those two posts provide evidence for the Catholic dogma, [...]

Today is the celebration the birth of Mary, the Mother of our Lord. This feast is observed on September 8 in both the Roman and Byzantine rites. The Gospel appointed for the feast, in the Roman Rite, is Matthew 1:1-16. This passage, like Luke 3:23-38, presents the genealogy of Jesus. 

Today, August 15, is the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. On this day, the universal Church celebrates what took place at the end of our Blessed Mother’s earthly life. “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and [...]

Today we celebrate the central event in the whole of human history: the Incarnation of the Second Person of the most Holy Trinity, in the womb of the Virgin Mary, nine months before His nativity. On this day, God fulfilled the promise He had made in the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:15) that He would [...]

In the decade following the arrival of Hernando Cortez and the Spanish Conquistadors in the New World in 1519, the Aztecs were highly resistant to Christianity. But in 1531 an amazing miracle took place, and the missionaries were soon overwhelmed with requests for catechesis and baptism. This miracle precipitated the greatest flood of conversions in [...]

Today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, in which we celebrate the conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who “from the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the human race, was preserved free from [...]

One of the most misunderstood Catholic dogmas is that of the Immaculate Conception, the solemnity that the Holy Church of Jesus Christ observes on December 8th as a holy day of obligation. The Immaculate Conception is the dogma that Mary was saved by God in a singular and unique way. Unlike the rest of us [...]

In honor of the great Marian feast tomorrow, the Immaculate Conception, I would like to repost some material from my personal blog: a book review on one of the best popular level historical surveys of Mary available. “Mary Through the Centuries,” published in 1998, was written by one of the preeminent Church historians of the [...]