Solemnity of Mary Mother of God:

Feast day : 01 January

Today the Church celebrates the divine motherhood of the Blessed Virgin through the Feast of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. By honouring the Blessed Virgin as the ‘Mother of God’ we are also in turn honouring the divinity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who was true God and true man, both at the same time. Honouring Mary as the Mother of God does not imply that the divinity of Jesus as the Second person of the Holy Trinity was born or originated through Mary. Rather, Mary became the ‘Mother of God’ or ‘God Bearer’ (Theotokos) by conceiving the human incarnation of the Son of God in her womb. Her role in God’s plan for salvation of mankind was to bear the ‘Word that became flesh’, the Word i.e. Son of God who existed from the very beginning of the world. We read about this more clearly in the Gospel of John 1:1-14.

For the fulfilment of God’s plan, to send forth His Son to the world, He needed to prepare a body for his birth and for this He wanted the free cooperation of a creature. For this from all eternity God chose Mary as the mother of his Son. To become the mother of the Savior, Mary “was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a role.” In fact, in order for Mary to be able to give her free consent at the announcement by the angel, it was necessary that she herself was born by God’s grace and remained full of grace.

This is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854 “The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin.”

The “splendour of an entirely unique holiness” by which Mary is “enriched from the first instant of her conception” comes wholly from Christ: she is redeemed, in a more exalted fashion, by the reason of the merits of her Son right from her birth. The Father blessed Mary more than any other created person “in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” and chose her “in Christ before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless before him in love.”

At the announcement that she would give birth to “the Son of the Most High” without knowing man, by the power of the Holy Spirit, Mary responded with the obedience of faith, certain that “with God nothing will be impossible.” Thus the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father’s eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity. Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly “Mother of God”. (Reference from Catechism of the Catholic Church Para 484 -511)

The Gospels also bear witness to the divinity of her conception. In Luke 1:35 at the annunciation “The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.” Again we read in Luke 1:43 where Elizabeth filled with Holy Spirit exclaimed “And why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me?”.