ARCHDIOCESE OF CHICAGO
OFFICE OF THE ARCHBISHOP

Mary Immaculate: Patroness of the United States

A patron is like a sponsor, someone who takes responsibility for another, who protects another.  Catholics rely on our patron saints not only to inspire our lives by their example, but also to pray for us and protect us in our life of grace.  A patron looks out for us, sometimes in ways we don’t always recognize. 

Mary Immaculate was officially declared the patroness of the United States in 1847.  A year earlier, the U.S. bishops had written to the Catholics of this country:

We take this occasion to communicate to you the determination, unanimously adopted by us, to place ourselves and all entrusted to our charge throughout the United States under the special patronage of the holy Mother of God, whose Immaculate Conception is venerated by the piety of the faithful throughout the Catholic Church.  By the aid of her prayers, we entertain the confident hope that we will be strengthened to perform the arduous duties of our ministry, and that you will be enabled to practice the sublime virtues, of which her life presents the most perfect example.

Even earlier, in 1843, shortly after coming to Chicago as its first Bishop, William Quarter wrote that he placed the new diocese, which was then the entire state of Illinois, under the protection of “the Immaculate Mother of God.”  Cardinal Bernardin recalled this dedication on the occasion of the 150th. anniversary if the Archdiocese in 1993.

In 1849, the U.S. bishops asked the Pope to declare the Catholic belief that the Blessed Virgin Mary was free of sin from the first moment of her conception to be a dogma of the Church.  When the Holy father did so in 1854, the Bishops of this country decided that December 8 would be observed in every diocese as a holy day of obligation.  This year, 2004, we celebrate the 150th. anniversary of Pope Pius IX’s declaration that Mary’s Immaculate Conception is a dogma of faith, a belief that every Catholic must hold as integral to the faith that comes to us from the apostles.

This faith had shaped the American continent long before there was a United States of America.  In all the lands of North and South and Central America colonized by France and Spain, devotion to Mary marked the lives of the people.  In the British colonies, where the public practice of Catholicism was forbidden, any external sign of love for Jesus’ mother was impossible.  Still, the Catholics of the newly independent United States were instructed in 1792 by their first Bishop, John Carroll:

I shall only add this my earnest request, that to the exercise of the most sublime virtues, faith, hope and charity, you will join a fervent and well regulated devotion to the Holy Mother of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; that you will place great confidence in her in all your necessities.  Having chosen her the special patroness of this Diocese (the whole country at that time), you are placed, of course, under her powerful protection; and it becomes your duty to be careful to deserve its continuance by a zealous imitation of her virtues and a reliance on her motherly superintendence.

Imitating Mary’s virtues is easier than reading Bishop John Carroll’s eighteenth-century prose!  His instructions about praying to Mary, however, were will received in the eighteenth-century and reinforced by the devotional practices of the many Catholic immigrants who began to come to the United States early in the following century.

There is some irony in the choice of Mary Immaculate as our patroness.  One of the hallmarks of our society is self-reliance, getting the job done on your own, being independent and doing things your own way.  The meaning of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is that Mary was always totally anything on her own but always did things God’s way.  Never touched by sin, nothing in her resisted God’s will for her and for the salvation of the world through her Son.  Of the few words attributed to her in the Gospels, the most basic is, “Let is be done to me according to your word.”  From this free decision on her part flows her instruction to the servants at the wedding feast of Cana, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Mary Immaculate is our patroness.  She speaks to us of god’s initiative in her life and ours; she witnesses to the primacy of grace in her life and ours.  She tells us, proud of our own initiatives, to do it God’s way.

-Francis Cardinal George, OMI 

 Francis Cardinal George

Immaculate Conception: Understanding the Solemnity and the Dogma

In 1854 Pope Pius IX solemnly proclaimed the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception.  It states that Mary was conceived without the stain of original sin.  What does that mean?  Some may wonder about the meaning of the phrase “stain of original sin”; others, about the very purpose of the doctrine.  Does it really make a difference?  And why did it take he church so long to solemnly proclaim the Immaculate Conception as something that Catholics are to believe?  To answer these questions, we will begin with the idea of original sin.  Then we will look at the development of the doctrine; its history will help us understand its meaning.  Finally, with that background, we will be in a position to see that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception does make a difference and that it has an effect on our lives today.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand original sin is to look at our own experience of sin.  All of us are born in need of God’s grace.  The Second Vatican Council pointed out to the very human experience we have a feeling divided within ourselves: “Examining his heart, man finds that he has inclinations toward evil…(He) is split within himself” (Church Today, 13).  All of us experience the struggle between good and evil.  Even Saint Paul experienced an inner division.  He wrote: “I cannot even understand my own actions.  I do not do what I want to do but what I hate” (Romans 7:15).  The condition into which we are born seems to be a lack of wholeness.  We are born with a sense of not being at home with ourselves or our world or God.  We stand in need of God’s grace.  In other words, being born does not automatically put us in a loving relationship with God.  Traditionally, the way of expressing this is to say that original sin formally consists in a lack of sanctifying grace.  (See the Catechism, 396-421.)

As we think about original sin as a part of our experience we ought to remember that we are not talking about our personal sin.  Sin as used in original sin has a special sense.  We are not talking about the exercise of our own freedom that distances and alienates us from God and from one another-that is personal sin.  Rather, we are talking about being born into a situation of alienation, of not-at-homeness with God, before we make any particular decisions.  We are born needy.  More specifically we are born in need of a relationship with Jesus Christ the Savior, who breaks down the distance and the alienation between God and ourselves.  Jesus heals and reconciles the divisions we experience within ourselves.  He links us with our God and with one another.

With this understanding of original sin, we can return to the declaration of the doctrine made by Pope Pius IX in 1854.  The decree reads: “From the first moment of her conception, the Most Blessed Virgin Mary by a unique grace and privilege of God and in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the savior of the human race, was preserved from all stain of original sin.”  This statement of the Church is the outcome of many years of reflection, prayer, and consideration.  (See the Catechism, 490-493, 508.)

Although belief in the Immaculate Conception was a part of the Church’s faith for many centuries, some theologians as great as Saint Thomas Aquinas could not accept the doctrine as it was proposed in their time.  The principal reason for their rejection of the doctrine was that they were not certain whether the doctrine as proposed held that Mary did not need to be redeemed.  Did she not, indeed, need the saving and healing power of her son?  Although the church had always held Mary in very high regard, that did not necessarily mean that she did not fall under the influence of original sin.  She belonged after all to the human family and would therefore need the saving work of Christ.  The theological breakthrough came when theologians recognized that even though Mary needed redemption she was redeemed in a unique way.  We are saved  or redeemed from original sin when we are baptized and make our profession of faith in Jesus Christ.  Mary was saved or redeemed by being preserved form original sin form the very moment of her conception.

If the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception means that Mary enjoyed a special privilege, what is its meaning for us?  Does it have any connection with our own lives?  In fact, it does; the church’s journey of faith with Mary that led to the proclamation of the doctrine has a close connection with our experience.  The way God moved in Mary’s life from the very first moment of her conception is similar to the ways he moves in our lives.  The Church’s journey of faith with Mary brings us to a deeper understanding of the way God works in our lives.

The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception says that Mary is who she is because of a gift of God.  She is holy, not because of her own merits, not because of something that she earned; she is holy because God loved her.  She was drawn close to God by God himself; she did not draw herself close to him.  Since she received God’s favor from “the first moment of her conception,” there can be no doubt that the responsibility for who she was rested with God.  Her Immaculate Conception reflects and proclaims that absolute primacy of God’s grace in human life.  Something similar also happens in our own lives.  In Christian faith-terms, there are no self-made people.  Everything depends on a gift of God.  In other words, God’s grace is absolutely primary and foundational for us.

     Cardinal George’s Sermon

delivered at Holy Name Cathedral August 3, 2003 printed at his request

Dear Friends in Christ:

I stand before you not as the celebrant of the Mass but as the Archbishop of Chicago, the pastor of this local Church, to use this pulpit of the Cathedral in a way that I have not used it in the six years that I have been Archbishop here. For those of you who are visitors, I ask your indulgence.

I stand here to defend our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, against a false accusation made on the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times last Friday. The headline reads: “Pope Launches Global Campaign against Gays.” The Pope, of course, did no such thing.

First, what did the Pope do to invite this false accusation against him? The Holy Father, through the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, approved a statement about the nature of marriage, a statement which repeats what every Pope has taught for two thousand years: marriage is the life-long union of a man and a woman who enter into a total sharing of themselves for the sake of family. This is not first of all a religious teaching, although Christ raised marriage to the level of a sacrament. This is an understanding of marriage from nature itself. Marriage predates our present government or any other and predates, as well, the founding of the Church. Marriage is not the creature of state or church, and neither a government nor the church has authority to change its nature. A government that claims such authority becomes totalitarian. What the Holy See concluded from the fact that there is neither biological nor moral equivalence between heterosexual marriage and homosexual unions is that there should be no legal equivalence either, in a well-ordered and wholesome society.

It is this conclusion, evidently, which was represented falsely as a “global campaign against gays.” Because of a concerted campaign in movies and TV shows in recent years to shape public imagination and opinion into accepting same sex relations as normal and morally unexceptional, obvious truths now are considered evidence of homophobia. Because a morality based upon desires has largely supplanted a morality based upon the truth of things, a teaching which limits sexual self-expression of any sort becomes oppressive. In this context, the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that people of homosexual orientation should be treated with every respect and with compassion; but the Catechism also teaches the truth about the nature of God’s gift of human sexuality, a truth our bodies themselves proclaim and the lives of married couples attest to.

Secondly, who is the Pope and why should Catholics take to heart false accusations against him? The Pope is the Bishop of Rome, and therefore the successor of the apostle who heard Jesus tell him: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Mt. 16: 18-19).

The Holy Spirit invisibly anchors the Church in the truth of Christ. Truths of faith can be more adequately understood from age to age, but the Holy Spirit does not contradict himself. The Holy See, because of the personal office of the Successor of Peter, is a privileged and secure visible expression of the Spirit’s guidance of the Church. Catholics therefore reverence the Petrine office as a gift from Christ himself and have a deep respect for the person holding that office. Divulging disinformation about the Pope, engaging in anti-papal propaganda, attacks all Catholics and is usually, in history, a preparation for active persecution of the Church. The Holy Father makes up nothing that he teaches. His is not the “opinion of the Vatican.” His is the teaching of Jesus Christ, because he is the primary witness to the faith that unites us to Christ. In matters that are received over the ages and proclaimed by the Pope in ours, no person who disagrees to the point of denial can claim to hold the Catholic faith. Disdain for and hatred of the Pope are sure signs of anti-Catholicism.

Thirdly, then, what does the printing of a false accusation against the Pope in a major Chicago daily say about anti-Catholicism here? This is a question I never believed I would have to ask. The Catholic Church was here before any newspaper, before the incorporation of the city of Chicago or the establishment of the State of Illinois. The Church has been the instrument used by Christ to make thousands of Chicagoans holy. She has preached the Gospel and made the sacraments available, she has educated and healed, served the poor and raised a voice for justice. We Catholics are sinners and, at this moment, we are especially shamed by the terrible sins of some priests and bishops; but the Church remains holy in her gifts from her Lord. If her moral teaching were honored in our conduct, there would be no sexual abuse of anyone, no rape or betrayal of marriage, no sexual promiscuity parading as freedom, no fraud in business or government, no false accusations or lies, published or unpublished. What the Church, which condemns all these sins, offers constantly is Christ’s forgiveness of sinners.

The Pope is attacked for many reasons. In some Protestant circles, he is still regarded as the anti-Christ. Among secularists, his teaching office is a threat to human freedom. Among disaffected Catholics, the Pope must be discredited so that Catholics will be forced to change their faith. And the headline writers of the Sun-Times? I do not know their motivation. A bishop likes to presuppose good will, and what they did would find an echo in many places; but what I must say today is that a line has been crossed, and Chicago Catholics cannot ignore what has happened.

I have written a letter of apology to Pope John Paul II. He has visited this city many times and always asks of it fondly. He does not think of it as a center of anti-Catholicism. For the first time in my life, I hesitated as I signed my title. I’m ashamed that this false accusation against the Pope was made in our city. At the very least, it is unfair; and we pride ourselves on fairness. I ask you to pray for the Holy Father; pray as well for the enemies of the Church; and let us pray for one another, for strength in the present and perseverance in the difficulties to come.

                                                    Francis Cardinal George