Abbot Caedmon Holmes gave the homily to the School community at Mass on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. His sermon follows.
"On December 8, exactly nine months before the Blessed Virgin Mary's birthday on September 8, we celebrate a feast in honor of her conception. The Immaculate Conception is the first moment of Mary's life in the womb of her mother, St. Anne. 'Immaculate' comes from the Latin word macula, meaning 'spot.' From the very first moment of her life, our Lady was immaculate, as it were unspotted, by the contagion of sin. The angel Gabriel greets Mary in the Gospel we've just heard by applying to her the unusual phrase 'full of grace,' meaning, completely in favor with God, completely satisfactory to Him.
"You might have thought that every child's life begins so: free of sin, full of grace, open to God. But today's first reading, from the book of Genesis, reminds us that Adam---the head of the human race, from whom all are descended, whose very name means 'human race'---sinned by disobeying God, at the very beginning of the human story. Consequently, all of mankind from then on is involved with this Original Sin, spotted by sin, entangled in sin, unable to get free. There can be no doubt about it: the evidence is all around and in us.
"For instance, consider history. How often have there been great plans for perfecting a nation or perfecting the world, for eliminating war and poverty and exploitation of every sort? And have these plans, no matter how sincerely and carefully and energetically implemented, ever completely succeeded, even in a limited area for a limited time? Why not? Because the human race, in all of its members, is spotted by sin, and consequently unable to attain complete goodness from the very outset of each individual's life. (We are born of human parents, brought up and socialized by other human beings. By necessity, our lives are bound up with the lives of others; and each human life is bound up in some way with all other human lives. Thus by coming into human existence, we come into the power of sin, Original Sin.)
"Or consider these words, part of an address spoken by Pope Benedict on December 8th last year:
...Today's young people...grow up in an environment saturated with messages that propose false models of happiness. These boys and girls risk losing hope because they often seem to be orphaned from true love, which fills life with meaning and joy...John Paul II...on so many occasions proposed Mary to the youth of our time as the 'Mother of Fair Love.'
Unfortunately, numerous experiences tell us that adolescents, young people, and even children easily fall prey to corrupt love, deceived by unscrupulous adults who, lying to themselves and to them, lure them into the dead ends of consumerism; even the most sacred realities, like the human body, temple of the God of love and of life, thus become objects to be used...What sadness when youth lose the wonder, the enchantment of the most beautiful feelings, the value of respect for the body, manifestation of the person and of the person's unfathomable mystery!
"Those are the Pope's words: an environment filled with messages that propose to young people false models of happiness; adults lying to themselves and lying to young people about how to live. Doesn't that sound like a world miserably out of kilter as a result of Original Sin?
"God's purpose in creating the human race and each individual was to bring us all into loving communion with Himself, to share with us everything He has, which means to share with us His own Eternal Life. But the presence of Original Sin in us would have prevented that from happening, since God---by His very nature incapable of sin---is utterly opposed to sin, unable to compromise with sin. So in order to fulfill His original purpose, He had to take another step, so as to rescue us from sin's domination, and set us on the clear path to Him.
"That further step is sending His divine Son to take on human nature, become a human being as Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary. Jesus saved us from sin by willingly undertaking for our sakes to live sinlessly among us sinners, teaching and preaching the truth, all the way to death by capital punishment inflicted by us. Where Adam selfishly decided against obeying God, Jesus, for love of us, obeyed God to the bitter end. Being God-made-man, he was personally immune to sin.
"In order to give this Son-of-God-made-man a worthy mother, God kept Mary unspotted by sin from the very first moment of her existence. That is the Immaculate Conception. And Mary responded to this privilege by living for God from early childhood on, listening for Him to speak to her in the Scriptures, responding to Him in constant prayer, and treating those she met with selfless generosity: the kind of life that God wishes for us all, the kind of life that He makes possible by blessing us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, having chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, having destined us to be His sons, holy and blameless before Him, as we heard St Paul say in the second reading.
"It's by the death of Christ that Mary, like us, is saved from sin, and enabled to live a holy and blameless life. The difference between her and us is that, by a special privilege, God 'let her share beforehand in the salvation Christ would bring by his death.' Christ is the savior of all mankind, Mary included. By reason of what he has done for us, he has become now the new head of the human race, displacing Adam, and undoing the effects of his ungrateful turning from God. Through Jesus Christ God can fulfill His original purpose of adopting us to himself.
"You notice that today's feast, like all the feasts, is primarily about Christ. And we celebrate this feast, as we celebrate all the greatest feasts, by offering the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Sacrifice of the
Mass. There is no better way to thank God for Mary's Immaculate Conception---there is no better way to thank Him for any of the spiritual blessings he has bestowed on the Church and on the whole human race---than to offer Him again the utterly pleasing and fragrant sacrifice of His Son's death for us on the cross. We will do precisely that when, a few minutes from now, we do what Jesus told us to do in memory of him, and repeat over the bread and wine his words from the Last Supper, the night before he died. Let us offer him, and let us offer ourselves with him, to God. In Holy Communion let us devoutly receive him (as Mary conceived him in her womb, and then held him in her arms) and let us ask him to do in us what he did in Mary: that is, enable us to live for God and for one another, especially the poor and afflicted.
"Mary, his Blessed Mother and ours, naturally wants to see the purpose of God accomplished in us. Let us entrust ourselves to her.
"O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee."
