(LifeSiteNews) — The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is the most solemn that the Church celebrates during the season of Advent.

This feast is celebrated at a time when, in the northern hemisphere, we spend most of our day in darkness. The days are short, the nights are long, and not much warmth or light is received from the sun. We are beginning our Advent penances, and the festivities of Christmas are still some weeks away.

The darkness of winter reflects very much the season through which the Church passes in our times. Her light is obscured by the darkness of sin and heresy, and by thralls of Satan masquerading as servants of Jesus Christ.

These evils, as all the evils that befall humanity, are ultimately the result of that first sin committed at the dawn of human history when Adam rebelled against God.

The horrifying consequences of this sin overwhelm the earth today, and as we look out over the mass slaughter of the unborn, the deliberate destruction of innocence, and the apostasy of so many from the Church of Christ, perhaps we can have some sense of the despair that Adam and Eve must have felt after the primal sin of the human race.

Yet, in the midst of this darkness, the Holy Roman Church directs our gaze towards the light of our ever-sinless mother. At Vespers today the Church sings:

This day there went forth a branch from the root of Jesse: this day was Mary conceived without any stain of sin: this day was the head of the old serpent crushed by her. Alleluia.

The old serpent, whose triumph over Adam was only temporary, looks ahead not to the triumph of darkness but to his ultimate defeat.

A hymn of the 8^th century proclaims:

Our first parent brought death on himself, by drinking in the poison of the wicked serpent; thence came the pestilence on all mankind, and it was mortal.

But the Creator of the world took compassion on man, and seeing the womb of the Virgin, that was pure from sin, it is by her he decrees to convey the joys of salvation to the world that languished in crime.

Gabriel is sent from heaven bearing to the chaste Virgin the eternal decree: and she becomes Mother of the Word, her womb containing within it Him that fills the earth.

A chaste maid, yet a mother! a virgin, yet a parent! The Creator of the world was born in his own world; the sceptre was wrested from the hands of the dreaded enemy; a new light shone throughout the whole world.

The new light of the Immaculate Virgin Mary is more than strong enough to pierce through the gloom of the darkness which engulfs the Church of her Divine Son.

Dom Guéranger writes:

The Woman, with her own foot, is to crush the head of the hated Serpent. The Second Eve is to be worthy of the Second Adam, conquering and not to be conquered. The human race is one day to be avenged, not only by God made Man, but also by the Woman miraculously exempted from every stain of sin, in whom the primæval creation, which was in justice and holiness, (Eph 4:24) will thus reappear in her, just as though the original sin had never been committed.

Guéranger believed that the definition of the Immaculate Conception, by Pope Pius IX in 1854, was a providential act to strengthen us for the dark days ahead:

On that great day of the Definition, the infernal serpent was again crushed beneath the victorious foot of the Virgin-Mother, and the Lord graciously gave us the strongest pledge of his mercy. He still loves this guilty earth, since he has deigned to enlighten it with one of the brightest rays of his Mother’s glory.

It was a pledge “for the days when Truths are diminished among the children of men”.

On 8 December 1854, the Vicar of Christ:

[I]n the presence of the fifty-four Cardinals, forty-two Archbishops, and ninety-two Bishops; before an immense concourse of people that filled Saint Peter’s, and had united in prayer, begging the assistance of the Spirit of Truth… pronounced the decision which so many ages had hoped to hear.

On that day:

Peter [had] spoken by the mouth of Pius; and when Peter has spoken, every Christian should believe; for the Son of God has said: I have prayed for thee, Peter, that thy faith fail not. (Lk 22:32) And again: The Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring all things to your mind, whatsoever I shall have said to you. (Jn 14:26)

As Our Lady remained free from all stain of sin, so the Roman Church remains always unconquered by heresy. That Church, the fathers teach, has “neither stain nor blemish” in its doctrine and “remains unsullied” by error.

That stainless Church of Rome, which defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception on this day in 1854, will one day again rejoice in the possession of an ever-faithful Vicar who will once more proclaim the light of Catholic truth to the world.

Let us then be encouraged by words of Guéranger:

Raise up your heads, then, ye children of Adam, and shake off your chains! This day, the humiliation, which weighed you down, is annihilated. Behold! Mary, she who is of the same flesh and blood as yourselves, has seen the torrent of sin, which swept along all the generations of mankind, she has seen it flow back at her presence and not touch her; the infernal dragon has turned away his head, daring not to breathe his venom upon her; the dignity of your origin is given to her in all its primitive grandeur. This happy day, then, on which the original purity of your race is renewed, must be a Feast to you.

This article was originally published on December 8, 2023.