The Birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary

This life on the Nativity of Mary is a feast meditation rather than a biography, and he writes it in a tone of joy. The birth of the Blessed Virgin is celebrated because it announces the visible nearness of salvation. The woman promised after the fall, whose seed would crush the serpent, has now come into the world. This life therefore speaks of her birth as a mystery of holiness and singular privilege.

Mary enters life unlike the rest of Adam's children, adorned with the graces fitting her vocation as the Mother of God, and the Church answers with praise and thanksgiving. He does not try to pretend that we know all the earthly details of her infancy or the exact place of her birth with certainty. Instead he keeps the focus where the feast itself keeps it: on the joy of God's preparing so pure a mother for His Son and on the place of Mary's birth within the unfolding of redemption. It also notes the long growth of the feast in East and West, showing that devotion to this beginning of Mary's earthly life spread naturally through the Church's worship.