Mass Readings
Liturgical Readings for : Monday, 8th December, 2025Léachtaí Gaeilge
Next Sunday’s Readings
8-12 The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Solemnity
This feast celebrates Mary as a person of singular grace who was preserved free of original sin
in view of the merits of her son and Saviour, Jesus
c/f A short history of today’s Feastday can be found below today’s Readings and Reflection.
FIRST READING
A reading from the book of Genesis 3:9-15. 20
I will make you enemies of each other: your offspring and her offspring.
After Adam had eaten from the tree the Lord God called to the man. ‘Where are you?‘ he asked.
‘I heard the sound of you in the garden;’ he replied ‘I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.‘
‘Who told you that you were naked?‘ he asked. ‘Have you been eating of the tree I forbade you to eat?’
The man replied, ‘It was the woman you put with me; she gave me the fruit, and I ate it’.
Then the Lord God asked the woman, ‘What is this you have done?‘
The woman replied, ‘The serpent tempted me and I ate’.
Then the Lord God said to the serpent,
‘Because you have done this,
‘Be accursed beyond all cattle, all wild beasts. You shall crawl on your belly and eat dust every day of your life.
I will make you enemies of each other: you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring.
It will crush your head and you will strike its heel’.
The man named his wife ‘Eve’ because she was the mother of all those who live.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Responsorial Psalm Ps 98:1,2-3, 4
Response Sing a new song to the Lord for he has worked wonders.
1. Sing a new song to the Lord for he has worked wonders.
His right hand and his holy arm have brought salvation. Response
2. The Lord has made known his salvation; has shown his justice to the nations.
He has remembered his truth and love for the house o f Israel. Response
3. All the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
Shout to the Lord all the earth, ring out your joy. Response
SECOND READING
A reading from the letter of St Paul to the Ephesians 1:3-6. 11-12
Before the world was made, God chose us in Christ.
Blessed be God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with
all the spiritual blessings of heaven in Christ.
Before the world was made, he chose us, chose us in Christ,
to be holy and spotless, and to live through love in his presence,
determining that we should become his adopted sons,
through Jesus Christ for his own kind purposes,
to make us praise the glory of his grace, his free gift to us in the Beloved,
And it is in him that we were claimed as God’s own, chosen from the beginning, under the predetermined plan of the one who guides all things as he decides by his own will; chosen to be, for his greater glory, the people who would put their hopes in Christ before he came.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Gospel Acclamation Lk 1: -28
Alleluia, alleluia!
Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women.
Alleluia!
GOSPEL
The Lord be with you, And also with you
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke 1:26-38
You are to conceive and bear a son.
The angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. He went in and said to her, ‘Rejoice, so highly favoured! The Lord is with you.’
She was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what this greeting could mean, but the angel said to her,
‘Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God’s favour.
Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High.
The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David;
he will rule over the House of Jacob forever and his reign will have no end.‘
Mary said to the angel, ‘But how can this come about, since I am a virgin?’
‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you’, the angel answered , ‘and the power of the Most High will cover you with its shadow. And so the child will be holy and will be called Son of God. Know this too: your kinswoman Elizabeth has, in her old age, herself conceived a son, and she whom people called barren is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible to God’
‘I am the handmaid of the Lord,‘ said Mary ‘let what you have said be done to me.’
And the angel left her.
The Gospel of the Lord. Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
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Gospel Reflection Dec 8th Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception Luke 1:26-38
Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his poem, ‘The Blessed Virgin compared to the air we breathe’, concludes with a prayer to Mary, ‘Be thou then, O thou dear Mother, my atmosphere; My happier world, wherein To wend and meet no sin’. Today’s feast celebrates Mary as that happier world wherein we meet no sin. She was untouched by that sin of Adam referred to at the beginning of today’s first reading. Because Adam rebelled against God’s will for his life, he was uncomfortable in God’s presence. He hid from God and God had to call out to him, ‘Where are you?’
Mary had no reason to hide from God because she was always open to doing God’s will. She lived her life in the light of God’s presence. She was, in that sense, full of God. It was because Mary was so full of God from the first moment of her conception that she could respond to God’s call to her through the angel Gabriel with the words, ‘Let what you have said be done to me’.
The principal church in our Dublin Diocese is in Marlborough Street in Dublin city and was commonly called the ‘Pro-Cathedral’. However, Pope Leo has recently updated this practice by declaring its official title to be ‘Saint Mary’s, Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception). We don’t often speak of Mary as Saint Mary. We have other ways of referring to her. Yet, today’s feast celebrates Mary’s sainthood, her sanctity.
We consider Mary the greatest of all the saints because we believe that she was holy from the first moment of her conception. However, no more than any of the other saints, Mary was not removed from the struggles and sufferings of the human condition. Something of her struggle comes through in today’s gospel reading. She was initially deeply disturbed by the words of the angel Gabriel. She was full of questions in response to Gabriel’s good news, ‘How can this come about?’ Luke goes on to tell us in his gospel that Simeon announced to her that a sword would pierce her soul. According to the gospel of John, she stood at the foot of the cross suffering the agony of watching her only Son die a slow and painful death. It was in the midst of all the struggles and pains of life that she lived out her ‘yes’ to God’s will for her life.
Mary’s holiness from her conception does not remove her from us. She is our companion on our pilgrim journey. She is given to us as a perpetual help. That is why, in the ‘Hail Mary’ prayer, we ask her to pray for us ‘sinners’ now and ‘at the hour of our death’. Paul reminds us in the second reading that before the world was made God ‘chose us in Christ to be holy and spotless and to live through love in his presence’. Paul spells out there our calling from the beginning of time. Mary has lived that calling to the full; she was holy, living through love in God’s presence. We look to her to help us to live out that same calling. In the words of the Preface of today’s Mass, she is an advocate of grace for God’s people, for all of us. She prays for us for the grace we need to be as generous as she was in responding to God’s purpose for our lives.
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The Scripture Readings are taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published 1966 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd and used with the permission of the publishers. http://dltbooks.com/
The Scripture Reflection is made available with our thanks from Fr Martin Hogan’s book Reflections on the Weekday Readings : The Word is Near to You, on your lips and in your heart published by Messenger Publications c/f www.messenger.ie/bookshop/
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For homily resources for this Sunday’s Gospel click here: https://www.catholicireland.net/sunday-homily/
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Feast of the Day: Dec. 8th; Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception
This feast had its origin in the East as the “Conception of Mary by Saint Anne.” It spread through the West during the Middle Ages as the “Immaculate Conception” and was extended to the entire Western Church in the eighteenth century. The feast celebrates Mary, preserved from sin from the moment of conception as the first fruits of her Son’s redemption and a prophetic model of what the Church is called to be.
A statue of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception was designed at that time by Luigi Poletti and placed on the top of an ancient Roman column overlooking the beautiful Spanish Steps. (c/f image left)
Each year at the ceremony a fireman of the Rome’s Fire Brigade climbs and places a wreath of flowers on the arm of Our Lady above in Rome. c/f image right>
Patrick Duffy outlines the history and doctrine of the feast.
The Doctrine
What the Doctrine of the ‘Immaculate Conception’ means is that from the first moment of her conception, God, foreseeing and anticipating the merits of Jesus’s passion and death, and knowing Mary would say “yes” to becoming the Mother of the Saviour, filled her with grace, and preserved her free from all stain of original sin. The Church assumes Mary herself was conceived in the normal way through the loving intercourse of her father Joachim with her mother Anne.
Mary’s Parents
The names and tradition about Mary’s parents, Anne and Joachim, come from the apocryphal (doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true) gospel of St. James and the apocryphal gospel of the Nativity of Mary (2nd century). The tradition is that Anne was the youngest daughter of a priest Nathan from Bethlehem, descended from the tribe of Levi. Anne married Joachim, who was a native of Galilee. She was childless for twenty years, but after the fervent prayer of both spouses, they had a daughter who would bring blessings to the whole human race.
Anne is the patron of childless women, pregnant women, and grandmothers;
Joachim is the patron of grandfathers. Both have their joint feast on 26th July.
Brief History of the Feast
The emperor Justinian had a basilica built in Constantinople to honour St Anne; it was dedicated in 550. The Greek Church has kept a feast of the Conception by St Anne of the Most Holy Theotokos on 9th December from that time. Anne’s feast was celebrated at Canterbury from 1100 and there is a prayer for the feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Sarum Missal (11th century). France, Spain and Germany have the same feast from around the same time. In 1476 Pope Nicholas IV approved the feast for Rome with its own Mass and Office. This was confirmed in 1568, when Pope St. Pius V published the Roman breviary for the universal Church. There is widespread evidence for the celebration of the feast in Ireland in the 17th century.
Doctrine Disputed
The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was a matter of dispute in the Middle Ages. It is surprising that such champions of Mary as St Bernard and St Thomas Aquinas did not see any theological justification for it as a theological opinion. Eadmer of Canterbury (1064-1124), the companion and secretary to St Anselm, presented an argument from congruity (fittingness) that Mary was free from original sin, using the Latin axiom: Potuit, decuit, ergo fecit (“God was able to do it; it was appropriate; therefore He did it”).
Theology of Bl. John Duns Scotus (1265-1308)
To deal with this question, Bl Scotus made a distinction between the order of nature and the order of time. With Mary, conception and sanctification were simultaneous, producing a twofold situation at the first moment of her existence. Mary, as a human descendant of Adam and Eve, would have contracted the debt of original sin, but simultaneously by a privileged infusion of grace and by a special anticipation of the merits of the Saviour, she ‘became‘ a daughter of God, and was preserved from the consequences of the common lot of fallen nature.
Definition by Pope Bl. Pius IX (1854)
The core of the definition was expressed in the Constitution Inneffabilis Deus in 1854: “We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.”
Visions
It is worth noting that in 1830 St Catherine Labouré experienced a vision in which she saw ”Our Lady’ standing on a globe with rays of light emanating from her hands. The vision was surrounded by an oval frame on which were the words, ‘Oh Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee’.
Also noteworthy is that four years after the definition, when Our Lady appeared at Lourdes to St Bernadette Soubirous, Bernadette asked her, “Would you kindly tell me who you are?”, she replied: “I am the Immaculate Conception“.
Iconography
Eastern Orthodox Christians believe that Mary was without sin for her entire life, but do not accept the formulation of the doctrine that the Mother of God was exempted from the consequences of original sin at the moment of her conception by virtue of the future merits of Her Son. However, many icons depicting the Conception by St Anna show Mary as the Most Holy Theotokos trampling the serpent underfoot.
Baroque era
This theme was not highlighted by painters of the Baroque era. For example, El Greco, Murillo, and Zubaran all made paintings of the Immaculate Conception, showing Mary simply as the beautiful woman of Revelation 12:1 “clothed with the sun and the moon under under her feet“, but no serpent under her feet as the text of Genesis 3:15 (Vulgate) used in the definition might have suggested.
Crushing the Serpent’s Head
This way of depicting this mystery seems to have appeared in the West only after 1854, when a statue depicting Mary crushing the serpent’s head under her feet, was commissioned by Pope Pius IX and designed by Luigi Poletti, and erected at the southern end of Piazza di Spagna in Rome. It is this statue which has been the model for artists depicting the Immaculate Conception ever since. ( c/f image right at the top of this article)
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Memorable Quote for Today
Let those who say that the Church pays too much attention to Mary
give heed to the fact that Our Blessed Lord himself
spent ten times as much of his life with her
than he he gave to his Apostles.
~ Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen ~
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