Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Nine months after December 8, the Church keeps Mary’s birthday. The arithmetic is deliberate. The Immaculate Conception is the first moment of her existence, preserved from original sin by the merits of Christ. September 8 is her birth into the world that birth was meant to save. She is the only saint besides John the Baptist whose earthly nativity is a feast. The reason is the same in both cases: their births already belong to the Gospel, not merely to their later achievements.

Scripture does not tell the story of Mary’s parents or of the day she was born. The names Joachim and Anne, the rejected offering, and the birth to a barren couple come from the Protoevangelium of James, a second-century Christian writing that is not the Bible. The Church does not read it as Scripture. She does receive the feast, and she has long been willing to honor Anne and Joachim as Mary’s parents. What the liturgy actually celebrates is not the detail of that book. It is the birth of the woman who will consent to the Incarnation. An old antiphon calls her nativity the dawn of salvation.

September 8 is a feast, in white, with the Gloria. It is not a solemnity and not a holy day of obligation. If it falls on a Sunday in Ordinary Time, it is celebrated in place of that Sunday. The Gospel most often heard is Matthew’s genealogy, the long list that ends with “Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.” Mary appears at the end of Israel’s story as the one through whom the story becomes flesh. Some Masses use the Gospel of the birth of John, by extension, or other texts allowed for Marian feasts. The genealogy is the sharpest: her birthday is celebrated by reading the names of the people who waited.

Popular devotion in some countries treats September 8 as a harvest feast or as the day to bless seed and wine. Those customs can be kept without becoming the meaning of the day. The meaning is a birth. God prepared a mother. The world did not notice. The Church did, and still does, nine months after she celebrated the conception that made this birth different from every other.

Micah 5, the prophecy of Bethlehem and of she who is to give birth, is a classic first reading. Romans 8, those God foreknew he also predestined, is heard of Mary in a singular way and of every Christian in the common way. The preface of the Virgin Mary, or the proper prayers of the feast, praise her nativity as the hope of the whole world and the dawn of salvation.