Catholic Fire

Your birth, O Blessed Virgin Mary, fills the whole world with a sweet consolation and a holy joy, because of you was born our Jesus, our God, who has taken away from us the curse in which we were plunged by the sin of our first parents, and filled us with all kinds of blessings.  ~ St. John Vianney “The Immaculate Virgin…invites us not to fix our eyes on her but to pass beyond, and as much as possible, to enter into the mystery in which she was conceived: the mystery of God who is One and Three, full of grace and fidelity.”  ~ Pope St. John Paul II The Catholic Church celebrates the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary on its traditional fixed date of September 8, nine months after the December 8 celebration of her Immaculate Conception as the child of Saints Joachim and Anne. History of this feast day The feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, one of the oldest of the Marian solemnities, was mentioned by the Church Fathers in the early fifth century. ...

'The Birth of the Virgin', fresco by Juan de Borgoña, Cathedral of Toledo, c. 1495 When the time had come for human nature to encounter the divine and to be so intimately united to it that the two would make but one person, it was necessary that each should already be manifested in its integrity. God, on his part, revealed himself in a manner befitting God, but it was the Virgin alone who threw light on human nature... For it truly seems that if God assumed human nature, not at its origin but in the fullness of time (Gal 4,4), this was because before that time this nature had not yet been fully brought to birth, whereas now, in Mary, it appeared in its integrity for the first time... All this is what we have come to celebrate so festively today. The Virgin's birthday is likewise that of the whole world since this day saw the birth of the first fully human being. Now «the earth» has truly «yielded its fruit» (Ps 67[66],7), the earth that, with its thorns and thistles, always...