Happy Birthday, Mother Mary!
Let us celebrate the birth of the Virgin Mary; let us worship her Son, Christ the Lord. Each Year, the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary is celebrated on September 8. Usually the church celebrates the feast day of a saint on the date of their death, which is actually the day remembered as their birth into everlasting life. Mary, however, was conceived without sin as a special grace because God had selected her to become the Mother of His Son. Her birth is a cause for great joy as it is considered the "dawn of our salvation" (Pope Paul VI, Marialis Cultus,1972.) Although there is no reference to Mary's birth in the Sacred Scriptures, the names of Mary's parents, Joachim and Anna, appear in the Protoevangelium of James (5:2), which is an apocryphal writing from the late 2nd century. According to this account, Joachim and Anna were also beyond the years of child-bearing, but prayed and fasted that God would grant their desire for a child. The primary foc...