"I am the Immaculate Conception"

[Monica4316]

Hi
I’m watching the movie “Song of Bernadette”… in it, St Bernadette tells the priest that Our Lady of Lourdes said “I am the Immaculate Conception”. His initial point was that since a conception is an event, Mary could not have said this because it doesn’t make sense grammatically.

I’m wondering, - do we know why Mary referred to herself in this way? Has the Church explained it, since accepting Lourdes as an apparition?

btw I completely believe in the Lourdes apparition I’m just interested in what Mary meant.

thanks God bless.

 

[MarkThompson]

Grammatically, it does make sense, though the construction is not overly common. Take a verb like “create”: the process of doing it is “creation,” as in “The world’s creation took six days.” But we also call the product of that process a “creation,” as in “The world is God’s creation.” Or take the verb “establish.” The process of establishing something is called “establishment,” and likewise we can call the thing established “an establishment.” Similarly with “explain” (the process of “explanation” produces “an explanation”), “observe” (an hour of careful observation may produce useful observations), and others. So it is with “conceive.” This can happen in an everyday context with the verb, as when a person might say that in the process of thinking he conceived a new business idea and so the idea was “his own conception.” Correspondingly, if God carries out the process of an immaculate conception, the resulting person can be called “an immaculate conception” of God’s.

Grammatically, cases where the same word can be used in two senses like this are called instances of “process-product ambiguity.” The prime case is with the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids Congress to make laws “respecting an establishment of religion.” Historically, the process-meaning was almost certainly what was intended (i.e., the narrow prohibition that Congress was not to engage in the process of establishing a religion), but in subsequent practice it has been interpreted oppositely (the broad ban on making laws dealing with existing religious establishments).

I will also hold out the possibility that Mary meant “I am the Immaculate Conception” in the slightly metaphorical sense in which Jesus meant “I am the Resurrection.” But, if need be, the sentence can be read strictly grammatically.

 

[Monica4316]

Thanks for the explanation! I forgot that Jesus calls Himself the Resurrection and the Life… certainly then Mary can call herself the Immaculate Conception

God bless!

 

[FCEGM]

Monica, St. Maximilian Kolbe presents some beautiful insights into Mary, the Immaculate Conception, in The Immaculate Conception and the Holy Spirit.

 

[Mijoy2]

Perhaps in the same way as Ronald Reagan was “The Great Communicator”. When we refer to Reagan this way, the term is a proper noun.

Don’t go on taken my word for it though, I ain’t no english major. I slept through that part of my schoolin’ days.

 

[JRKH]

Another important aspect of this is that she refered to herself in this way because, as pointed out in the movie, it was something that Bernadette herself did not understand, and had never heard of, but it was immediately recognized by the Priest.

The Immaculate Conception had only been dogmatically declaredsome 3 years earlier. Bernadette, the barely educated daughter of a poor family in a remote part of France in the mid 19th century, had no idea what it meant. All she did was deliver the message just as the Lady gave it to her.
In this way, the Priest would be hard pressed to ignore or reject the visons as something in Bernadette’s imagination.
It was a brilliant stroke on the part of God and Our Lady to reveal herself in this way.

Peace
James

 

[Bob_Crowley]

Another important aspect of this is that she refered to herself in this way because, as pointed out in the movie, it was something that Bernadette herself did not understand, and had never heard of, but it was immediately recognized by the Priest.

The Immaculate Conception had only been dogmatically declaredsome 3 years earlier. Bernadette, the barely educated daughter of a poor family in a remote part of France in the mid 19th century, had no idea what it meant. All she did was deliver the message just as the Lady gave it to her.
In this way, the Priest would be hard pressed to ignore or reject the visons as something in Bernadette’s imagination.
It was a brilliant stroke on the part of God and Our Lady to reveal herself in this way.

Peace
James

Apparently when Bernadette reported this to the priest, it shook him to the core. He of all people would have known that Bernardette would have little inkling of the dogma, and in so doing, was confirming not only who the apparition was, but the truth of the doctrine at the same time.

God had other reasons for sending her at that time, as pointed out by Bishop Sheen in his essay, “The Assumption and the Modern World”, viz…

*“The definition of the Immaculate Conception was made when the Modern World was born. Within five years of that date, and within six months of the apparition of Lourdes where Mary said, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” Charles Darwin wrote his Origin of Species, Karl Marx completed his Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel (“Religion is the Opium of the people”), and John Stuart Mill published his Essay on Liberty. At the moment the spirit of the world was drawing up a philosophy that would issue in two World Wars in twenty-one years, and the threat of a third, the Church came forward to challenge the falsity of the new philosophy. Darwin took man’s mind off his Divine Origin and fastened it on an unlimited future when he would become a kind of God. Marx was so impressed with this idea of inevitable progress that he asked Darwin if he would accept a dedication of one of his books. Then, following Feuerbach, Marx affirmed not a bourgeois atheism of the intellect, but an atheism of the will, in which man hates God because man is God. Mill reduced the freedom of the new man to license and the right to do whatever he pleases, thus preparing a chaos of conflicting egotisms, which the world would solve by Totalitarianism.”