THE NATIVITY OF BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, MOTHER OF GOD
8 September 2009
HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOTHER MARY!! WE LOVE YOU!!
The Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary was celebrated at least by
the sixth century, when St. Romanos the Melodist, an Eastern Christian who
composed many of the hymns used in the Eastern Catholic and Eastern Orthodox
liturgies, composed a hymn for the feast. The feast spread to Rome in the
seventh century, but it was a couple more centuries before it was celebrated
throughout the West.
The source for the story of the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the
Protoevangelium of James, an apocryphal gospel written about A.D. 150. From it,
we learn the names of Mary's parents, Joachim and Anna, as well as the
tradition that the couple was childless until an angel appeared to Anna and
told her that she would conceive. (Many of the same details appear also in the
later apocryphal Gospel of the Nativity of Mary.)
The traditional date of the feast, September 8, falls exactly nine months after
the feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary. Perhaps because of its close
proximity to the feast of the Assumption of Mary, the Nativity of the Blessed
Virgin Mary is not celebrated today with the same solemnity as the Immaculate
Conception. It is, nonetheless, a very important feast, because it prepares the
way for the birth of Christ.
