This Wednesday’s feast day (25th March) celebrates the mystery of the Incarnation in which, at the visit of the Archangel Gabriel to the Holy Virgin, Mary gave her consent to receive into her womb the Saviour of the World. We recall this mystery each time we pray the Hail Mary, according to the announcement of the Archangel Gabriel: “The Lord is with thee”. With these simple words of God’s angel we find the dawning revelation of the Word made flesh, who comes to dwell in Mary’s womb; and the affirmation of the supreme dignity of this holy woman, virgin and mother.
We recall each year the close connection between this feast and that of our patroness, St Bernadette. It was on the feast of Our Lady’s Annunciation, 25th March 1858, that Mary spoke to Bernadette the powerful words: “I am the Immaculate Conception”, a statement received by Catholic piety as an affirmation of the dogma of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, solemnly defined some years previously (1854) by Pope Pius IX.
Masses on Wednesday are at 6.30am, 8.30am, 1.10pm (EF, Latin), 5.30pm (sung).
“Adorned from the first instant of her conception with the radiance of an entirely unique holiness, the Virgin of Nazareth is greeted, on God’s command, by an angel messenger as ‘full of grace’, and to the heavenly messenger she replies: ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to thy word’. Thus Mary, a daughter of Adam, consenting to the divine Word, became the mother of Jesus, the one and only Mediator. Embracing God’s salvific will with a full heart and impeded by no sin, she devoted herself totally as a handmaid of the Lord to the person and work of her Son, under Him and with Him, by the grace of almighty God, serving the mystery of redemption.” (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, No. 56).