8 September

Today the churches of the East and West celebrate the birth of Mary, the mother of the Lord. The first source that recounts the event is the so-called Protoevangelium of James according to which Mary was born in Jerusalem in the house of Joachim and Anna. Here in the 4th century the Basilica of Saint Anna was built and on the day of its dedication the nativity of the Mother of God was celebrated. The festival then spread to Constantinople and was introduced to the West by Sergius I, a pope of Syrian origin. «Those that God has always known, he also predestined them": Dante almost seems to paraphrase Saint Paul's verse when he defines Mary as "fixed term of eternal counsel".
From eternity, The Father works for the preparation of the All-Holy, of She who was to become the mother of her Son, the temple of the Holy Spirit. The geneaology of Jesus proposed by the Gospel of Matthew culminates in the expression «Joseph, Mary's husband, from which Jesus called Christ was born". With Mary, so, the hour of the definitive David has come, of the full establishment of the kingdom of God. Furthermore, with his birth the womb offered by humanity to God takes shape so that the incarnation of the Word in the history of men takes place. Finally, Mary as a child is also an image of the new humanity, the one from whom her Son will remove the heart of stone to give her a heart of flesh that accepts the precepts of God in docility. Read More