It Had to be Immaculate

8 September 2025  Matthew 1:18-23

Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

“She was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit…” Matthew 1:18

“She was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:18). Well, not quite. She was found to be with child, but no one at the time was thinking of the agency of the Holy Spirit, certainly not Joseph, who wasn’t naïve about such things, and wanted a divorce – a quiet one, but a divorce all the same.

But maybe it was theologically necessary to put it this way, kind of like the whole dogma of the Immaculate Conception. There is not the merest, solitary shred of historical evidence for the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. There is no historical case to be made for it, only a theological one. It had to be that way because that was the only way that God could be with us.

To talk about “original sin” is a good way to get a lot of hackles up, but if we think about it as the corruption of the will, there is general agreement that humanity has gone wrong. We all know that the world is not as good as we want it to be, nor are we as good as we want to be. We all know that we are influenced by factors outside our control, and that these things affect not only individuals, but humanity as a whole. There is no historical memory of any time when it was otherwise. St. Augustine saw this corruption even in infants – their screams and tantrums do not hurt us not because infants lack the will to hurt us, but only because they lack the strength (Confessions, 1:7). There has never been, in the memory of our species, any indication that these tendencies are not passed down from one generation to the next. So, if God was going to be with us via a human womb, then that womb had to be protected from all that from the start.

So, Mary had to be conceived and born without that corruption, a prevenient grace, coming long before she would need it to bear the Messiah, God with us.

Mary couldn’t be just “found with child,” suggesting that maybe she succumbed to the corruption of her nature the way we all do sometimes, the way Joseph suspected. She could only “be found with child of the Holy Spirit” – never a doubt about the purity of Mary’s will. If Joseph couldn’t spot that this was “of the Holy Spirit” that was a flaw in Joseph, not Mary.

That is the official Catholic teaching.

It is also one of God’s favorite ways of being with us. When God is preparing for big transitions, large displays of His providence and power, there are miraculous childbirth stories.

Abraham and Sarah, way past prime time for having children, suddenly conceive Isaac, the promise of the continuation of the covenant.

Moses, born a Jewish boy in danger of being heaved into the Nile and killed, saved and raised by an Egyptian princess in defiance of her father the Pharaoh, and as an old man savior of his people from Egyptian bondage.

Samuel, born to a barren woman, dedicated to God from birth, the last of the Judges and the first of the Prophets.

John the Baptist, another birth to elderly parents, the “voice of one crying in the wilderness,” the last of the Old Testament prophets, the herald of the Messiah.

Mary, and Jesus.

It’s God’s way of saying, “Watch this!”

“She was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit.”

God with us.

Watch this!