One of the most confusing Catholic beliefs, I think, is that of today’s solemnity.

The Immaculate Conception doesn’t refer to Jesus—it refers to Mary. It means that Mary was conceived without original sin in the womb of her mother, St. Ann, as a singular grace. It doesn’t mean she’s a goddess. It means she was special prepared to be the mother of God. In Mother Mary Francis’ words, Mary was “pre-cleaned.”

(For more on the Church’s Marian doctrine, check out this Catholic 101 post I wrote.)

“She did not have that downward pull that we have, but she still had choices, and she could have wrong ones or right ones. She could have insisted after the finding in the temple that Jesus explain what he meant. She could have said, ‘I am your Mother, and I have got to get this straight. I don’t understand what you are talking about.’ But she preferred, she chose, to accept what was to her not understandable, and to return to her humble home and to go about her duties and to ponder these things in her heart…She chose the will of God and she chose is freely—again, we say, unencumbered by the downward pull of concupiscence that we know so well, but still a woman quite capable of doing right or wrong, or doing good or better or best.

“It is very important that we do not allow our Lady to be distanced from us by her Immaculate Conception, but to be brought closer to us. She is the one to teach us poor sinners because she is called the Refuge of Sinners. Our Lord did not give her to St. John and say, ‘Now I am giving her to you, and she is the Mother of all the flawlessly holy ones.’ But he gave her to be the Mother of all persons, of all men and he knew what was in them, what is in each one of us, our weaknesses as well as our strengths.”

—Mother Mary Francis, PCC, Come Lord Jesus: Meditations on the Art of Waiting