“Goodbye Spain, land of Mary,” is how John Paul II said goodbye on May 4, 2003 before taking off from Barajas airport. The Pope repeated this phrase countless times, but why? On the one hand, due to the large number of Marian shrines and devotions that exist in Spain, which make religiosity here adopt a markedly feminine aspect, and on the other, because this country has been the bastion of the Immaculate Conception.
For those less versed in the catechism, it is worth starting by explaining what exactly the Immaculate Conception is. Firstly, she is a Marian devotion, like the Virgin of Sorrows, that of Monserrat or that of Fátima. In Catholicism, invocations are nothing more than different ways of referring to the mother of Jesus, using as an excuse a geographical accident, an apparition, one of her attributes or a circumstance in her life.
In this case, what is celebrated is that he was free from original sin – the stain that Adam and Eve caused to fall on all of Humanity – from the moment of his conception in the womb of Saint Anne, his mother. Well, this is not just a tradition, an invocation like any other. According to canon law, it is an “absolutely certain truth about which no doubt hangs.” That is, a dogma.
It is because it is in the Annunciation passage of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, when the archangel Gabriel appears before her and greets her, calling her “full of grace.” This is the documentary justification, but there is also a theological justification, since this makes her an example, the first to benefit from the grace that her son comes to bring to the world. As John Paul II said, she “is what the entire Church desires and hopes to be.”
Despite all this, it was only a century and a half ago that this belief was elevated to the level of dogma. In early Christian times the idea had been controversial (the Orthodox still do not accept it), so the Church became accustomed to treating the issue with a certain ambivalence.
If any pope had referred to it, it was to do like Sixtus IV (1414-1484) and simply say that he was going to respect both those who thought one thing and the opposite. Even the Council of Trent, in the 16th century, which was so definitive in other things, refused to resolve the case.
During all this time there was one exception, which was Spain. Here the cult of the Immaculate Conception dates back to at least 675, when the 11th Council of Toledo invested Wamba, king of the Visigoths, as “defender of the Most Pure Conception of Mary.” As historian John of the Cross explains in Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the Holy Spirit of God (2013), this is why Ferdinand III the Saint (c. 1199-1252), James I the Conqueror (1208-1276), the emperor Charles V (1500-1558) or his son Philip II (1527-1598) carried the banner of the Immaculate Conception in their battles, because they considered themselves heirs of that oath.
If we talk about wars, we cannot ignore what happened during the Eighty Years War. On December 7, 1585, a third of Spain had been trapped on a small Dutch hill called Empel, completely surrounded by water and by a much superior rebel fleet. The men were tired, wet and lacking supplies, but when they were offered to surrender they gave a very Tercios response: “We'll talk about capitulation after we're dead.”
The fact is that they were digging trenches when an infant came across a half-buried image of the Virgin. They made an altar to her, entrusted themselves to her, and that same night a frost occurred that turned the water into ice and allowed them to surround the enemy, annihilating them from behind at dawn. It was December 8, the day of the Immaculate Conception, so since then she has been the patron saint of the Spanish infantry.
In the civil sphere, there had long been countless brotherhoods and brotherhoods created in honor of this devotion, the first being that of Girona in 1330. The level of popular commitment to the defense of this dogma is also expressed in the so-called “oaths.” of the immaculist vow”, through which ordinary people committed themselves to defend this theological truth, with their lives if necessary.
Saint John of Ávila (1500-1569), Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), Saint Teresa of Jesus (1515-1582)…, the list of Hispanic saints – and scholars – who advocated for Rome to recognize the dogma is long. Therefore, when Pope Pius IX finally did so in 1854, he ordered it to be celebrated with a monument in the Roman Piazza di Spagna.
