The Nativity of Our Lady: The Rising of the Moon

This article was originally published by the Dutch site My Immaculate Heart will triumph.

The Church keeps three birthdays in the year and no more. Our Lord's at Christmas, Saint John the Baptist's in June, and Our Lady's on the eighth of September. Every other saint is remembered on the day he died, because that is the day he was born into heaven. These three alone are kept on the day they arrived here.

Why the Church celebrates a birth at all

We keep birthdays because a birthday is the day a person walked onto the stage of this life. It is also the day the world he was given to live in became richer by one presence.

Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, in a conference given on this feast on 8 September 1963,[1] put it plainly. Every birth is a favour of God and an enrichment of human society, because every human being has great value. That holds even though the child is conceived in original sin. It holds even where some fault runs in the family that the child will carry and have to fight, since the fight itself is an increase of glory.

So when we keep a person's birthday, we celebrate what he brought with him. The light proper to him, the virtues he is meant to fulfil, the wealth of soul he has in him.

Which puts the question this feast asks. What did Our Lady bring?

What she brought with her

The answer is hard to say because it is so large.

In the order of nature, Our Lady was conceived without original sin. Since the fall of Adam she is the one creature in the world free of every stain. Prof. Plinio called her an incomparable lily in the beauty of the human race. In this exile, in the middle of this humanity, there appeared a creature without original sin.

To that add everything else she carried. Our Lord gave her, in the order of nature, a personality of great richness, so that her presence among men was already a treasure nobody could measure.

And to that add the graces that came with her, which are the greatest graces God has ever given to anyone.

Why the sunrise pales

Put those together and you begin to see what her entry into the world was.

Prof. Plinio said the sunrise pales beside it. Every grand phenomenon of nature that we think precious is nothing next to it. The most solemn entry of a king into his own kingdom is nothing next to it.

He had a line he liked to use on this feast. Blessed is the day that saw Our Lady born. Blessed are the stars that shone on Our Lady as a little girl. Blessed is the moment when her parents saw that the virgin creature called to be the Mother of the Redeemer had been born.

The joy of all the angels in heaven, and the joy of whatever just souls somehow knew of it, must have greeted that moment.

The world she was born into

It is worth being exact about that world, because the feast means less if we imagine it arriving into calm.

The world was submerged in paganism. Every vice ruled. Idolatry had taken the earth. Corruption had reached inside the religion of Israel, which existed to prepare the way for the Church. By any reckoning a man could have made at the time, the devil had won outright.

Then, at the moment His mercy had fixed, God broke the wall. He began to overturn the order of the devil at the point where it was least imaginable, and He did it by letting a girl be born. She was the blessed root from which Our Lord would come.

Nothing about that day looked like the beginning of anything. That is closer to the point of the feast than any of the splendour we hang on it afterwards.

The names of her parents, Joachim and Anne, reach us through the Protoevangelium of James, a text of about the year 150 that stands outside the canon of Scripture. The Gospels do not record her birth at all. The Church has kept the day regardless. The earliest evidence for the feast is a hymn Saint Romanos the Melodist composed for it between 536 and 556, and the first liturgical commemoration is tied to the dedication, in that same century, of the basilica in Jerusalem raised on the spot where tradition places the house of Joachim and Anne. Rome took the feast from the East in the seventh century. Why the eighth of September was chosen, nobody knows.

The objection

Somebody will say: what does the arrival of a baby mean for human society? A child who has no words. A child with no use of reason. A child who influences nothing.

Prof. Plinio raised that objection himself, and then answered it.

What she was already doing

Nothing of the kind was true of Our Lady.

Because she was conceived without original sin, she had the use of reason from the first moment of her existence. Already in her mother's womb Our Lady was thinking, and thinking the highest thoughts, living in the womb of Saint Anne as in a true tabernacle.

And from there she began to pray for the human race.

Before any face had seen her, Our Lady was asking for the coming of the Messiah. She was asking for the ruin of every evil in the human race. And there, Prof. Plinio said, the highest intention of her life was surely already forming in her mind: to become the handmaid of the Redeemer, to serve Him and to help Him.

So Our Lady had begun to shape the destiny of the human race before she was born.

The Gospel gives us something like a proof of it at one remove. When Our Lady came to Elizabeth, John the Baptist leapt for joy in his mother's womb at the sound of her voice (Luke 1:41). John was not free of original sin, though he was cleansed of it in that instant. Whatever grace could do in him at the sound of her greeting says something about what she herself was, from the beginning.

The broken sceptre

Her presence on earth was a source of grace to everyone who came near her in her childhood, and before it.

If a woman was healed by touching the hem of Our Lord's garment (Luke 8:44), the Mother chosen to carry Him was not a lesser vessel.

From her birth, small child as she was, great graces began to come down on the human race. The devil began to be crushed. He began to understand that something in his sceptre was broken and would never be repaired.

Like a dawn in a life

Prof. Plinio drew one more thing out of this feast, and it is the part that reaches the ordinary reader most directly.

How often does something like this happen in the spiritual life of a Catholic? A soul is in a fight. It is in difficulty, turning and turning in it, with no idea when the blessed day will come that some great grace puts an end to the torment and finally moves the soul forward.

Then, in the night of the worst difficulty and the deepest dark, Our Lady appears, and the difficulties begin to come apart. She appears like a dawn in that life, and begins to be something in that soul which the man did not know was there.

The rising of the moon

When we speak of the Nativity of Our Lord, we think of the rising of the sun.

Our Lady is compared to the moon.

The moonrise has not the glory of the sunrise and does not pretend to it. But how like the sunrise it is. How welcome it is, how it lifts the heart, how it consoles anybody who has been sitting a long while in the dark.

That is the nearest image we have of what her birth was.

Her birthday falls in our spring

In the old world the eighth of September falls at the close of the harvest, when the year is turning down toward winter.

Here it falls a week into spring.

The southern calendar gives this feast something the old world cannot have. Our Lady's birthday arrives here when everything is beginning.

What you can do today

Assist at Holy Mass if you can get to one. It is her birthday.

Pray the Rosary, and stay a little longer on the Joyful Mysteries, which belong to her early life.

Read the antiphon of the feast, printed below, and say it slowly.

Put flowers in front of her image at home. A birthday is kept with something, and children understand that better than we do.

Ask her for one grace, named. That last one deserves its own paragraph, because Prof. Plinio was particular about it.

The grace to ask for

He told his listeners to take a moment on the evening of this feast, gather themselves, and ask Our Lady for a favour.

Then he suggested what the favour should be. He said to ask that Our Lady make a covenant with each of us, a bond of kinship in our dealings with her, so that she takes us under her own protection and heals in us the wounds of soul she wishes to heal.

Then he added the line that makes it worth doing. Sometimes it is not exactly what we imagine, but something else. Whatever our soul most needs, may she give us that, on the evening of her birth.

A prayer for the feast

The antiphon the Church sings for the Nativity of Our Lady:[3]

Thy Nativity, O Virgin Mother of God, proclaimed joy to the whole world: for out of thee arose the Sun of Justice, Christ our God, who, taking away the curse, gave blessing, and confounding death, gave us everlasting life.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

References

[1] Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, conference of 8 September 1963. Published in Dutch translation by Mijn Onbevlekt Hart zal triomferen.
[2] Protoevangelium of James, c. AD 150. On the origin of the feast, Catholic Encyclopedia, Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, newadvent.org/cathen/10712b.htm.
[3] Antiphon Nativitas tua, from the Office of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Last updated: 7 September 2026 06:59