From The Sacramentary by Bl. Ildefonso Schuster:
As Eve, our first Mother, arose from the side of Adam, dazzling with life and innocence, so Mary came forth, bright and immaculate from the heart of the eternal Word, who, by the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, as the Liturgy teaches us, was pleased to form that body and soul which were to be, one day, his Tabernacle and altar. This is the sublime meaning of the feast of the Birthday of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is the dawn foretelling the day which already breaks behind the eternal hills, the mystic rod which rises from the venerable root of Jesse; the stream which springs from Paradise; it is the symbolical fleece which is stretched on our dry earth to catch the miraculous dew. This is the new Eve, that is to say the life and the Mother of all the living, who is born to-day for those to whom the first Eve became the Mother of sin and death.
Today’s feast, the Nativity of Mary, is older than the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, which was precisely nine months ago. I’ve always been puzzled that in the Vetus Ordo the Nativity of Mary is a feast of lesser weight (2nd class) than the Nativity of John the Baptist (1st class).
Stop for a moment. Consider what our eternal prospects were before the birth not only of Our Lord, but also before the birth of His Mother, from whom He took our human nature, the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Ponder the state of slavery to sin in which we were bound and, after death, the strong possibility of everlasting separation from God.
Given what our prospects were, celebrating the birth of our fallen humanity’s solitary boast is a really good idea.
Holy Church, in celebrating liturgically her holy birth for a long time, ultimately reasoned back to Mary’s holy conception. As St. Thomas Aquinas argued,
“The Church celebrates the feast of our Lady’s Nativity. Now the Church does not celebrate feasts except of those who are holy. Therefore, even in her birth the Blessed Virgin was holy. Therefore, she was sanctified in the womb.” (STh III, q. 27, a. 1)
As we worship, so do we believe.
As we believe, so do we worship.
Change our worship you change belief, and vice versa.
We are our rites.
The ancient Roman observance of the Feast started around the time of Pope Honorius I (+638), though it was celebrated earlier in the Greek East. The station church for the feast was, of course, St. Mary Major and the Collect church was St. Adrian in the Roman Forum, which was originally the Curia or Senate House built by Julius Caesar. In the 13th c. 18 images of Mary from the different diaconal tituli (early parishes) were carried in procession. The Pope would change from shoes to slippers for the procession to St. Mary Major. He took off his slippers at the threshold of the basilica and as the Te Deum was sung his feet were washed with warm water before the Mass began.
As Blessed Ildefonso says:
Mary became Mother of the Divine Word Incarnate for the sake of sinful man. Will she not be to us also a loving Mother?
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Today’s feast is also, strangely, of lower rank in the Novus Ordo as well. The nativity of John the Baptist and the Immaculate Conception are both solemnities but today is a mere “feast”.
As such, when it happens to fall on a Sunday, it is suppressed. That said, popular piety wins out, so I’ve noticed a trend that when this happens, the hymns all happen to be Marian hymns, even if the propers and readings are for the Sunday.
Only in the “Bugnini” Vetus Ordo! before that it was a Double with simple Octave. So trumped the Sunday.
It is also the feast of the Victory over the Turk at the lifting of the siege of Malta, celebrated in that eponymous Order as the “Victory Mass”, and earlier as the feast of Our Lady of Philermo, in honour of the precious Rhodian icon.
The amount of evidence piling up gives weight to the prescience of the Ottaviani intervention.
“… the Novus Ordo represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session XXII of the Council of Trent…”
Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi
As I said above…the faithful know it’s Our Lady’s birthday. Regardless of the rubrics, they are aware. They will find a way to celebrate Her.
As I noted, at the local parish Novus Ordo Mass I attended this morning, the readings and propers ignored the feast completely, yet all the hymns sung by the choir were Marian hymns….the choir and everyone in that church knew in their hearts that it was Her birthday.
For Eastern Catholics ( Orthodox in communion with Rome), the birthday of Mary. The Theotokos, is the Sunday Divine Liturgy.
I’ve always been puzzled that in the Vetus Ordo the Nativity of Mary is a feast of lesser weight (2nd class) than the Nativity of John the Baptist (1st class).
That’s also so in the Novus Ordo. Only the East does it differently, where the Nativity of our Lady is among the “Twelve Great Feasts” and the Nativity of the Baptist is not (though among the “also great feasts” or whatever they called that come right next, I believe).
The reason is, I believe, not terribly difficult to see. St. John is specific in that we celebrate his nativity at all, because he was sanctified in the womb, but if we did have a particular feast-of-a-mystery for his nativity it would be a major-double at the very most.
It is a first-class double because it additionally takes on the rôle of The Feast of St. John, and of course he has a first-class double somewhere. (Peter Kwasniewski, I believe it was he, says the Easterners celebrate “the all-around awesomeness” of him on January 7th, which they call a synaxis; that sort of thing.)
Whereas our Lady’s Nativity is a second-class double all in its own right, and the thing it actually makes it holy, the Immaculate Conception, is of the first class.
And so far that is indeed logical. What does make this strange that in 1962 second-feasts were banished from the Sundays, a somewhat untraditional idea to begin with (I do not dispute the fact that something it made sense in 1910 to curb the mass of Sunday-replacing doubles somewhat or perhaps even somewhat more, it has always been the Roman tradition to celebrate the more important saints on such Sundays and not only the very most important ones), our Lady did not get an exception for her nativity. That is even less understandable than for Apostle Feasts.
Sorry; my first paragraph was a quote (of our Reverend host) and should have been in italics.