Was Mary Also Conceived by the Holy Spirit?

Question:  Does the Immaculate Conception of Mary mean that St Anne conceived her by the Holy Spirit?

Answer: The most important thing to know about the Immaculate Conception is that it refers to Mary having been born without the stain of original sin. Immaculate means without stain; in this context, the method of conception by St Anne is only of incidental interest.

And, obviously, we must not confuse the Immaculate Conception of Mary with Mary’s conception of Jesus, as many people do. Still, both were miraculous conceptions.

According to tradition, St Anne and her husband Joachim had been unable to conceive a child, much to their sorrow. St Anne was at an age when women don’t normally conceive, but God answered their prayers with an unexpected pregnancy. That conception is considered miraculous, regardless of whether it involved the intervention of a father.

The paternity question itself is the subject of a debate which goes back to the early Church. In the 8th century, St John Damascene, the Syrian Doctor of the Church, argued that God’s supernatural intervention at Mary’s conception was so comprehensive that Anne and Joachim were filled and purified by the Holy Spirit, and thus freed from sexual concupiscence.

The 1917 version of the Catholic Encyclopedia takes a different view: “[Mary’s] body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation.”

Either way, the mechanics of Mary’s conception by Anne are not part of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a teaching that goes back to the 4th century but was declared a dogma only in 1854 by Pope Pius IX, in the apostolic constitution Ineffabilis Deus.

“In the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, [Mary] was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin,” Ineffabilis Deus states.

The stain of original sin did not need to be removed from Mary’s soul, as it is from others by baptism, because it never was in her soul — regardless of the generative activity of her parents.

Published in the December 2022 issue of The Southern Cross magazine