NEWS STORY: Pope Prays for Peace on 150th Anniversary of Immaculate Conception Dogma

c. 2004 Religion News Service VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II prayed to the Virgin Mary for peace in Iraq and throughout the world on Wednesday (Dec. 8) at solemn ceremonies marking the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The ailing 84-year-old pontiff presided over a Mass […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY _ Pope John Paul II prayed to the Virgin Mary for peace in Iraq and throughout the world on Wednesday (Dec. 8) at solemn ceremonies marking the 150th anniversary of the proclamation of the Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

The ailing 84-year-old pontiff presided over a Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, led prayers from his study window and then drove across the River Tiber to pay homage to the Virgin at her statue near the Spanish Steps in the center of Rome.


The dogma, proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in St. Peter’s Basilica on Dec. 8, 1854, holds that the mother of Christ was conceived without original sin. Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant churches do not share the belief.

The Immaculate Conception dogma is significant because it marked the first time a pope declared an infallible teaching; the second, in 1950, declared in the Assumption that Mary was miraculously lifted into heaven.

John Paul, who has had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary since childhood, placed the letter M on his papal coat of arms above the motto “totus tuus (wholely yours).” He made a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine of Lourdes in France in August as part of this year’s anniversary celebrations.

Because the effects of Parkinson’s disease sometimes make it difficult for the pope to enunciate clearly, he left it to Archbishop Leonardo Sandri, undersecretary of state, to read most of his homily.

But it was John Paul who said the concluding prayer, calling on the Virgin “to obtain peace and salvation for all peoples. May the eternal father, who wanted you as the immaculate mother of the redeemer, renew in our time too, through you, the wonders of his merciful love.”

At midday, the pope led hundreds of pilgrims, who gathered in St. Peter’s Square in a driving rain, in the Angelus prayer. He called the immaculate conception “a beacon of light for humanity of every time.”

His prayer for peace this time was devoted to Iraq where gunmen bombed an Armenian Orthodox and Chaldean church in the tense city of Mosul, northwest of Baghdad, on Tuesday.


“I express my spiritual closeness to the faithful, shaken by the attack, and I implore the Lord, through the intercession of the Immaculate Virgin, that the dear Iraqi people might finally know a time of reconciliation and peace,” the pope said.

Keeping a tradition begun by Pope Pius XII in 1955, John Paul drove to Piazza Mignanelli at late afternoon to pray at the bronze statue of the Virgin Mary atop a tall, richly decorated marble column. Pius IX had the statue erected in 1856 to commemorate the Immaculate Conception dogma.

A light drizzle stopped as John Paul arrived in his glass-sided “popemobile” to the applause of thousands of pilgrims, Christmas shoppers and Romans marking what is both a church and a civic holiday in Rome.

Unable to kneel as he did in past years, the pope sat on a wheeled throne beside an oriental rug at the base of the statue to read a 33-line prayer in the form of a poem in a relatively strong and clear voice.

Calling on the “Immaculate Virgin,” he prayed, “Help us to build a world where the life of man may be always loved and defended, every form of violence exiled and the peace of all strongly sought.”

KRE/JL END RNS

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