My favorite personal story in connection with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception happened during my first year at Cornell. I had just finished a year at Oxford of Hebrew and Jewish studies, and I was eager to keep up my knowledge of Biblical Hebrew. So I was sitting in on a class in the Near Eastern Studies department - one isn’t allowed do theology at Cornell, certainly not to have a department with that name - a class which was basically a glorified reading group for selected Old Testament texts. There was one graduate student, not Jewish, and the rest were very much undergraduates and very much Jewish. (Keep in mind that at Cornell, out of every three undergraduate students, one is a well to do WASPy person, the other a Corean, and the third a Jew. And the latter two both come from the greater NYC area.)

I can’t remember exactly what the context was, but it must have been something to do with the development of Hebrew theological thought as seen through the different eras in which the Old Testament texts were written. (Warning: when going into such a class or course of studies, it is very, very difficult to avoid referring to the Old Testament by that name; the preferred nomenclature is the “Hebrew Scriptures”, which can avoid offending both Jew and Christian, I think.)

The professor knew that I was a Catholic - for some reason, I can’t remember. (Maybe I had slipped and referred to it as the Old Testament one too many times!) And he asked me if I could give a similar example (to whatever we’d been talking about) in the Christian tradition. The example being of a belief which had been around for a long time, but hadn’t be codified or set in stone until a rather late date. Right away, I said “the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception”, which wasn’t solemnly defined until the reign of Pius IX during the 19th century but had long been held, I guess, as a sententia certa.

The professor seemed to take this example in stride (he was also Jewish), but the undergraduates were flabbergasted! The Immaculate Conception only became an official, set-in-stone belief in the 19th century?! They just couldn’t belief it.

Unfortunately, I was too slow on the ball to relieve them in regard to the cause of their stupefaction. For like many people, they were under the impression that the “Immaculate Conception” refers to the conception of Our Lord in the womb of the Blessed Virgin by the Holy Ghost. So albeit unwittingly, I’m afraid that I put some further stumbling block in the way of my Jewish brethren when, with great seriousness of mien and a knowledgeable air, I affirmed that only since the 19th century was the Immaculate Conception a de fide proposition.

When we do our next round of apologies to the Jews, I’ll have my own minus peccatum to add to the list.

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