Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary

On September 8, the Church keeps the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary — the birthday of the woman who would say yes to the angel and bear the Son of God. The feast falls exactly nine months after the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception on December 8, and it is one of only three birthdays the Church's calendar keeps: that of Christ, of his mother, and of John the Baptist — the three whom Scripture marks out as holy from the womb.

The New Testament does not record Mary's birth. The story comes from the second-century Protoevangelium of James, which names her parents Joachim and Anne and tells of their long childlessness and a promise made to God. From at least the sixth century the feast was kept in Jerusalem, where a fifth-century basilica over the site traditionally identified as the home of Mary's parents — now the Church of St. Anne, near the Sheep Pool — gave the day its first liturgical home. The church's own dedication, Sanctae Mariae ubi nata est, "St. Mary's where she was born," is the earliest inscriptional witness to the feast. From Syria and Palestine the observance passed to Constantinople under the Emperor Maurice around 600, and Roman monks brought it to the West by the end of the seventh century. Pilgrims to Jerusalem can still visit St. Anne's crusader-era church, its crypt marking the traditional birthplace.

Several great Marian shrines are dedicated explicitly to the Nativity, and September 8 is their patronal feast. The most important of all German-speaking pilgrimage sites, Mariazell in Austria, is the Basilica of the Birth of the Virgin Mary — Mariä Geburt — its Gnadenkapelle holding the Romanesque Magna Mater Austriae statue that has drawn pilgrims since the twelfth century. Šiluva in Lithuania is the great Nativity shrine of the Baltic: the Basilica of the Nativity of the BVM, built on the site where the weeping Virgin appeared to shepherd children in 1608 — Europe's first Church-approved Marian apparition. The September 8 feast, Šilinės, drew pilgrims from Lithuania and Protestant Prussia from the fifteenth century, was suppressed under the Soviets, and was revived in 1990; John Paul II pilgrimaged there in 1993. Velankanni in Tamil Nadu, India — the "Lourdes of the East" — holds its annual feast on September 8, the date of the sailors' rescue miracle that fixed the shrine's patronal day; some five million pilgrims come each year, making it one of the largest Catholic pilgrimages in Asia.

The liturgical date is also the dedication feast of the Cathedral of Milan — the Santa Maria Nascente, "Holy Mary's Birth," whose golden statue of the Virgin stands atop the spire that defines the city's skyline. In France the day is known to winegrowers as Notre-Dame de la Vendange, "Our Lady of the Grape Harvest," and the best grapes of the season are brought to the local church to be blessed. In Malta the feast doubles as Victory Day, commemorating the turning of the Great Siege of 1565 — the day the Christian fleet, holding out against the Ottoman assault on Fort St Angelo, finally saw relief arrive.

The wider Marian shrine network holds September 8 within its own annual cycles. Loreto keeps the feast in the Holy House, where tradition places the very room of the Annunciation. Cotignac, in Provence, holds a votive Mass at the sanctuary of Notre-Dame de Grâces, where a woodcutter reported an apparition of the Virgin with the Christ Child in 1519 — the apparition fell on the octave of the Nativity, September 9, 10, and 11. Chartres, whose cathedral shrine of Notre-Dame Sous Terre honours a much older Marian image, was from medieval times the goal of one of the great September pilgrimages of France. And at Kevelaer in Germany, the Marienbildchen — the small printed image of "Mary Comforter of the Afflicted" — keeps the day within its own cycle of Marian devotions.