Why the Church Celebrates Mary's Birthday, and Almost Nobody Else's
The Church remembers thousands of saints, and marks only three of their birthdays.
Pick any saint and look up their feast day, and you will almost certainly be looking at the day they died.
This is not morbid bookkeeping. The early Christians called the day of a martyr’s death their dies natalis, their birthday, on the grounds that the day you leave this life is the day you are actually born. The word stuck, and the practice with it. When the Church marks a saint, it is usually marking a death.
Out of the whole crowded calendar, there are three exceptions. Three people whose actual, earthly, came-into-the-world birthday gets its own feast.
One is Christmas. One is the birth of John the Baptist on June 24. The third is September 8, the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Why those three
The reasoning behind the short list is older than most people assume, and it is consistent.
A birthday, in the Church’s traditional thinking, is not obviously a thing to celebrate, because everybody arrives carrying original sin. The day of death is the day that is finally dealt with. So you celebrate the exit rather than the entrance.
That logic makes room for exactly three exceptions, and they are the three cases where the Church holds the person did not arrive in the ordinary condition. Christ is sinless. Mary, by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, was preserved from original sin from the first instant. And John the Baptist is held to have been sanctified in his mother’s womb, on the strength of the scene in Luke where Elizabeth feels the child leap at the sound of Mary’s voice.
Three people whose beginning was worth marking on its own account. Everyone else gets their death day.
Where September 8 comes from
The date is the interesting part, and it does not work the way most people guess.
The obvious assumption is that September 8 was calculated backward from December 8, the Immaculate Conception, since the two are exactly nine months apart. It went the other way. The birthday feast came first, by several centuries. The feast of Mary’s conception was set afterward, counting back nine months from a date the Church was already keeping.
Where the September date itself came from is less certain. The feast appears first in the Christian East, and the best guess connects it to Jerusalem, where a church was built on what tradition identified as the site of Mary’s birthplace, near the Pool of Bethesda. The dedication anniversary of a church very often became the feast, and that is the likeliest route. It was being kept in the East by the sixth century, and Rome took it up in the seventh, where Pope Sergius I gave it a procession and set it among the principal Marian feasts.
Once established it spread widely. In parts of medieval Europe it fell conveniently at the close of harvest and picked up local customs accordingly, which is how feasts usually acquire their furniture.
It is not in the Bible either
Scripture says nothing about Mary’s birth. Not her date, not her parents, not the circumstances.
What we have instead comes from the same second-century document that gives us her parents’ names: the Protoevangelium of James, which the Church has never treated as Scripture and does not now. It describes an elderly childless couple, an angel, and a daughter born late and given to the Temple.
The honest position here is the same one that applies to Sts. Anne and Joachim, and to the Assumption. Mary was born. Somebody gave birth to her on some particular day, and the Church has kept a feast for it since at least the sixth century. The specific date, and the story attached to it, come from tradition rather than from the biblical text, and saying so plainly costs nothing.
What the feast actually asserts is narrow and worth separating from the storytelling around it: that this particular birth mattered, and that it is worth a day.
A birth with nothing attached to it yet
There is something appealing about a feast for a birth.
Every other date in Mary’s calendar is about something that happened to her or was asked of her. The Annunciation is a question. The Assumption is an ending. Her sorrows are, obviously, sorrows.
September 8 is a day for a baby who has not done anything yet, born to two people who had waited a long time and had stopped expecting it. Nothing is required of her on that date. It is a feast of pure beginning, which is a rarer thing in the calendar than you would expect.
And a note on your own
If you have been anywhere near a Catholic culture that keeps name days, you will know that the saint’s feast attached to a person can end up mattering more than the day they were born. We wrote about that last week, in the case for the saint on your birthday, which is a good custom and an easy one to pick up.
The Nativity of Mary is the counterweight. It is the Church, once in the year, treating a birthday as the whole point. Anyone born on September 8 has an unusually good one.
A saint like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of Saints by Mail: printed, reverent, and mailed to your door. A thoughtful gift for godchildren, families, and anyone who loves the saints.