Feast of the Maternity of Blessed Virgin Mary

This feast, observed throughout the Western Church on October 11, honors Mary as Mother of God, and bears the same sort of relation to the Annunciation and to Christmas as does the Synaxis of Our Lady in the Byzantine rite. It was long known in Portugal, where the Maternity of Our Lady was declared a feast on January 22, in 1751, at the request of King Joseph Manuel. The feast, granted to the dioceses of Portugal, Brazil, and Algeria, was assigned to the first Sunday in May. In the following year it was extended to the province of Venice; in 1778, to the kingdom of Naples; in 1807, to Tuscany. It was finally instituted in 1931 by Pope Pius XI in view of the fifteenth centenary of the Council of Ephesus.

At the same time the Pope ordered at his own cost the restoration of the Marian mosaics in Saint Mary Major, much decayed through age. He issued an encyclical letter, “Lux veritatis.” In this, among the objects of the new festival, is named one truth that was particularly close to the heart of Pius XI, “…that Mary, who is loved and revered so warmly by the separated Christians of the East, would not suffer them to wander and be unhappily led further away from the unity of the Church, and therefore from her Son, whose vicar on earth we are.”