Ad Honorem Immaculatae Conceptionis Mariae Oblatio

137 thing: he was to found the Congregation of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mother of God. So he followed the voice of God who called him to be totally self-sacrificial. ‘Go out of your native land and your father’s house to the land that I will show you’ (Gen 12:1). He left the Piarists, al- though not to found the Marians, but he had to leave them God’s plan to fulfill. When he left the Order of the Pious Schools, without renouncing his religious status, God showed him the ‘promised land’ which had to be and still is to be won: the Order of Mary’s Immaculate Conception. This key mystery of the identity of the Mother of God – her Immaculate Con- ception – which the Church of his times endeavored to discover and to accept, was left by Father Stanislaus to his spiritual sons as a gift and a task which – although it is already a dogma of the Catholic faith – is still to be re-discovered and accepted. Then, what does this truth of the faith mean, whose catechistic formula most Marians probably know by heart? It is not just about the chronolog- ical beginning of the life of the Mother of Jesus, detached, as it were, from her person and her history, forever connected with the Son, nor about her very freedom from original sin. It is precisely the saving relationship with the Triune God, the personal identity which Mary herself refers to on March 25, 1858, in Lourdes, as: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” 11 An Alsatian theologian, François-Xavier Durrwell, who passed away in 2005, thus spoke about it: One day, the Church, through the mouth of the parish priest of Lo- urdes, asked Mary to disclose her name. The beautiful lady that ap- peared, devoted herself to prayer for weeks. To give her name she waited for the day from which she drew her name, the day of the holy conception. On the morning of the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March 1858, she reappeared, “small and young” as when she was betrothed and did not delay replying. She opened her hands that had been joined together, lowered her arms, then raised them, resplen- dent with gratitude: “I am the Immaculate Conception”. Bernadette went to the parish priest and told him: “She answered: ‘I am the Im- maculate Conception’”. Mary does not call herself merely immaculate 11 Cf. J. Perrier (Ed.), Je suis l’Immaculée Conception . Colloque organisée par les sanctuaires Notre-Dame de Lourdes et la Société Française d’Études Mariales , Parole et silence, Paris 2006; J-M. Hennaux, La formule de Lourdes: «Je suis l’Immaculée Conception» , in: “Nouvelle Revue Théologique”, t. 130 (2008), pp. 65-78.