The Presentation

Today’s Feast is a peculiarly Catholic one: the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is true on different levels.

First of all, there is no Scriptural support for the story that this feast celebrates (the child Mary dedicated to Temple service by her parents.) Rather the first version of this legend is in the Protoevangelium of James, a Second Century document that contained a number of imaginative stories about Mary’s family history and the Holy Family.

It’s also Catholic in the sense of being part of a gradual accretion and growth. In fact the feast wasn’t celebrated in the West (those in Union with the Roman bishop) until the Fourteenth Century. A Pope heard, while he was in exile in Avignon, France, that the Greek Christians (the Orthodox) celebrated this feast . He added the feast, which then had a mixed history before being firmly established in the Sixteenth Century. Here’s a lovely Orthodox site on this feast. For them it is a major and very old feast indeed.

And that brings the Catholic aspect of this feast to completion: that a holy practice exists honourably in one part of the Church (albeit separated at the time) makes it acceptable to the Church as a whole. It is, indeed, the Catholic (Universal) Church.