.The Feast of the Birth of the Blessed
Virgin Mary has been celebrated in the Church at least since the 8th Century.
The Church's calendar observes the birthdays of only two saints: Saint John the
Baptist (June 24), and Mary, Mother of Jesus.
John the Baptist is
considered especially sanctified even before his birth. His birth to Elizabeth
and Zachariah is foretold in the first chapter of Luke, and it is also recorded
(Lk 1:41) that Elizabeth
The
birth of Mary was also miraculous. She was conceived without sin as a special
grace because God had selected her to become the mother of His Son (the feast
of her Immaculate Conception is celebrated on December 8). The dogma of the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, though generally believed throughout
the Church for many centuries, was formally declared by Pope Pius IX in 1854.
There is nothing
contained in Scripture about the birth of Mary or her parentage, though
Joseph's lineage is given in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. The
names of Mary's parents, Joachim and Anna, appear in the apocryphal
"Gospel of James", a book dating from the 2nd Century AD, not part of
the authentic canon of Scripture. According to this account, Joachim and Anna
were also beyond the years of child-bearing, but prayed and fasted that God
would grant their desire for a child.
According
to one tradition, the house in which Mary was born in Nazareth church of Saint Anna in Jerusalem
