Immaculate Conception Novena

 In anticipation of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th) consider saying this novena from November 29th through December 7th.The following is the same prayer being said during the Novena at the National Shrine of The Divine Mercy.

La Purísima Inmaculada Concepción
by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, 1678, now in Museo del Prado, Spain.

Immaculate Conception Novena 

Father, You prepared the Virgin Mary to be the worthy mother of Your Son. You let her share beforehand in the salvation Christ would bring by His death, and kept her sinless from the first moment of her conception.

Help us by her prayers to live in Your presence without sin. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

(NCCB, Sacramentary, December 8: Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, (p. 752-753).

Church Teaching on the Immaculate Conception:

“Through the centuries the Church has become ever more aware that Mary, 'full of grace' through God, was redeemed from the moment of her conception. That is what the dogma of the Immaculate Conception confesses, as Pope Pius IX proclaimed in 1854:

The most Blessed Virgin Mary was, from the first moment of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege of almighty God and by virtue of the merits of Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, preserved immune from all stain of original sin”. (Catechism of the Catholic Faith, 491).