Mass for the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception

How did you celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception?

The Patronal Feast of my parish was celebrated with a somewhat muted exuberance this year as our new parish priest if not a big fan of fanfare and ceremony. In fact, he did not even concelebrate the Mass but sat in the pews instead.

The Feast was transferred to Saturday, the 9th of December to allow for a greater number of people to participate.

Anyway, the Marian side chapel was done up with flowers and the processional statue of Our Lady prepared.
The choir was a re-formed ‘Kyrie’, a rock group that was disbanded after a particularly over-enthusiastic Christmas Mass elicited complaints to the Catholic newspaper. The celebrations culminated a 3 day triduum novena.

I lobbied very hard to get the ornate candlesticks out for this celebration. They normally use disposable candles in a glass instead. Here’s the altar prepared for the Mass.

We had a full complement of servers.

The Mass was concelebrated by Fr. Mark, our asistant parish priest, Fr. Paul Cheong, OFM Cap, with the Redemptorist Fr. Joe CSsR as the main celebrant. Fr. Joe was also the preacher for the triduum Masses leading to the Feast.

Here's Jacob incensing the celebrants.

The Gospel.

Sometime ago, I ranted about the practice we have of having an unordained person preach the homily. Well, it happened again. First, the homily (and I mean an actual homily, not a translation of the English version) was preached in Mandarin, from the ambo by a layperson.

After that Fr. Joe delivered his in English. If Fr. Mark were to preside, then another homily would have been delivered in Tamil by another lay person, for the sake of fairness since the Chinese had their go, even though Fr. Mark speaks the language.
Et incarnatus est. Can you spot what's wrong with this photo?

We've managed to train the altar servers to follow the rubrics, but the priests are kinda harder to train. =)

What do you think of the drawing? It was brought up as part of the presentation of the gifts.

Mark was serving as well.

We had quite a large delegation of members from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul present.

They presented the gifts.

Hoc est enim corpus meum.

Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei.

Per ipsum, et cum ipso, et in ipso.

Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi.

The procession then followed.

These were the cute little flower girls. They were in front of Our Lady's statue strewing flowers.

Managed to get the old Processional Crucifix used. First the servers.

Then the flower girls.

Followed by the statue of Our Lady borne by the members of the SSVP.

The procession made its way around the Church grounds while the Litany of Loreto was sung.

The girls needed some prodding to get into their groove as they kept on smiling and posing for the camera =)

All the SSVP members took turns bearing Our Lady. Some looked more sober than others...

Our Lady was precariously slanting at times.

One server was incensing the statue with two others serving to keep him from tripping.

The priests also joined in the procession.

There were quite a lot of people but it was hard to get a good shot, so these photos of the head of the procession had to suffice.

The statue was then processed back into the Church and placed on a pedestal in the sanctuary.

Benediction with the Blessed Sacrament followed and capped the night.

With lots of incense.

Do share some photos of your own celebrations if you have them.

Cheers.