The
Eastern Church first celebrated a
Feast of the Conception of the Most Holy and All Pure Mother of God on 9 December, perhaps as early as the 5th century in
Syria. The original title of the feast focused more specifically on
Saint Anne, being termed
Sylepsis tes hagias kai theoprometoros Annas ("conception of Saint Anne, the ancestress of God"). By the 7th century, the feast was already widely known in the East: on at least two occasions in the Acta of the
Third Council of Constantinople (680-681), regarded as ecumenical by both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, Mary is called "immaculate" (
Achrantos). Most Orthodox Christians reject the
Scholastic definition of Mary's preservation from original sin. The feast associated with her immaculate conception, initially celebrated on 8 December, was translated to the Western Church in the 8th century. It then spread from the
Byzantine Southern Italy to Normandy during the Norman dominance, eventually reaching England, France, Germany, and Rome. In 1568,
Pope Pius V revised the
Roman Breviary, and though the Franciscans were allowed to retain the Office and Mass written by Bernardine dei Busti, this office was suppressed for the rest of the Church, and the office of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin was substituted instead, the word "Conception" being substituted for "Nativity". According to the
papal bull Commissi Nobis Divinitus, dated 6 December 1708,
Pope Clement XI mandated the feast as a holy day of obligation which is to be celebrated in future years by the faithful. Furthermore, the pontiff requested that the papal bull be
notarized in the
Holy See to be further copied and reproduced for dissemination. Prior to Pope
Pius IX's definition of the
Immaculate Conception as a Catholic dogma in 1854, most
missals referred to it as the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The festal texts of this period focused more on the action of her conception than on the theological question of her preservation from original sin. A missal published in England in 1806 indicates the same
collect for the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary was used for this feast as well. The first move towards describing Mary's conception as "immaculate" came in the 11th century. In the 15th century,
Pope Sixtus IV, while promoting the festival, explicitly tolerated both the views of those who promoted it as the Immaculate Conception and those who challenged such a description, a position later endorsed by the
Council of Trent. ==Latin Church==