Why Protestants Miss the Truth of the Immaculate Conception

On April 15, 2019, as the world looked on in stunned sadness as flames engulfed the Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, I found myself realizing how much I connected this cornerstone of Western cultural heritage to Quasimodo and countless rom-coms and how little it put me in mind of its patron, Mary the Mother of God. I recalled a line from a speech by the author Walker Percy: "One gets too accustomed to names." In that speech, given on receiving the Laetare Medal at the University of Notre Dame in 1989, Percy, a Catholic convert, offered a brief reflection on his own experience with the words "Notre Dame."