[21] John Damascene extended the supernatural influence of God to Mary's parents, suggesting they were purified by the Holy Spirit during her generation.

[33] In the 16th and especially the 17th centuries there was a proliferation of Immaculatist devotion in Spain, leading the Habsburg monarchs to demand that the papacy elevate the belief to the status of dogma.

[34] In France in 1830 Catherine Labouré (May 2, 1806 – December 31, 1876) saw a vision of Mary standing on a globe while a voice commanded her to have a medal made in imitation of what she saw.

[36] In 1849 Pope Pius IX issued the encyclical Ubi primum soliciting the bishops of the church for their views on whether the doctrine should be defined as dogma; ninety percent of those who responded were supportive, although the Archbishop of Paris, Marie-Dominique-Auguste Sibour, warned that the Immaculate Conception "could be proved neither from the Scriptures nor from tradition".

[38][4] We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed firmly and constantly by all the faithful.

[39]Dom Prosper Guéranger, Abbot of Solesmes Abbey, who had been one of the main promoters of the dogmatic statement, wrote Mémoire sur l'Immaculée Conception, explaining what he saw as its basis: For the belief to be defined as a dogma of faith [...] it is necessary that the Immaculate Conception form part of Revelation, expressed in Scripture or Tradition, or be implied in beliefs previously defined.

[44] Luke 1:28, and specifically the phrase "full of grace" by which Gabriel greeted Mary, was another reference to her Immaculate Conception: "she was never subject to the curse and was, together with her Son, the only partaker of perpetual benediction".

[46] Four years after the proclamation of the dogma, in 1858, the young Bernadette Soubirous said that Mary appeared to her at Lourdes in southern France, to announce that she was the Immaculate Conception; the Catholic Church later endorsed the apparition as authentic.

[50] Beginning around 1140 Bernard of Clairvaux, a Cistercian monk, wrote to Lyons Cathedral to express his surprise and dissatisfaction that it had recently begun to be observed there,[25] but in 1477 Pope Sixtus IV, a Franciscan Scotist and devoted Immaculist, placed it on the Roman calendar (i.e., list of church festivals and observances) via the bull Cum praexcelsa.

[51] Thereafter in 1481 and 1483, in response to the polemic writings of the prominent Thomist, Vincenzo Bandello, Pope Sixtus IV published two more bulls which forbade anybody to preach or teach against the Immaculate Conception, or for either side to accuse the other of heresy, on pains of excommunication.

[52] Following the promulgation of Ineffabilis Deus the typically Franciscan phrase "immaculate conception" reasserted itself in the title and euchology (prayer formulae) of the feast.

Pius IX solemnly promulgated a mass formulary drawn chiefly from one composed 400 years by a papal chamberlain at the behest of Sixtus IV, beginning "O God who by the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin".

An example is the antiphon that begins: "Tota pulchra es, Maria, et macula originalis non est in te" ("You are all beautiful, Mary, and the original stain [of sin] is not in you".

)[54] On the basis of the original Gregorian chant music,[55] polyphonic settings have been composed by Anton Bruckner,[56] Pablo Casals, Maurice Duruflé,[57] Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki,[58] Ola Gjeilo,[59] José Maurício Nunes Garcia,[60] and Nikolaus Schapfl [de].

[65] The Loreto Litanies included the official Latin Marian title of Regina sine labe originali concepta (Queen conceived without original sin), which had been granted by Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846) from 1839 onwards to some dioceses, thus several years before the proclamation of the dogma.

[68] The definitive iconography for the depiction of "Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception" seems to have been finally established by the painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco in his "El arte de la pintura" of 1649: a beautiful young girl of 12 or 13, wearing a white tunic and blue mantle, rays of light emanating from her head ringed by twelve stars and crowned by an imperial crown, the Sun behind her and the Moon beneath her feet.

The Moon is under her feet and a halo of twelve stars surround her head, possibly a reference to "a woman clothed with the sun" from Revelation 12:1–2.

In 1894, when Pope Leo XIII addressed the Eastern church in his encyclical Praeclara gratulationis, Ecumenical Patriarch Anthimos, in 1895, replied with an encyclical approved by the Constantinopolitan Synod in which he stigmatised the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and papal infallibility as "Roman novelties" and called on the Roman church to return to the faith of the early centuries.

[77][78] Protestants overwhelmingly condemned the promulgation of Ineffabilis Deus as an exercise in papal power, and the doctrine itself as unscriptural,[9] for it denied that all had sinned and rested on the Latin translation of Luke 1:28 (the "full of grace" passage) that the original Greek did not support.