Pope Alexander VII, in the celebrated bull, “Sollicitudo omnium ecclesiarum,” issued in the year 1661, declares: “This devotion and worship to the mother of God again increased and was propagated, .... so that the universities having embraced this opinion (that is, the pious one [her Immaculate Conception]), almost all Catholics embrace it.” (Cited by St. Alphonsus in his work “The Glories of Mary”; Pope Pius IX later defined it as a dogma in 1854, and Our Lady revealed herself as “The Immaculate Conception” at Lourdes in 1858.)