“Because Mary is what God wanted us all to be, she speaks of herself as the eternal blueprint in the mind of God, the one whom God loved before she was a creature.  She is even pictured as being with Him not only at creation, but before creation.  She existed in the Divine Mind as an Eternal Thought before there were any mothers.  She is the Mother of mothers.  The closer one is to God, the greater the purity.  But since no one was ever closer to God than the woman whose human portals he threw open to walk this earth, then no one could have been more pure than she.  This special purity of hers we call the Immaculate Conception.  The word ‘immaculate’ is taken from two Latin words meaning ‘not stained.’  Conception means that at the first moment of her conception, the Blessed Mother in the womb of her mother, Saint Anne, and in virtue of the anticipated merits of the Redemption of her Son was preserved free from the stains of original sin.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The World’s First Love)