CHAPTER XVI.
THE CONFRATERNITY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION.
SOMETHING has been said above about Dominic's devotion to Our Blessed Lady, and it may be well imagined that the circumstances of December, 1854, provided occasions for extra fervour that were not lost upon him.
On the eighth of that month the Sovereign Pontiff defined the Dogma of Our Lady's Immaculate Conception, and the Catholic world was filled as with a wave of devotion. Young Savio was always practical in his manifestation of fervour. His idea was not only to celebrate the event, but to set on foot something that might be a permanent remembrance, and might be productive in years to come of a continual stream of devout clients of Our Lady.
He therefore set to work amongst his closest friends, and proposed to them the formation of a sodality or association, to be called the Sodality of the Immaculate Conception. Its object was to
