Total Marian Consecration

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The explosion of the preventable scandals involving perverted priests which have rocked the counterfeit church of conciliarism in recent years evidently has weakened the faith of some Catholics. And this is to say nothing of the scandal of the abandonment of the authentic patrimony of the Catholic Faith and her traditional liturgy under the regime of novelty in this counterfeit for the past fifty years. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to state the the preventable scandals involving perverted priests and presbyters, at least some of whom were recruited into the priesthood and protected by perverted bishops and perverted chancery factotums, is an expression of the corruption of the Faith that has been enshrined in the conciliar church's liturgy and the very humanistic, if not naturalistic, language that is used to describe the worsening of problems in the world that have their proximate origin in the Social Reign of Christ the King and of Mary our Immaculate Queen.

However, we have to understand, as I have noted in many recent articles on this site, the counterfeit church of concilairism is not the Catholic Church The Catholic Church will last until the end of time, no matter the assaults of the Adversary against us individually or against the Church Militant on earth collectively. In every age of scandal and heresy, however, Our Lady has raised up men and women of sanctity to help effect a genuine renewal of the Church, a renewal that is founded in the re-formation of individual souls in cooperation with the graces won for us by the shedding of every single drop of Our Lord's Most Precious Blood on the wood of the Holy Cross, graces which Our Lady herself helped to make possible by her perfect participation in her Divine Son's Redemptive Act.

To wit, Saint Athanasius, whose feast day celebrated today, May 2, 2013, resisted fiercely the Arians in his own day. He took action, writing his flock from exile to encourage them to resist the enemies who held the ecclesiastical offices while they demolished the Apostolic Faith. He did not simply remain silent and inert as the good of souls was being threatened by the wolves' in shepherd clothing in his own day:

"May God console you! ... What saddens you ... is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises – but you have the Apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith? The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in the struggle – the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith? True, the premises are good when the Apostolic Faith is preached there; they are holy if everything takes place there in a holy way ...

"You are the ones who are happy; you who remain within the Church by your Faith, who hold firmly to the foundations of the Faith which has come down to you from Apostolic Tradition. And if an execrable jealousy has tried to shake it on a number of occasions, it has not succeeded. They are the ones who have broken away from it in the present crisis. No one, ever, will prevail against your Faith, beloved Brothers. And we believe that God will give us our churches back some day.

"Thus, the more violently they try to occupy the places of worship, the more they separate themselves from the Church. They claim that they represent the Church; but in reality, they are the ones who are expelling themselves from it and going astray. Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the true Church of Jesus Christ." (Letter of St. Athanasius to his flock.)

It should also be noted that Saint Francis of Assisi lived at a time that featured another problem common to our own day, terrible scandals and clerical corruption within the Church. The lives of many in the clergy and in the laity had grown quite lax, to say the very least. It was Saint Francis's life of austere poverty, severe mortification of the flesh, deep Eucharistic piety and devotion to the Mother of God which helped to bring about the genuine renewal of the Catholic spirit in the Thirteenth Century. It is certainly the case that the work of the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, O.P., and his saintly Franciscan contemporary, Saint Bonaventure, was made possible in no small measure by the seeds planted by the great saint of Assisi, Saint Francis, who bore the brand marks of Our Blessed Lord and on his holy body and who used the Crucifix to perform many miracles. Saint Francis did not despair in the face of the problems of his day. He did not lose his faith. He understood that he had the responsibility to make reparation for his own sins--and that Our Lord permitted him the opportunity to help make reparation for the sins of the whole world by getting on the cross with Him on a daily basis.

A son of Saint Francis, Father Maximilian Kolbe, showed us more recently the good that can be done by devoting oneself single-heartedly to the establishment of the City of Mary Immaculate. Father Kolbe had no fewer than twelve publications printing simultaneously to promote total consecration to  Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and to build up the City of Mary Immaculate as the only antidote to the poisons of secular political ideologies that have their root in Freemasonry, including its Zionist manifestations, and naturalism in the world, to say nothing of the infiltration of these poisons within the souls of baptized Catholics.

Like the great apostle of total consecration at the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, Saint Louis de Montfort, whose feast was commemorated just four days ago now, Father Kolbe knew that the only true way to go to Our Lord is through Our Lady. There is no other way to get to Heaven. There is no other way to grow in intimacy with the Divine Redeemer than by surrendering everything we have (our liberty, our merits we earn for the good works we do and the indulgenced prayers and acts we say and perform) to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart.

There is thus no better way to help heal the self-inflicted wounds the Church Militant on earth is suffering from at present than to promote total consecration to Mary Immaculate, especially by relying upon the work and example of Saint Louis de Montfort and Father Maximilian Kolbe. Father Kolbe, for example, knew that more good could be done for the world by the wearing of the Miraculous Medal and by the daily and prayerful recitation of Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary than by anything else after Holy Mass itself. We must rely upon Our Lady to resist sin to the point of shedding our blood, and therefore to grow to the heights of personal sanctity, striving with each beat of our hearts to desire the highest place in Heaven below that of Our Lady herself.

Each Catholic who is serious restoring the Church by the vanquishing of the conciliarists and their blasphemous false religion must be committed to the entirety of the Catholic Faith. And until a true pope actually consecrates Russia to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart with all of the world's true bishops, the best way to do this effectively is to promote total consecration to Mary's Immaculate Heart, either through the formula of Saint Louis de Montfort or that of Father Maximilian Kolbe, who saw how clearly our contemporary world needed her and how every aspect of daily life had to be given to Mary to be used as she sees fit for the honor and glory of the Most Blessed Trinity and for the salvation of souls. It is holiness which is the breastplate and the armor against the attacks of the devil. What better way to resist the devil, who prowls around the world seeking the ruin of souls, than by relying upon the woman who has crushed his head, and who wants us to rely upon her to crush the head of the serpent in our own lives, especially in times of temptation?

To seek to be holy by being totally consecrated to Our Lord through Our Lady's Immaculate Heart begins with an admission that we are fallen, imperfect creatures who are prone to sin. No, not evil, not wicked. Imperfect, disordered, fallen. We must acknowledge the fact that we have to be reliant upon Our Blessed Mother to help us to follow her Divine Son in this vale of tears, trusting in her maternal protection and guidance at all times to be ever vigilant in our pursuit of sanctity (and never to be slow in getting to Confession should, God forbid, we fall into mortal sin). Bishops must be consecrated to Our Lady themselves and thus insist that every single one of their priests be so consecrated. No man should be ordained to the priesthood who is not totally consecrated to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart. Such a consecration is not a guarantee that a priest will never sin or cause scandal. However, it is a safeguard against sin and a motivation to scale the heights of sanctity.

Our Lady's Indispensable Role in the Economy of Salvation

God the Father knew from all eternity that the rational creatures He would create through His only begotten Son would rebel in the Garden of Eden. He knew that the first woman, Eve (the Mother of the Living), would succumb to the Adversary's allure to tempt her into disobeying Him. The Mother of the Living, therefore, became the instrument by which the Gates of Heaven were tied shut when Adam sinned. But just as it was a woman's pride which resulted in the Fall of Adam, so would it be in the Father's Divine Providence that the Redemption of the human race would be effected by the humility of a woman, the New Eve, Mary of Nazareth. The Second Adam, Who would recreate us on the wood of the Holy Cross, came into this world as a result of Mary Immaculate's perfect obedience to the Father's will, thereby undoing Eve's prideful disobedience.

Our Lady was preserved from all stain of Original and Actual Sin from the first moment of her conception in her mother's (Saint Anne's) womb. She had a perfect human nature, the same perfect human nature that Adam and Eve had when they were created by God. Our Lady had to have a perfect human nature so as to clothe the Word, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, with His Sacred Humanity. As the Co-Eternal Son could not have the stain of Original Sin on His soul, He had to be conceived in the womb of a woman who herself had been preserved from all stain of sin. Our Lord thus received from Our Lady a perfect human nature when He was conceived in His human nature as a helpless embryo by the power of the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation.

Our Lady's preservation from all stain of sin is very important to meditate and reflect upon at all times, especially during this month of May. Our Lady's Immaculate Conception has some very real and practical meanings insofar as her relationship to her Divine Son is concerned. And it has some very real and practical meanings insofar as her relationship to us is concerned.

First, as one who was preserved from all stain of sin, Our Lady had a superior intellect and a superior will. Unlike those of us born with the stain of Original Sin on our souls, Our Lady did not have to struggle to know or to accept the truth. Her will was in complete conformity to that of the Father's. Thus, although she asked a question of St. Gabriel the Archangel when he announced to her that she would conceive and bear a child outside of the normal course of events, she accepted God's plan for her in a spirit of docility. Similarly, Our Lady did not understand why Our Lord had stayed behind in Jerusalem to answer questions put to Him by the rabbis in the Temple, causing her and her chaste husband, Saint Joseph, a great deal of grief. However, she accepted what He told her and stored up all those things in her Immaculate Heart. She had a preternatural inclination to accept the Word of God with humility and docility.

Second, Our Lady did not suffer from concupiscence. There was no trace of selfishness in her whatsoever. She was the personification of selflessness, of other-directedness, which she demonstrated so perfectly in hastening to visit her kinswoman, Saint Elizabeth, to be with her as she carried her own Son's precursor, Saint John the Baptist, in her womb. Our Lady did not seek to "empower" herself. She was content to be a "stay at home" mother to attend to her domestic duties, understanding that it was in the perfect fulfillment of the duties of one's state in life that she was to give honor and glory to God. Thus, the woman who said that she had been exalted by God and that all generations would call her blessed was content to do menial chores and to care for her chaste husband, Saint Joseph, and her Divine Son, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. She sought only to fulfill God's plan for her without demanding anything from anyone. She requested that her Son provide more wine for the wedding feast in Cana, but she did not demand it. Her humility, however, is always rewarded by her Son, Who can refuse her nothing.

Third, as one who did not suffer from concupiscence, Our Lady had a perfect and unsurpassed bond of love with the fruit of her virginal and immaculate womb, Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. There was no possessiveness exhibited by Our Lady with respect to her Divine Son. Our Lady could not harbor a grudge. She did not lose her temper. She was in perfect control of her emotions. Yes, she cried as her Son's dead Body was taken down from the Cross. Her tears were not for herself, though. Her tears were shed because she saw how the sins of men had torn asunder the Body she enfleshed in the nine months It was being formed within the tabernacle of her womb. And she cried justly because she knew that her Son had died in vain to save people who would refuse entrance into His true Church and/or refuse sacramental forgiveness right up to the point of their deaths. No mother has ever suffered the way Our Lady suffered, precisely because of the perfect bond that existed between the one conceived immaculately and the Word Who was made Flesh within her.

Fourth, Our Lady understood that her Son had come into this world through her to reconcile sinful men to the Father in Spirit and in Truth. She was willing to suffer with Him out of love for Him and out of love for us. The love which unites her Immaculate Heart with the Sacred Heart of Jesus is one of complete and perfect compassion. The two hearts, although located in different bodies, beat as one. They suffer as one, as Pope Leo XIII noted in Iucunda semper expectatione, September 8, 1894, calling Our Lady the "Co-Redemptress" of the world.

Fifth, Our Lady accepted the role given her by her Son to be our Mother. She looked after Saint John the Evangelist, who had been given the task by Our Lord to look after her. Saint John had taken our place at the foot of the Cross to offer Our Lord and Our Lady his consolation. His being given as Mary's son by Our Lord as He was dying His horrible death by Crucifixion is symbolic of the fact that we were given through him to be Mary's children. Our Lady has never shrunk from her role as our Heavenly Mother, who prays for us now and at the hour of our deaths, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. She is the New Eve, the new Mother of the Living, the Gate of Heaven, and the Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant.

Sixth, Our Lady's Assumption body and soul into Heaven tells us what a special place she has in Paradise. She is the Queen of Heaven and of Earth. As her body was preserved from all stain of sin, it did not have to undergo the corruption of the grave. It was her right to be assumed body and soul into Heaven so as to reign there gloriously as our Queen, our Mother, and our Advocate. And it because of her royal dignity that Our Lord has seen fit to send her at various times in the past half millennium to remind us of the need to do penance for our sins, and to honor her quite publicly as our Queen through consecration to her Immaculate Heart and by our fidelity to her her Most Holy Rosary. What a tragedy, therefore, that no pope has seen fit to fulfill Our Lady's Fatima requests, upon which hinge the fate of both the Church and the world.

Finally, Our Lady is the singular vessel of honor through which Our Lord entered the world. And it is the will of the Son that she be recognized through which we ourselves will ascend to the heights of personal sanctity in this vale of tears as a preparation for enjoying an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Paradise. Our Lady is the Mediatrix of all graces, something that is displayed quite vividly in the original cast of the image of the Miraculous Medal, which was revealed by Our Lady to Saint Catherine Laboure. Our Lord wants us to understand that all graces flow to us through Mary. She, the model of all Christian virtue and perfection, is thus our only path back to Him.

Our Lady's Role in Our Own Lives

As the Queen of Heaven and of Earth, Our Lady is supposed to be honored by all human beings until the end of time. Each of us would take great offense if someone slighted our mother, would we not? Imagine, therefore, how much Our Lord wants us to honor the woman who made possible our salvation.

Mothers have the natural desire to will the good of their children. Our Blessed Mother wills our eternal good, the salvation of our immortal souls. She wants us to despise sin, which is why she gave the Miraculous Medal to Saint Catherine Laboure and ratified the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception to Saint Bernadette Soubirous. Our Lady knows that each one of our sins, including our venial sins, disfigures our souls. Indeed, one of the prayers recited in the Miraculous Medal Novena  reads as follows:

 

 

Immaculate Virgin Mary, Mother of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ Jesus and Our Mother, penetrated with the most lively confidence in Thine all-powerful and ever-failing intercession, manifested so often through the Miraculous Medal, we Thy loving and trustful children implore Tee to obtain for us the graces and favors we ask during this novena, if they be beneficial to our immortal souls, and the souls for whom we pray.

(Mention your petition)

You know, O Mary, how often our souls have been the sanctuaries of Thy Son who hates iniquity. Obtain for us then a deep hatred of sin and that purity of heart which will attach us to God alone so that our every thought, word and deed may tend to His greater glory. Obtain for us also a spirit of prayer and self-denial that we may recover by penance what we have lost by sin and at length attain to that blessed abode where Thou art the Queen of angels and of men. Amen.

That is, Our Lady wants us to love God so perfectly that we will be repulsed even by the thought of sin. For it was sin that caused her Divine Son to suffer unspeakably on the wood of the Holy Cross. And it is sin which wounds the Church Militant today. It is sin which causes all suffering in the world in all human lives. And the only remedy for sin is to cooperate with the graces won for us by the shedding of Our Lady's Son's Most Precious Blood, flowing forth through her loving hands as the Mediatrix of All Graces.

Our Lady has told us that the way to avoid sin and to grow in holiness is through total consecration to her Immaculate Heart. Saint Louis de Montfort wrote out his formula of consecration nearly three hundred years ago. Father Maximilian Kolbe popularized total Marian consecration in the first half of the Twentieth Century. Indeed, it is written of this apostle of the City of Mary Immaculate:

In order to move souls to love Mary, St. Maximilian ventured to make great, self-effacing personal sacrifices. He made exhausting journeys on missions that seemed foolish, so much so that a saying circulated that he wanted "to make a trip to the moon on a hoe." But he went ahead undaunted, carrying on with hard work and privation: fainting spells on the train, having to celebrate Mass while supported by two friars, repeatedly coughing up blood, becoming emaciated, even proving himself unpopular with certain persons. His love for the Immaculate would not let him rest from his feverish activity. There was a time in Japan when people, upon seeing his tireless activity, thought he must be part of what they called the "myth of immortality". . . .  He was tireless and daring, and when someone told him to lighten up a little, he answered smilingly, "I have no time to rest here below. I will take my rest in Paradise." This is the way with true love." (Father Stefano M. Manelli, F.I. Devotion to Our Lady, Academy of the Immaculate, pp. 113-144; as we now, Father Kolbe has not been canonized legitimately by the authority of the Catholic Church. I pray that he will be so canonized one day.)

Total consecration to Our Lady means that we unite ourselves completely to her as her slaves, pledged to honor her Immaculate Heart by living lives that are totally worthy of disciples her Divine Son. Remember, we are the adopted children of Our Lady. No child would want to do anything deliberately to displease his mother. We must be ever conscious of the fact that we are Mary's children and that nothing displeases her more than the coldness and indifference we exhibit concerning the obligations imposed upon us when we were baptized into the true Church, outside of which there is no salvation. She wants us to live in a manner befitting our dignity as redeemed creatures. She wants us to reject the ways of the secular, godless, materialistic, pleasure-seeking world in which we live. She wants us to be seen as her children who proudly wear her Miraculous Medal as a sign of our total consecration--and thus as our pledge to help, as Saint Maximilian Kolbe wrote, to build the City of Mary Immaculate, which is the only antidote to the poisons of Modernism running rampant throughout the Church and the poisons of sin spreading at a rapid pace in the world as a result of the Church's own abandonment of her authentic patrimony and the Immemorial Mass of Tradition.

Some of the Elements of Total Marian Consecration

Total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart involves some very simple elements. Here are but a few:

First, consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart means that we give all of the joys and sorrows of our lives to her to use as she sees fit for the honor and glory of the Blessed Trinity, for the triumph of her Immaculate Heart, and for the conversion of all souls to the true Church. If it is natural for us to trust our own earthly mothers implicitly, is it not only just but right for us to trust our Blessed Mother completely? Our Lady uses every element of the lives of those who are totally consecrated to her to effect the greater honor and glory of God and the salvation of souls. Our Lady will use everything in our lives. Everything. All of the physical pains and aches were may experience. All of our humiliations. All of the gossip directed against us. All of the backstabbing from family members and friends, most of whom do not have the courage to confront us face to face. She will use our patient fulfillment of our daily duties, from our getting up in the morning when we would prefer to remain in bed, to our running of the errands we do not want to perform, to our dealing with people who try our patience, to our state of physical exhaustion at the end of the day.

Second, total consecration to Our Lady requires us to be mindful of our obligation to be assiduous in prayer, especially by means of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and her Most Holy Rosary. The Mass is the perfect prayer. And the Traditional Latin Mass is, as Father Faber noted in his lifetime, the closest thing to perfection this side of Heaven. The prayers contained in the Immemorial Mass of Tradition express more fully and more beautifully the necessity of relying upon Our Lady than those found in the synthetic novelty concocted by the Consilium in the 1960s, otherwise known as the Novus Ordo Missae. We should not want to give God sloppy worship, that which depends upon a priest or a parish or a diocese. We should want to give God worship that is as perfect is possible, worship that grew organically and could never have been devised by men. It is thus as consecrated slaves of Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart that we must give to her our sacrifices to get ourselves to the Mass of tradition so that its glories can flower once more above ground as the normative Mass of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. As my dear wife Sharon notes, "If Our Lady could ride on a donkey while nine months' pregnant, we can make a few sacrifices to drive in an air conditioned or heated car to get ourselves to the Traditional Mass."

Our Lady is present mystically each time Holy Mass is legitimately offered by a validly ordained Catholic priest, just as she was present physically at the foot of the Holy Cross, upon which hung her Divine Son, the King of Love. We would not go more than a day or so without eating. Our bodies need the nourishment provided food. Well, so do our souls, which is why the habit of Daily Mass is something that a soul consecrated to Our Lady, Mary Immaculate, finds as something that is absolutely indispensable as part of his own daily routine. Daily Mass helps us to live the life of the Church in preparation for living in an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Heaven. It is not the "religious fanatics" who assist at Daily Mass. It is those who are truly on fire for love of God as He has revealed Himself through His true Church who do so. Our Lady was pleased that Saint John kept her company at the foot of the Cross. She is pleased with us when we do so by our assistance at the unbloody re-presentation of Calvary that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Those who are totally consecrated to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart understand the importance of modesty of attire, reverence of behavior, and the necessity of silence when in Church. Calvary was not a jokefest, it was not a show. It was not a time for conversation. Well, the same is true of the Mass. People who wish to engage in conversations can do so in a vestibule, on the telephone, or in a restaurant. It is disrespectful of Our Lord's Real Presence (and discourteous to those trying to concentrate on their mental prayers) to gab in Church. This is beneath the dignity of Mary's children. Even the pagans are silent in the places they hallow.

Third, after Mass, obviously, it is Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary which must be the principal foundation of our prayer lives. The fifteen decades of the Rosary contain the mysteries of salvation, from the Annunciation to Our Lady's Coronation as Queen of Heaven and Earth. Those totally consecrated to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart learn that we can never tire of meditating upon the mysteries contained in her Most Holy Rosary. We will find that total consecration to Our Lady brings with it a deepening of the care we take in praying the Rosary in a spirit of reflection upon each of the mysteries contained therein. And we will find that the praying of all fifteen decades of the Rosary on a daily basis is not at all difficult to "fit into" our schedules. Keeping Our Lady's five First Saturday requests, which includes the recitation of the Most Holy Rosary, also demonstrates our desire to do everything Our Lady asks of us, especially by praying the Rosary with the same fervor and care that she taught Saint Bernadette Soubirous to maintain when doing so.

Fourth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart leads us to become people of abiding Eucharistic piety. Our Lord was enfleshed in Our Lady's Virginal and Immaculate womb. He was the Prisoner of the tabernacle of her womb. He is the Prisoner of Love in the tabernacle where He abides in His Real Presence. Just as Saint John the Baptist leapt for joy when he heard the sound of the voice of the woman carrying the Child Whose precursor he would be, so are we to leap for joy at the opportunity we have to be in the presence of Our Eucharistic King. Our Lady wants to lead us to her Divine Son in His Real Presence. If we have time to go to the movies (most of which we should not be watching), or to a restaurant or to talk on the phone for hours on end, we have time to spend before Our Lord in His Real Presence. One cannot be a son or daughter of Mary if he or she is not willing to adore Mary's Son in the Most Blessed Sacrament.

Fifth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart requires us to be conscious of our sins. It was our sins that broke her Immaculate Heart as she watched the Body she enfleshed by the power of God the Holy Ghost be tortured beyond all telling, as is vividly portrayed in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. It was our sins that caused her to grieve as she beheld the same Body after death that she had once cradled in the stable in the cave in Bethlehem. And it has been our sins and our indifference which have prompted Our Lord to send her to us to remind us of the necessity of making reparation for our sins, especially by being totally consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. A person totally consecrated to Our Lady, therefore, must seek to detest sin, including venial sin.

A person who is conscious of his sins realizes that he is in need of the forgiveness which was won for us by Our Lord on Calvary. Many saints went to Confession every day of their lives. The more one grows in love with Our Lord through His Blessed Mother,  the more one grows in awareness of his own imperfections and faults, great and small. A person who is totally consecrated to Our Lady realizes, therefore, the importance of weekly confession. One should certainly never go any longer than two weeks without going to confession, admitting, of course, that this may be impossible in areas of the country and the world that lack true priests. The weeds of venial sin grow up very quickly. Pride and sloth, two of the capital sins, can lead us into thinking that the lack of mortal sins to confess means that we are making great progress in the spiritual life. A good, devotional confession strengthens the soul by virtue of the grace administered by the priest, who acts in persona Christi, in the hospital of Divine Mercy that is the confessional.

Moreover, one consecrated to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart understands that she, the Queen of Mercy, wants us to be merciful to others. There is nothing any of us can suffer at the hands of another that is the equal of what one of our least venial sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross. We broke Our Lady's Immaculate Heart on Good Friday by means of our sins. Her Immaculate Heart breaks today because of the sins of men. Thus, we can never hold onto any grudges whatsoever. We must forgive all others from the bottom of our hearts, praying fervently for the salvation of their immortal souls. Those totally consecrated to Our Lady know that the beneficiaries of her Divine Son's mercy must be generous in the bestowal of mercy upon all those who offend or who disappoint them.

Sixth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart means that her consecrated slaves trust in her completely to be dealt with as she sees fit. Consecrated slaves to Our Lady accept all things (sickness, health, prosperity, poverty, humiliation, consolation, etc.) as within God's Providence to be given to her in a spirit of perfect self-abnegation that trusts entirely in her. A consecrated slave of the Immaculate Heart, therefore, will be content with what he has, whether good or bad, understanding that his sins deserve far worse than he can ever possibly imagine.

Seventh, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart makes a consecrated slave grateful to God for all that has been given to him, including, as mentioned above, his sufferings. Gratitude is a keynote of a consecrated slave. And we must express that gratitude in our interior prayers and vocal aspirations.

Eighth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart humbles our proud hearts by surrendering unto her all of the merit we earn by means of our indulgenced prayers and good works. Our Lady was always the humble handmaid of God. Being totally consecrated to her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart predisposes us to grow in acts of humility, loving every single bit of humiliation that comes our way as coming from the loving hand of God Himself.

Ninth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart requires those so consecrated to stand apart from the secular world in which they live. We must dress modestly at all times, not only for Holy Mass, something that Our Lady addressed in her Fatima apparitions. We do not live so as to be au courant with the current fashions and styles. We live so as to give honor and glory to God. We can never dress, act, or speak in a way which would offend the Mother of God. That is, it is not befitting Christian dignity to attend most motion pictures (no matter what their rating), to watch anything on television, to listen to the satanic fare that passes for contemporary music, designed of its nature to agitate the soul rather than to lift it up to God, and to think in ways that are in opposition to the teaching Mary's Son deposited in Holy Mother Church. Everything we do must be in conformity with the standard of Our Lord's Most Holy Cross. There are no exceptions. None.

Tenth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart has several important external manifestations. Three will be mentioned here.

The first, the Miraculous Medal, is worn prominently on the outside of our apparel. It is our statement to the world that Mary Immaculate is the one who holds the key to following Our Lord through His true Church. My dear wife, Sharon, hands out Miraculous Medals to waiters and waitresses and other unsuspecting souls we meet in our travels across the nation. The Miraculous Medal is a powerful instrument of conversion. We must display it prominently, and we must give Miraculous Medals away generously. The Miraculous Medal effected the conversion of an unbelieving Jewish man the church of San Andrea delle Fratte in Rome on January 20, 1842, Alphonse Ratisbonne. As Father Manelli wrote, "For Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Miraculous Medals were Heaven's ammunition, Heaven's bullets, which caused grace to be penetrated into hearts." Indeed.

The second symbol of total consecration is the Brown Scapular, which is worn around our necks inside of our clothing, right next to our flesh. It is the sign of our reliance upon Mary's intercessory power in our lives, especially at the moment of our own deaths. She has promised never to abandon anyone who wears the Scapular (and fulfills all of the obligations associated with its wearing.)

The third involves invocations to honor Our Lady. Saluting another or closing a letter with the phrase Ave Maria is one example of such an invocation. Remembering to say the Angelus outside of Paschaltide (and the Regina Coeli during Paschaltide) is yet another. These invocations are ways to remind ourselves and others of our total reliance upon Our Lady as her consecrated slaves.

Eleventh, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart strengthens families, prompting parents and children to fulfill generously and eagerly their daily duties. Uppermost in the mind of each member of a Catholic family, especially one totally consecrated to Our Lady, is the image of the Holy Family of Nazareth. It is interesting that the Holy Family had within it the God-Man and a woman conceived without stain of sin. Neither was the head of that family, though. Saint Joseph was the head of the Holy Family. Our Lord and Our Lady submitted to his authority, just as we are supposed to submit ourselves humbly to all lawful authority in those things that are within its competency and do not violate God's law in any manner whatsoever.

A family, therefore, is not a sentimental collection of individuals who happen to be related by blood or adoption. No, a family is the instrumentality by which the Co-Eternal Son sought to enter human history. It is the means by which the Church is built up. It is where children are to be welcomed generously as the natural fruit of their parents' married love. It is where such children are to be trained to aspire to be saints, to love the things of Heaven more than they love the things of this passing world. It is where they are to learn that the family is the domestic cell of the Church. It is where they learn to love the Church, no matter the problems that beset her at any given moment in her history. It is where children learn that each human being is made in the image and likeness of God from the first moment of his fertilization until the moment of his natural death. And it is, most importantly, the cradle where vocations to the priesthood and the consecrated religious life are supposed to be fostered by mothers and fathers as a first and salutary duty: to give back unto God and His true Church what He has given so generously to them. All of this flows quite naturally in a family where each of its members are totally consecrated to Our Lady, Mary Immaculate.

Twelfth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart results in our being unafraid to speak the truth in love at all times. Remember, Our Lady was in the Upper Room with the Apostles on Pentecost Sunday. She prayed for her Son's Apostles as they were filled with the gifts and the fruits of the Holy Ghost. She had become the Spouse of the Holy Ghost at the Annunciation. She wanted the Apostles to boldly proclaim the Holy Name of the Divine Son she begot by the power of the Holy Ghost. She wants us to do the same. She wants us to be fearless in our proclamation of the truths of the Catholic Faith, no matter what it might cost us in this passing vale of tears.

The traditional liturgical calendar of the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church is replete with men and women who thought nothing of offering their very bodies in torture to bear witness to their fidelity to the fullness of what Our Lord had revealed to the Apostles and deposited in Holy Mother Church through them. Our very baptism and confirmation have imposed upon our souls the obligation to do as the Apostles and martyrs have done. Total consecration to Our Lady's Immaculate Heart helps us to eschew human respect, the desire for success in this world at the price of betraying the true Faith, yes, even with our own family members, from whom we have to become estranged in order to remain faithful to Our Lord through Our Lady. Our Lady will help us grow in virtue, to come living temples of the Holy Ghost who mature in each one of the seven gifts and the twelve fruits of the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.

Courage is need particularly now in the life of the Church. Those who are committed as consecrated slaves of Our Lady to the restoration of the Church Militant on earth are mocked and caricatured as schismatic and heretical and disloyal. We must never let such slogans and mindlessness get in the way of doing now what Our Lady's prayers helped the Apostles to do nearly two millennia ago: proclaim the full truths of her Divine Son without fear of how anyone is going to react, including ecclesiastical officials.

Thirteenth, total consecration to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart leads us to grow more fully in love with the Blessed Trinity. She lived to please God: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So must we. Remember something that is worth repeating  a zillion times: the purpose of each human life is to know, love, and serve God here on earth so as to be happy with Him for all eternity in Heaven. Nothing in this vale of tears is going to last, nothing that is except our immortal souls and the actions they have performed. Everything else will be wiped away at the end of time on the Last Day. Our Lady loved God completely. It is the purpose of total consecration to lead us to God through the very instrument through whom He came to earth to redeem us, that is, Mary Immaculate. Total consecration to Mary Immaculate is the path to eternal union with God in Heaven.

Never Surrender To Despair When Our Lady Is So Near

We live in troubling times. We need never surrender to fear or despair when Our Lady is ever near to us.

The naturalists who pass for the great and well-paid commentators and columnists in our world today have nothing to offer us as they do not see the world clearly through the eyes of the true Faith. Moreover, not even those Catholics who have access to the "mainstream" media ever mention Our Lady or her intercessory power as to do so would be to lose their precious "access" to the millions who watch them on television. No amount of such access, however, matters one little bit if they are unwilling to proclaim the glories of Our Lady and to state publicly that there is a path out of the nightmares caused by Modernity and Modernism. This path runs through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart as we pray as many Rosaries each day as our state-in-life permits and as we wear the Miraculous Medal and fulfill the terms that come with being clothed with the garment of Our Lady, her Brown Scapular of Mount Carmel.

The devil, whose head has been crushed by the heel of Our Lady, does not want Our Lady honored publicly. He does not want us to honor her in our own lives. He wants living in fear and doubt and confusion. It was to dispel confusion in the heart of Juan Diego that Our Lady spoke these consoling words to her faithful son, a fifty-five year-old Catholic widower:

 

 

“Hear me and understand well, my son the least, that nothing should frighten or grieve you. Let not your heart be disturbed. Do not fear that sickness, nor any other sickness or anguish. Am I not here, who is your Mother? Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not happily within my fold? What else do you wish? Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything. Do not be afflicted by the illness of your uncle, who will not die now of it. be assured that he is now cured." (Our Lady Of Guadalupe | Relation of the Apparitions.)

We crown Mary as Queen in chapel after chapel each May. Each of us should pray during this month of May, therefore, that we will have the zeal of the Apostles themselves, who, inspired by Our Lady's prayers, planted the seeds for a world where Christ was honored as King and Our Lady was recognized as Queen. Can we do any less?

Viva Cristo Rey!

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saint Athanasius, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Isn't time to pray a Rosary now?

Act of Consecration to Our Lady

by Saint Louis de Montfort

Oh Jesus, Eternal and Incarnate Wisdom, true God and true man, only Son of the Eternal Father and of Mary ever Virgin. I adore you dwelling in the splendor of your Father from all eternity, and in the virginal womb of Mary, your Mother, at the time of your Incarnation.

I thank you for having emptied yourself in assuming the condition of a slave, to set me free form the cruel slavery of sin. I praise and glorify you for having willingly chosen to obey Mary, your holy Mother, in all things, so that through her, I may be your faithful disciple. Unfortunately, I have not kept the vows and promises which I made at my baptism and do not deserve to be called a child of God.

For this reason, I turn to the merciful intercession of your Mother, with the hope of obtaining, through her intercession, the forgiveness of my sins, and lasting communion with you, Incarnate Wisdom.

Hail Most Pure Virgin, living tabernacle of God, in whom the Eternal Wisdom willed to receive the adoration of both men and angels. I greet you as Queen of heaven and earth, for all that is under God has been made subject to you. Oh sure refuge of sinners, all experience your endless mercy. Grant the desire I have for divine Wisdom and of total consecration.

I, (N.....), a faithless sinner, renew and ratify today in your hands, the vows of my baptism. I renounce forever Satan, his pomps and his works, and I give myself entirely to Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Wisdom, to carry my cross after him, all the days of my life, in fidelity to the will of the Father.

In the presence of the heavenly court, I choose you this day as my Mother and Queen. I surrender and consecrate to you, my body and soul; my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions, –past, present and future–, leaving to you the right to dispose of me and of all that belongs to me, according to your good pleasure and for the greater glory of God in time and in eternity.

Accept, gracious Virgin, my offering and present it to your Son; so that as he redeemed me though you, so will he now receive me through you. May I live fully this consecration so as to prolong, in my life, your loving obedience to your Son and thus respond to the mission which God has confided to you in the work of salvation.

Oh Mother of Mercy, grant me the grace to obtain the true Wisdom of God, and, for this end, receive me among those whom you love, teach, guide, nourish and protect as your children and slaves.

Oh Virgin most faithful, make me in everything so perfect a disciple, imitator, and slave of Jesus, your Son, the Incarnate Wisdom, that I may attain through your intercession and example, the fullness of maturity in Christ on earth and his glory in heaven. Amen. Totus Tuus!