Total Consecration to Our Lord through Our Lady's Immaculate Heart

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, taught us 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, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Christ, 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.

It was over a century ago that Father Maximilian Kolbe reiterated this, showing us the good that can be done by devoting oneself singleheartedly 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.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 Our Lady 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 tous 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.  She had complete control of herself as she stood valiantly under the wood of the Holy Cross. 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 Diviine 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 Our Lady’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 her 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 her Divine 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 thethought 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 appended below,  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 Protestant and Judeo-Masonic Novus Ordo liturgical service. 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 Immemorial Mass of Tadition so that its glories can flower once again be the norm for all Catholics of the Roman Rite.  

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.

Saint Louis Grignion de Monfort explained this in True Devotion to Mary:

8. Our best actions are usually tainted and spoiled by the evil that is rooted in us. When pure, clear water is poured into a foul-smelling jug, or wine into an unwashed cask that previously contained another wine, the clear water and the good wine are tainted and readily acquire an unpleasant odour. In the same way when God pours into our soul, infected by original and actual sin, the heavenly waters of his grace or the delicious wines of his love, his gifts are usually spoiled and tainted by the evil sediment left in us by sin. Our actions, even those of the highest virtue, show the effects of it. It is therefore of the utmost importance that, in seeking the perfection that can be attained only by union with Jesus, we rid ourselves of all that is evil in us. Otherwise our infinitely pure Lord, who has an infinite hatred for the slightest stain in our soul, will refuse to unite us to himself and will drive us from his presence.

79. To rid ourselves of selfishness, we must first become thoroughly aware, by the light of the Holy Spirit, of our tainted nature. Of ourselves we are unable to do anything conducive to our salvation. Our human weakness is evident in everything we do and we are habitually unreliable. We do not deserve any grace from God. Our tendency to sin is always present. The sin of Adam has almost entirely spoiled and soured us, filling us with pride and corrupting every one of us, just as leaven sours, swells and corrupts the dough in which it is placed. The actual sins we have committed, whether mortal or venial, even though forgiven, have intensified our base desires, our weakness, our inconstancy and our evil tendencies, and have left a sediment of evil in our soul.

Our bodies are so corrupt that they are referred to by the Holy Spirit as bodies of sin, as conceived and nourished in sin, and capable of any kind of sin. They are subject to a thousand ills, deteriorating from day to day and harbouring only disease, vermin and corruption.

Our soul, being united to our body, has become so carnal that it has been called flesh. “All flesh had corrupted its way”. Pride and blindness of spirit, hardness of heart, weakness and inconstancy of soul, evil inclinations, rebellious passions, ailments of the body, – these are all we can call our own. By nature we are prouder than peacocks, we cling to the earth more than toads, we are more base than goats, more envious than serpents, greedier than pigs, fiercer than tigers, lazier than tortoises, weaker than reeds, and more changeable than weather-cocks. We have in us nothing but sin, and deserve only the wrath of God and the eternity of hell.

80. Is it any wonder then that our Lord laid down that anyone who aspires to be his follower must deny himself and hate his very life? He makes it clear that anyone who loves his life shall lose it and anyone who hates his life shall save it. Now, our Lord, who is infinite Wisdom, and does not give commandments without a reason, bids us hate ourselves only because we richly deserve to be hated. Nothing is more worthy of love than God and nothing is more deserving of hatred than self.

81. Secondly, in order to empty ourselves of self, we must die daily to ourselves. This involves our renouncing what the powers of the soul and the senses of the body incline us to do. We must see as if we did not see, hear as if we did not hear and use the things of this world as if we did not use them. This is what St. Paul calls “dying daily”. Unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single grain and does not bear any good fruit. If we do not die to self and if our holiest devotions do not lead us to this necessary and fruitful death, we shall not bear fruit of any worth and our devotions will cease to be profitable. All our good works will be tainted by self-love and self-will so that our greatest sacrifices and our best actions will be unacceptable to God. Consequently when we come to die we shall find ourselves devoid of virtue and merit and discover that we do not possess even one spark of that pure love which God shares only with those who have died to themselves and whose life is hidden with Jesus Christ in him.

82. Thirdly, we must choose among all the devotions to the Blessed Virgin the one which will lead us more surely to this dying to self. This devotion will be the best and the most sanctifying for us. For we must not believe that all that glitters is gold, all that is sweet is honey, or all that is easy to do and is done by the majority of people is the most sanctifying. Just as in nature there are secrets enabling us to do certain natural things quickly, easily and at little cost, so in the spiritual life there are secrets which enable us to perform works rapidly, smoothly and with facility. Such works are, for example, emptying ourselves of self-love, filling ourselves with God, and attaining perfection.(Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

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.

Saint Louis Grignion de Montfort explained that the perfection of True Devotion to Mary by means of being the consecrated slave of her Divine Son through her own Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart hinges on having the humility to use her as our Mediatrix rather than presuming, as do Protestants and even many Catholics in the conciliar structures, that we do not need her maternal intercession before the Throne of the Most Blessed Trinity:

83. It is more perfect because it supposes greater humility to approach God through a mediator rather than directly by ourselves. Our human nature, as I have just shown, is so spoilt that if we rely on our own work, effort and preparedness to reach God and please him, it is certain that our good works will be tainted and carry little weight with him. They will not induce him to unite himself to us or answer our prayers. God had his reasons for giving us mediators with him. He saw our unworthiness and helplessness and had pity on us. To give us access to his mercies he provided us with powerful advocates, so that to neglect these mediators and to approach his infinite holiness directly and without help from any one of them, is to be lacking in humility and respect towards God who is so great and holy. It would mean that we have less esteem for the King of kings than for an earthly king or ruler, for we would not dare approach an earthly king without a friend to speak for us.

84. Our Lord is our Advocate and our Mediator of redemption with God the Father. It is through him that we must pray with the whole Church, triumphant and militant. It is through him that we have access to God the Father. We should never appear before God, our Father, unless we are supported by the merits of his Son, and, so to speak, clothed in them, as young Jacob was clothed in the skin of the young goats when he appeared before his father Isaac to receive his blessing.

85. But have we no need at all of a mediator with the Mediator himself? Are we pure enough to be united directly to Christ without any help? Is Jesus not God, equal in every way to the Father? Therefore is he not the Holy of Holies, having a right to the same respect as his Father? If in his infinite love he became our security and our Mediator with his Father, whom he wished to appease in order to redeem us from our debts, should we on that account show him less respect and have less regard for the majesty and holiness of his person?

Let us not be afraid to say with St. Bernard that we need a mediator with the Mediator himself and the divinely-honoured Mary is the one most able to fulfil this office of love.  Through her, Jesus came to us; through her we should go to him. If we are afraid of going directly to Jesus, who is God, because of his infinite greatness, or our lowliness, or our sins, let us implore without fear the help and intercession of Mary, our Mother. She is kind, she is tender, and there is nothing harsh or forbidding about her, nothing too sublime or too brilliant. When we see her, we see our own human nature at its purest. She is not the sun, dazzling our weak sight by the brightness of its rays. Rather, she is fair and gentle as the moon, which receives its light from the sun and softens it and adapts it to our limited perception.

She is so full of love that no one who asks for her intercession is rejected, no matter how sinful he may be. The saints say that it has never been known since the world began that anyone had recourse to our Blessed Lady, with trust and perseverance, and was rejected. Her power is so great that her prayers are never refused. She has but to appear in prayer before her Son and he at once welcomes her and grants her requests. He is always lovingly conquered by the prayers of the dear Mother who bore him and nourished him.

86. All this is taken from St. Bernard and St. Bonaventure. According to them, we have three steps to take in order to reach God. The first, nearest to us and most suited to our capacity, is Mary; the second is Jesus Christ; the third is God the Father. To go to Jesus, we should go to Mary, our mediatrix of intercession. To go to God the Father, we must go to Jesus, our Mediator of redemption. This order is perfectly observed in the devotion I shall speak about further on. (Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.)

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.

Finally, Our Lady is the singular vessel of honor through which Our Lord entered the world. And it is the will of her Divine 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.

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! Vivat Christus Rex

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

Our Lady of the Rosary, 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 Monica, pray for us.

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!

Appendix B

The Perfection of Consecrating Oneself as a Slave of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary

120.  As all perfection consists in our being conformed, united and consecrated to Jesus it naturally follows that the most perfect of all devotions is that which conforms, unites, and consecrates us most completely to Jesus. Now of all God’s creatures Mary is the most conformed to Jesus. It therefore follows that, of all devotions, devotion to her makes for the most effective consecration and conformity to him. The more one is consecrated to Mary, the more one is consecrated to Jesus.

That is why perfect consecration to Jesus is but a perfect and complete consecration of oneself to the Blessed Virgin, which is the devotion I teach; or in other words, it is the perfect renewal of the vows and promises of holy baptism.

121.  This devotion consists in giving oneself entirely to Mary in order to belong entirely to Jesus through her. It requires us to give:

  (1) Our body with its senses and members;

  (2) Our soul with its faculties;

  (3) Our present material possessions and all we shall acquire in the future;

  (4) Our interior and spiritual possessions, that is, our merits, virtues and good actions of the past, the present and the future.

In other words, we give her all that we possess both in our natural life and in our spiritual life as well as everything we shall acquire in the future in the order of nature, of grace, and of glory in heaven. This we do without any reservation, not even of a penny, a hair, or the smallest good deed. And we give for all eternity without claiming or expecting, in return for our offering and our service, any other reward than the honour of belonging to our Lord through Mary and in Mary, even though our Mother were not – as in fact she always is – the most generous and appreciative of all God’s creatures.

122.  Note here that two things must be considered regarding our good works, namely, satisfaction and merit or, in other words, their satisfactory or prayer value and their meritorious value. The satisfactory or prayer value of a good work is the good action in so far as it makes condign atonement for the punishment due to sin or obtains some new grace. The meritorious value or merit is the good action in so far as it merits grace and eternal glory. Now by this consecration of ourselves to the Blessed Virgin we give her all satisfactory and prayer value as well as the meritorious value of our good works, in other words, all the satisfactions and the merits. We give her our merits, graces and virtues, not that she might give them to others, for they are, strictly speaking, not transferable, because Jesus alone, in making himself our surety with his Father, had the power to impart his merits to us. But we give them to her that she may keep, increase and embellish them for us, as we shall explain later, and we give her our acts of atonement that she may apply them where she pleases for God’s greater glory.

123. (1)  It follows then: that by this devotion we give to Jesus all we can possibly give him,and in the most perfect manner, that is, through Mary’s hands. Indeed we give him far more than we do by other devotions which require us to give only part of our time, some of our good works or acts of atonement and penances. In this devotion everything is given and consecrated, even the right to dispose freely of one’s spiritual goods and the satisfactions earned by daily good works. This is not done even in religious orders. Members of religious orders give God their earthly goods by the vow of poverty, the goods of the body by the vow of chastity, their free will by the vow of obedience, and sometimes their freedom of movement by the vow of enclosure. But they do not give him by these vows the liberty and right to dispose of the value of their good works. They do not despoil themselves of what a Christian considers most precious and most dear – his merits and satisfactions.

124.  (2) It follows then that anyone who in this way consecrates and sacrifices himself voluntarily to Jesus through Mary may no longer dispose of the value of any of his good actions. All his sufferings, all his thoughts, words, and deeds belong to Mary. She can then dispose of them in accordance with the will of her Son and for his greater glory. This dependence, however, is without detriment to the duties of a person’s present and future state of life. One such duty, for example, would be that of a priest who, by virtue of his office or otherwise, must apply the satisfactory or prayer value of the Holy Mass to a particular person. For this consecration can only be made in accordance with the order established by God and in keeping with the duties of one’s state of life.

125.  (3) It follows that we consecrate ourselves at one and the same time to Mary and to Jesus. We give ourselves to Mary because Jesus chose her as the perfect means to unite himself to us and unite us to him. We give ourselves to Jesus because he is our last end. Since he is our Redeemer and our God we are indebted to him for all that we are. (Treatise on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.)