AUGUST MESSAGE 2010 for the MONTH OF THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY

In the last decade of the Holy Rosary, the Blessed Virgin Mary is assumed body and soul into Heaven where she is crowned Queen. It is only in the last 50 years that the Assumption of Our Lady into Heaven has become dogma although the feast of the Assumption has been celebrated for centuries. The reasoning behind the belief of the Assumption is that since Our Lady said ‘Yes’ to becoming the Mother of God, allowing herself to be the bearer of the Christ-Child, surely Our Lord could not allow His Mother’s body to be corrupted in death. As it was the Temple of His conception, Mary’s body is united with her soul in Heaven. In honouring Mary by assuming her body and soul into Heaven we are honoured as fellow human beings.

We should remind ourselves every day in the hope of the resurrection – that one day we will be united with Christ. This should also remind us of how we have to treat our bodies – as temples.  Do we corrupt our bodies before death? There are many temptations to give way to the pleasures and vices that surround us in our modern world. There are pressures to conform to the acceptability of the ways of the world. Promiscuity, drug abuse, alcoholism, pornography, laziness – the list is endless. How often have we offended Our Lord with our tongue, so soon after receiving Him in Holy Communion?

Let us imagine a great number of saints and angels surrounding a throne. On the throne is Our Blessed Mother receiving a crown from her Son Jesus. The coronation of Mary is glorious and fulfilling of what has been promised. The promise of good triumphing over evil. ‘A woman adorned with the sun, standing on the moon and with the twelve stars on her head for a crown.’ The rest of this quote from Revelation, taken from the Mass of the Feast of the Assumption, tells of a woman giving birth to a Son. As soon as the child was born he was taken up into Heaven to frustrate the evil intentions of the dragon. ‘Then I heard a voice shout from Heaven. ‘Victory and power and empire forever have been won by our God, and all authority for His Christ.’ This shout of victory could well be echoed during Our Lady’s coronation.

Our own voices unite with the heavenly crown when we recite the Litany of Our Lady, particularly when we come to the parts that invoke Mary as Queen. Then again, the last title is very special: Queen of Peace. It is something that we all long for and hope will someday come about. Our Blessed Mother became God’s instrument, God’s means to bring His Son into the world. A peace that the world cannot give. Saint Pio demonstrated this by following the example of Saint Francis in asking to be instruments of peace and prayer among our fellow men and women in our day and age.

Saint Pio prayed to our Blessed Mother with the most beautiful titles; he never tired of calling her his blessed, tender Mother. In his voice could be heard the resounding of a very sweet harmony. He invites all to love Mary, to call Her, “refuge, comfort, star of our earthly journey.” He has also advised us to make every effort, like many chosen souls, to always follow this Blessed Mother, to walk close to her since there is no other path leading to life except the path followed by our Mother. Let us not refuse to take this path, we who want to reach our journey’s end. For all souls travelling towards the heavenly homeland, his words have the value of an extremely joyful wish, immersed in eternal goodness: “May she who entered the world without stain of sin, obtain for us from her Son, the grace to depart from it free from sin”.

For many years Saint Pio had to continually fight and sustain the ferocious battle with Satan. Traps of all kind were laid for him with the most fearful skilfulness. Illness, misunderstandings, beatings, terror, tortures of the body and spirit, persecutions, insults, silence and abandonment: satan vomited the ferocious hate of the Inferno against him. Saint Pio, trusting the Divine Guide’s promise, and sustained by the exquisite love of his Heavenly Mother, continued to fight and to win, up to the last instant. Having plunged into a sea of light, he was always ready to tear from the heart of his ‘good little Mother’ treasures and graces for we who are still pilgrims on this earth. The sweet hope that through their intercession, the greatest of all graces be granted to us, comforts us: The grace that one day, we too, might be participants in that glory and joy without end.

After Our Lord ascended into heaven, Mary was with the apostles and the disciples, who waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit. St. Luke tells us that: “ All these with one mind continued faithfully in prayer, with the women and Mary.”  Tradition tells us that Mary remained on earth some 12 years after her Son’s Ascension into heaven, until her own bodily Assumption. During these years, she helped to keep up the faith of the early Christians and strengthen them in their loyalty under persecution. After Christ’s Ascension, it was Peter who took the initiative on Pentecost Sunday and guided the young Church by His Christ-given power.

Although Mary was the Mother of Christ, she was obedient to the vicar of Christ in her day. We must be obedient to those who Christ has appointed and co-operate with the graces that our prayers obtain through Mary. Mary is our model of unity in the Church. Our Lord prophesied that “ By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” To obtain the kind of supernatural love that is born of grace and poured into our souls by God, we need constant help from Christ, through the intercession of His Mother Mary. After the Ascension of Christ into heaven, Mary continued to have a burning desire to be re-united with Him. Without Her Divine Son, She felt completely exiled. Those years of separation from Him were a painful martyrdom for her, a martyrdom of love that consumed her gradually. Another name for our Church is the “Community of Love” and this means a lifetime of sacrifice. It was the price that Christ paid to bring the Church into being on the Cross.

THOUGHT FOR THE MONTH:

Our Lady with the Child Jesus appeared to Sister Lucia in the convent of the Dorothean Sisters in Pontevedra, Portugal, on December 10th, 1925. She said to her: “My daughter, look at My Heart surrounded with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. You, at least, try to console Me, and say that I promise to assist at the hour of death with all the graces necessary for salvation, all those who, on the first Saturdays of five consecutive months go to confession and receive Holy Communion, recite five decades of the Rosary and keep me company for a quarter of an hour while meditating on the Mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to Me. ” 

The Child Jesus said: “ Have compassion on the Heart of your Most Holy Mother, which is covered with thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, while there is no-one to remove them with an Act of Reparation.”

Our Lady said at Fatima that God wishes to establish in the world, devotion to Her Immaculate Heart and that she would come and ask for reparation on the first Saturdays.

REMEMBER:

The first five Saturdays must be 5 in a row.

WHY 5?:

Our Lady revealed to Sister Lucia that there are five types of blasphemy against the Immaculate Heart of Mary:

Blasphemy against the Immaculate Conception.

Blasphemy against Mary’s Virginity.

Blasphemy against her divine Maternity

Blasphemies that seek to implant in the hearts of children indifference, contempt and even hatred for their Immaculate Mother.

Blasphemies insulting her in her sacred images.

Sister Lucia tells us that Our Blessed Lord Himself said to her that He wanted devotion to the Immaculate Heart of His Mother to be “extended and placed beside devotion to My Divine Heart.”

THE HOLY COMMUNION:

For this purpose Saturday includes the Vigil Mass of Sunday. Also Lucia tells us that the Child Jesus Himself granted the following concession, that “For justifying reasons, approved by a priest” one may receive on the Sunday following the First Saturday.

THE CONFESSION:

Sister Lucia asked Our Blessed Lord if confession within 8 days (before or after the First Saturday) would be valid. Jesus replied: “Yes, even more still, provided they receive Me in the state of grace…..”

THE MEDITATION:

It may be on one or more of the mysteries. It may be divided into parts before each decade of the Rosary. A priest or someone other than a priest may conduct the meditation or give a short talk on the mystery or mysteries.

PRIESTS!

All over the world vast numbers are at Mass, receive Holy Communion and say the Rosary daily. Will you tell them that as well as the intention of making Reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary,they only need to add a fifteen minute meditation on a Mystery or mysteries of the Rosary on the First Saturdays to complete this devotion.

ALL CATHOLICS!

“ There stood by the Cross of Jesus His Mother.” The Blessed Virgin could not have been more willingly and more closely associated with the life and death of our Divine Saviour. Whether or not we do the First Saturdays, Jesus Himself wants us to live in the spirit of Reparation not only to His Sacred Heart, but also to the Immaculate Heart of His and our Mother.

After the consecration of the world to the most sweet and motherly Heart of Mary in 1942, many petitions were sent to the Roman Pontiff asking him to extend to the whole Church the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary that already existed in some places. Pope Pius XII agreed in 1945 certain in her most loving Heart...... the safe haven in the middle of the confusion that attacks us on every side.

PRAYER:

In the Assumption there is the reward for virtue.  Our Lady who had accepted the hay of the stable was lifted from the casket in which the apostles laid her, and was assumed bodily into heaven where she was crowned Queen.

Here is the supreme promise fulfilled.  The young Jewish girl who had assented to the Will of God in her cave - like home in Nazareth, who lived in harmony with the carpenter Joseph, who stood beneath the Cross of her dying Son, became Queen of Heaven! What matters poverty, or pain of the moment against such promise and such splendour? Mary provides every assurance we need: from the joys of duty, to the sorrows of life, and on into ultimate fulfilment, into hope supreme. Praying the Rosary is more than a miniature retreat, it is a renewal of the spirit, cause for great joy, and a most ideal way in which to praise God and give joy to her Immaculate Heart. Mary, the Mother of God, the mother of mankind, the Queen of heaven. With the words ‘Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Hail our life, our sweetness and our hope’, we express all the reasons why we should turn to her with such child-like and unlimited confidence.  A review of our sad situation as exiles in a ‘valley of tears’, through which we travel sorrowfully just as she once did. From the valley of exile we ask her to turn her most sweet and merciful eyes towards us. We ask her to ‘show Jesus unto us’, that is, resurrection and eternal life at the end of our pilgrimage.

“Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, hail our life, our sweetness and our hope! To you do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then, O most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy towards us; and after this our exile, show to us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary, Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.”  

Dear Mother Mary, pray for us and ask Jesus that we may die in His favour so as to rise on the last day body and soul into heaven, and so share in your Glorious Assumption.

AUGUST 22^nd: ‘Queenship of Mary’

Prayer is the foundation on which we build our GROUPS of PRAYER.

Love and Prayers,  Josephine                        .            www.padrepio.org.uk/