August 1, 1973
“‘O my Jesus, give me your Heart because I want to love Our Lady as You have loved her.’ This is the prayer, my son, which I myself have inspired in you: no one in fact has ever loved Me as my Son Jesus.
With what tenderness He surrounded Me! He has always been within Me; we grew up together in his hidden life, and in his public life; we were as one during his Passion and his death on the Cross.The sight of the sorrow of his Mother who assisted Him in his atrocious agony shortened his life; more than his physical sufferings, his Heart-of-a-Son could not withstand this unspeakable agony. ‘Mother!’ was his last agonizing cry, the loud cry with which He expired on the Cross.
At this present time, Jesus is greatly saddened, even angered, at seeing how numerous those Priests are who have turned away from Me in their hearts, who have forgotten Me in their lives, who have blotted Me out in the souls of so many of the faithful. Through their fault, devotion to Me, always such a living thing in the Church, has now become greatly weakened; in some places it is practically dead.
They say that I-the Mother-cast a shadow on the glory and the honour which is due to my Son alone! My poor children, how senseless they are, how blind! How the Devil has known how to capture them! They have reached such blindness because they have listened neither to Jesus nor to Me.
They have allowed themselves to be led by themselves alone, by their intelligence, by their pride and thus they have allowed themselves to be made the sport of Satan, who was the one to succeed-at last-in obscuring my place in the Church and in obliterating me in souls!
I will again have to go about searching out from among Priests those who are faithful, those who listen to Me, those who love Me. Through them I will again shine more resplendently in the Church, after the great purification … The Mother has received from Jesus the power to bring back home the children who have gone astray.
But I have need of humble and courageous Priests: ready to let themselves be laughed at, ready to let themselves be trampled on for Me. It will be through these Priests, humble, laughed at and trampled on, that I will form the cohort that will make it possible for Me to bring to Jesus an innumerable number of children, now purified by the great tribulation.
My Thoughts:
We (all of us, priests and laity) are living in such times that to follow our Catholic faith fully, means to be mocked and accused …this is our cross to bear…do not brush it off so easily. God can bring good out of it, but we need to be willing to do our part. Seeking peace from the worldly at all costs is in fact attempting to avoid the cross. ‘Get behind me Satan’ should be our reply, like Jesus’ when He was put to the temptation. And we are all tempted at one time or another to worship the kingdom of this world with its apparent ease, and merriment. However all of that comes with a cost, all that is under Satan’s domain binds the soul to it and throws it into knots, while all who find freedom in Christ are free indeed. “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son remains forever. So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:34-36).
So then if true freedom means freedom from sin, or ‘fullness of grace’. Mary makes a greater partner for us on this journey towards freedom, which is what our whole entire life is about.
Prayer for Personal Troubles:
Mother of fair love, I look to you.
Take into your hands the ribbon of my life,
and see the snarl of knots that keeps me bound
to sin, anxiety, and hopelessness.
I beg you, Mother, by your powerful intercession
and long fingers of love and grace,
undo the knots in my heart and in my life.
Free me to love as Christ loves.
Mary, Undoer of Knots, pray for us.
I. MARY’S MOTHERHOOD WITH REGARD TO THE CHURCH (Catechism of the Catholic Church)
Wholly united with her Son . . .
964 Mary’s role in the Church is inseparable from her union with Christ and flows directly from it. “This union of the mother with the Son in the work of salvation is made manifest from the time of Christ’s virginal conception up to his death”;504 it is made manifest above all at the hour of his Passion:
- Thus the Blessed Virgin advanced in her pilgrimage of faith, and faithfully persevered in her union with her Son unto the cross. There she stood, in keeping with the divine plan, enduring with her only begotten Son the intensity of his suffering, joining herself with his sacrifice in her mother’s heart, and lovingly consenting to the immolation of this victim, born of her: to be given, by the same Christ Jesus dying on the cross, as a mother to his disciple, with these words: “Woman, behold your son.”505
965 After her Son’s Ascension, Mary “aided the beginnings of the Church by her prayers.”506 In her association with the apostles and several women, “we also see Mary by her prayers imploring the gift of the Spirit, who had already overshadowed her in the Annunciation.”507