Consecration

FATHER de Nantes, our venerable founder, consecrated the little Brothers and little Sisters of the Sacred Heart to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1997, upon his return from exile, with the purpose of “giving way” to the Immaculate Conception. Today, it is Pope Francis who “is giving way,” fulfilling the prophetic vision of Saint Jacinta:

“Oh! Lucy! Can’t you see all those highways and roads and fields full of dead people with their blood pouring out, and others who are crying with hunger and have nothing to eat? And the Holy Father in a church praying before the Immaculate Heart of Mary? And so many people praying with him?”●

On the feast of the Annunciation, Friday, March 25, 2022, the whole world saw and heard Pope Francis beseeching Our Lady of Fatima in a moving tone:

“We now turn to You and knock at the door of Your Heart. We are Your beloved children. In every age You make Yourself known to us, calling us to conversion.”

For a hundred years, the Popes have succeeded one another, from Pius XI to Benedict XVI, each vying with his predecessors in indocility, disregarding the repeated ‘visits’ of the Blessed Virgin. Pope John Paul I was an exception. He had determined to obey Her, but he died a martyr of his brothers before carrying out this intention. Benedict XVI, being John Paul II’s successor, refused to accept Pope Francis’ invitation to unite in the consecration. Pope Francis thus appears to be the successor of John Paul I from the time of the beautiful program that the Good God had inspired him to proclaim in his first consistorial homily, before stunned cardinals. Nevertheless, he then seemed to have forgotten it somewhat, like Saint Peter denying his Master three times.

For the Head of the Apostles, this lasted only a few hours. Then, the Virgin Mary, Saint Mary Magdalene and Saint John, who were confronted with this mystery of iniquity wherein all power had been given to the Prince of this world, quickly snatched Peter from Satan’s clutches. For us, this has lasted for almost ten decades.

In Tuy, on June 13, 1929, Our Lady said to Lucy:

“The moment has come when God asks the Holy Father to make, in union with all the bishops of the world, the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart, promising to save it by this means.”

It is a matter of eternal life or death!

“So numerous are the souls that the justice of God condemns for sins committed against Me, that I have come to ask for reparation. Sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray.”

Pius XI turned a deaf ear, letting his policy of friendship with the USSR be his only guide. So we had the war with Germany, also underpinned by the same pact with Russia, which Pope Pius XI had refused to consecrate to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in order to obtain her conversion.

Today, Pope Francis confesses with true repentance: “We have strayed from that path of peace. We have forgotten the lesson learned from the tragedies of the last century, the sacrifice of the millions who fell in two World Wars.”

Rather than “forgotten”, it would be more accurate to say that we “disregarded the lesson” announced in advance to Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta, as early as July 13, 1917, in the middle of the World War, the first one!

“If what I am going to say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace. The war is going to end. If, however, they do not cease to offend God another, a worse one, will begin in the reign of Pius XI. When you see a night illuminated with an unknown light, know that it is the great sign that God is going to punish the world for its crimes by means of war, famine, and persecutions against the Church and the Holy Father.

“To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to My Immaculate Heart and the Communion of Reparation of the first Saturdays of the month. If My requests are heard, Russia will be converted and there will be peace. If not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, provoking wars and persecutions against the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, and many nations will be annihilated.”

All these things were literally fulfilled throughout the “past century.” Today, Pope Francis – after having painted a picture of the “large city half in ruins” announced by the third part of the ‘Secret’ entrusted to the children – “is praying in a large church before the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and so many people are praying with him:

“Mother Mary, we now desire to welcome You into our lives and our history. At this hour, a weary and distraught humanity stands with You beneath the Cross…”

The “large Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with its bark” that Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta saw on July 13, 1917.

“…needing to entrust itself to You and, through You, to consecrate itself to Christ.”

Admirable formula that puts an end to the objections of the ‘theologians,’ from Laurentin to Ratzinger!

“The people of Ukraine and Russia, who venerate You with great love, now turn to You, even as Your Heart beats with compassion for them and for all those peoples decimated by war, hunger, injustice and poverty.

“Therefore, Mother of God and our Mother, to Your Immaculate Heart we solemnly entrust and consecrate ourselves, the Church and all humanity, especially Russia and Ukraine.

She had promised it! “In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and she will be converted and a certain period of peace will be given to the world. In Portugal the dogma of the Faith will always be conserved.” The promise was kept!

“This is not a magic formula," the Pope stressed in the homily delivered during the Mass he had just celebrated, “but a spiritual act. And a gesture of full confidence of the children who, in the tribulation of this cruel and senseless war that threatens the world, have recourse to their Mother by throwing fear and pain into Her Heart, returning to Her.”

Concretely, given the authority of the Holy Father, the gravity of the situation and the capital importance of this consecration, we must see the finger of God Lk 11:20 in this act of the “Bishop dressed in White walking “half trembling with halting step.” God intervenes through the poor Vicar of His Son, diabolically disoriented, expert in a bankrupt humanity: “Now with shame we cry out: Forgive us, Lord!”

After Paul VI, exalted by his “cult of man,” it is prodigious to have a Pope who asks God for forgiveness!

Pope Francis is not far from the Kingdom of Our Lady of Fatima, although he does not name Her and prefers to quote a sentence of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego. In so doing, he does not yet understand that by refusing the Covenant that God proposed to the Supreme Pontiffs, his predecessors, through the mediation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, they were primarily responsible for the “millions of deaths of the World Wars” that he deplores, “the corpses he meets on his way.”

His way of presenting the holy and divine words of the consecration is reminiscent of the prodigal child. He does not give himself airs and graces, certainly, but like a very small child, somewhat unconscious and therefore not very contrite, he hardly seems to measure how much he has upset his Mother Nonetheless he repents upon seeing the tears of his Mother, tears like those seen at the Carmel of Coimbra by Lucy, whom her superior suddenly heard whispering, in the presence of a statue of Our Lady of Fatima: “She is weeping!”

Pope Francis saw Mary’s tears: “O Mother, may Your sorrowful plea stir our hardened hearts. May the tears You shed for us make this valley parched by our hatred blossom anew.”

The “us” used by the Pope recalls the “us” used by Father de Nantes, our venerable founder, in conclusion of his criticism of the so-called ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church’ (ccc): “Our mirages have led us astray, Most Holy Father...” It is as though Jesus were guiding the pen of His vicar who has denied Him. But precisely, Pope Francis, like Saint Peter, will have all the more authority to “confirm his brothers,” now that he has “returned” with the weight of the royal “We,” the “We” responsible for all the apocalyptic disorders of our times that are the last.

IMMACULATE HEART

We read in La Croix of Friday, March 25, 2022, on the feast of the Annunciation, Loup Besmond de Senneville’s account of “Pope Francis’ spiritual offensive: Pope Francis will consecrate Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, this March 25 at Saint Peter’s Basilica.”

The author’s thought is abysmally profound: “The announcement of the consecration of Ukraine and Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary left the ambassadors to the Holy See as perplexed as they were intrigued: ‘It is certain that when one resorts to prayer, it is because the situation is grim,’ one of them stated.” Astounding!

It is all too obvious that the Second Vatican Council left the Vatican and all its institutions totally stripped of any mystical and political intelligence of the Immaculate Conception.

In Lourdes, the Virgin Mary said Her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” She did not confine Herself to the invocation that She had taught to Saint Catherine [Labouré], rue du Bac, in Paris. “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to You.” The privilege of the Immaculate Conception was understood as the affirmation that, from Adam and Eve until the end of the world, only one ‘Woman’ would be preserved from original sin: the Virgin Mary. This truth of Faith, always believed and loved by the good Christian people, difficult for the reason of theologians throughout the centuries to accept, had become the object of the dogmatic definition pronounced by Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1854.

Four years later, the Virgin Mary descended in the grotto of Massabielle and said, on March 25, 1858: “I am the Immaculate Conception.”

“We are passing, it seems to me,” said Father Nantes, in a sermon of February 11, 1997, “from a restricted acceptance of this new revelation to a universal understanding. This is an explanation of dogma. It is not only a ‘confirmation’ of the definition, as Saint Bernadette wrote to Blessed Pius IX, it is a new understanding, as Saint Maximilian-Mary Kolbe had grasped in his dazzling illuminations.”

It is Her proper name and not a qualifier. It is as though She were saying: I have been preserved, in My human conception, from the taint of original sin that a carnal ‘conception’ conveys, it is true. Our Father reminded us that God ‘conceived’ His Word. Thus there is ‘conception’ in God. This word of the Virgin opens a new chapter in the treatise of the Incarnation of the Word Who was ‘conceived’ by the Holy Spirit in the virginal womb of Mary.

The Word Himself is the eternal ‘Conception’ of the Father. God conveys His Word, all His wisdom, pours Himself entirely into another Self Who is His beloved Son. This relationship of spiritual begetting is called a ‘conception’. In our human condition, it is an idea so distinct that it acquires a kind of relative, partial independence from the mouth that emits the sound of the voice, to express the thought corresponding to the Truth.

The Virgin Mary, more divine than human, gives an eternal work of God as Her name: “I am the Immaculate Conception.” She is the perfect ‘conception’ of the creature as God desired Her to be to Her fullness. She is the work of God, a perfect work that places Her above all women, because Jesus, ‘conceived’ in Her womb, is the perfect, the more than perfect, work of God, placed above all men by His Incarnation.

“What I say in an absolute way about Jesus Christ I say in a relative way about the Blessed Virgin,” Saint Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort declared, adding: “Since Jesus Christ chose Her as the indissoluble companion of His life, His death, His glory, His power in Heaven and on the earth, He gave Her through grace, relatively to His majesty, all the same rights and privileges that He possesses by nature.”

He gave Her a soul, a body, an Immaculate Heart, that is, a Heart as perfectly holy as the Sacred Heart of Jesus is; the Immaculate Heart of Mary is as Holy as God is. We are consecrated to Her by the Holy Father... along with the Russians, the Ukrainians, and “the Church and all humanity.”

WHAT DOES CONSECRATION TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY INVOLVE?

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass begins with “acknowledging that we have sinned” and asking for forgiveness, that is, with our ‘conversion.’

The ‘suppliants’ thus converted then receive the teaching of the Word of God in the Holy Books of the Old Testament. This teaching heralded and prepared the Incarnation of this Word, prophesied by the prophet Isaiah: “Behold the Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and His Name shall be Emmanuel,” i.e. “God with us.” It is so extraordinary that we recall three times a day the historical fulfilment of this miracle in the Angelus prayer: “Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis, the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

Now, this miracle is renewed at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is a ‘consecration,’ that is, a transformation of the bread into the Body of Christ, and of the wine into His Precious Blood poured out to cleanse us of all sin. Because He is risen, Christ has this power to ‘consecrate’ the person who eats this Flesh and drinks this Blood, that is, to render holy the sinner that he was. This is how the risen Christ incorporates him, snatching him from Satan, and reconquers this world to make it His Church, His Bride, of Whom the Immaculate Heart of Mary is the tireless Artificer.

This is how France became the “eldest daughter” of Mary, “consecrated” in “mystical body of Christ,” that is, in Christendom.

What about Russia? Why “Russia?” Tirelessly, Lucy reminded Pope Francis’ predecessors that this was a requirement of the Blessed Virgin. They, however, did not have the same ‘political’ views as the Blessed Virgin.

Today, it is clear: Russia is at the centre of the cyclone that is threatening to devastate the world... “God... wants to save it”, Francis, the vicar of Christ, also since he has just knocked on the door of Mary’s Heart:

“Mother of God and our mother, to Your Immaculate Heart we solemnly entrust and consecrate ourselves, the Church and all humanity, especially Russia and Ukraine… In Your womb Jesus took flesh; help us to foster the growth of communion.

This means that it is not enough to rely on the miracle promised to us by Our Lady of Fatima. Like Bernadette in Lourdes, like Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta, “I still must earn it.” The consecration is well done and ‘valid’ ex opere operato. Russia has been incorporated into the ‘Eucharistic Heart of Jesus-Mary.’ It is up to us to make it bear fruit through the assiduous practice of the five First Saturdays instituted by Our Lady of Fatima, in Pontevedra, to “make us artisans of communion” in the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus Mary.

Brother Bruno of Jesus-Mary