Saturday, June 8, 2013

Immaculate Heart of Mary

Immaculate Heart of Mary, Melissa Breeland
Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The feast is celebrated on the Saturday after the Second Sunday after Pentecost.

Origin
The feast grew out of the exisiting devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary
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. Pius XII agreed in 1945 cenain to find in her most loving Hean ... the safe haven in the midst of the tempest that everywhere assails us. Through the symbol of her heart we venerate in Mary her most pure and perfect love for God and her motherly love for each one of us. In that heart of hers we can find a refuge in the midst of all the and temptations of life, and we ask her to prepare for us the safe way - iter para tutum - the way by which we will soon reach her Son (In Conversation with God, Vol. 6, p. 330)
Sweet & Immaculate Heart
St. Josemaria taught that we should "get accustomed to entrusting your poor heart to the Sweet and Immaculate Heart of Mary, so that she may purify it from so much dross, and lead it to the Most Sacred and Most Merciful Heart of Jesus" (Furrow, 830). This is what our Blessed Mother always does – leads us back to Jesus.


Blessed Pope John Paul II
Pope John Paul II prayed the following before the :
O Mother of all men and women, and of all peoples, you who know all their sufferings and their hopes, you who have a mother's awareness of all the struggles between good and evil, between light and darkness, which afflict the modern world, accept the cry which we, moved by the Holy Spirit, address directly to your Heart. Embrace with the love of the Mother and Handmaid of the Lord, this human world of ours, which we entrust and consecrate to you, for we are full of concern for the earthly and eternal destiny of individuals and peoples. In a special way we entrust and consecrate to you those individuals and nations which particularly need to be thus entrusted and consecrated. ‘We have recourse to your protection, holy Mother of God!' Despise not our petitions in our necessities. 
“Behold, as we stand before you, Mother of Christ, before your Immaculate Heart, we desire, together with the whole Church, to unite ourselves with the consecration which, for love of us, your Son made of himself to the Father: ‘For their sake', he said, ‘I consecrate myself that they also may be consecrated in the truth' (Jn 17:19). We wish to unite ourselves with our Redeemer in this his consecration for the world and for the human race, which, in his divine Heart, has the power to obtain pardon and to secure reparation. The power of this consecration lasts for all time and embraces all individuals, peoples and nations. It overcomes every evil that the spirit of darkness is able to awaken, and has in fact awakened in our times, in the heart of man and in his history. How deeply we feel the need for the consecration of humanity and the world—our modern world—in union with Christ himself! For the redeeming work of Christ must be shared in by the world through the Church. The present Year of the Redemption shows this: the special Jubilee of the whole Church. 
Above all creatures, may you be blessed, you, the Handmaid of the Lord, who in the fullest way obeyed the divine call! Hail to you, who are wholly united to the redeeming consecration of your Son! Mother of the Church! Enlighten the People of God along the paths of faith, hope, and love! Enlighten especially the peoples whose consecration and entrustment by us you are awaiting. Help us to live in the truth of the consecration of Christ for the entire human family of the modern world. 
In entrusting to you, O Mother, the world, all individuals and peoples, we also entrust to you this very consecration of the world, placing it in your motherly Heart. Immaculate Heart! Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today, and whose immeasurable effects already weigh down upon our modern world and seem to block the paths towards the future! 
From famine and war, deliver us us. From nuclear war, from incalculable self-destruction, from every kind of war, deliver us. From sins against the life of man from its very beginning, deliver us.From hatred and from the demeaning of the dignity of the children of God, deliver us. From every kind of injustice in the life of society, both national and international, deliver us. From readiness to trample on the commandments of God, deliver us. From attempts to stifle in human hearts the very truth of God, deliver us. From the loss of awareness of good and evil, deliver us From sins against the Holy Spirit, deliver us, deliver us! 
Accept, O Mother of Christ, this cry laden with the sufferings of all individual human beings,laden with the sufferings of whole societies. Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit to conquer all sin: individual sin and the ‘sin of the world', sin in all its manifestations. Let there be revealed, once more, in the history of the world the infinite saving power of the Redemption: the power of merciful Love! May it put a stop to evil! May it transform consciences! May your Immaculate Heart reveal for all the light of Hope!” (Pope John Paul II, March 25, 1984)

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