Abide in the Unblemished Heart of Mary

A string of meditations

On the calendar of the once and future Roman Rite, today is the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. (I’ve written two articles about the shifting around of Marian feasts for the modern rite of Paul VI: if you’re interested in the details, see here and here.) For the occasion, I would like to share the following pertinent excerpts from the book In Sinu Jesu: When Heart Speaks to Heart—The Journal of a Priest at Prayer (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2016). Page numbers are given in parentheses.

---

My Eucharistic Heart overflows with love for My priests. I would give to each of them the grace I gave Saint John, My beloved disciple: that of intimacy with My Heart and with the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of My Mother. I would renew the priesthood of My Church in this way. I would make My priests resplendent with holiness. I would impart to their tongues and to their hands the very graces that I poured out upon My Apostles in the beginnings of My Church. The reticence is not Mine. It is they, My priests, who flee My company. (14)

The Immaculate Heart of My Mother loves all My priests. She accepts each one as her own son, and in each one she sees a friend of My Heart, a friend chosen by Me, and one in whom I want to find all the qualities of friendship that I found in Saint John. This is part of My Mother’s role in the sanctification of priests. She will lead every priest who consecrates himself to her, as you did, into the deepest joys of friendship with My Sacred Heart. (17)

---

(Our Lady:) My presence and my action are revealed in gentleness, in sweetness, and in mercy. I want you to resemble me spiritually, just as my Jesus resembled me physically. Jesus, looking at me, saw the perfect reflection of all the dispositions and virtues of His adorable Heart. I, looking at you, want to see my own Immaculate Heart mirrored in yours. I want to communicate to you and to all my priest sons the virtues of my Heart. (18)

(Our Lord:) The fire of My Heart is the Living Flame of Love, the Holy Spirit. Yield to that fire, and ask Me to enkindle it in you and in the souls of all My priests. The flame of purifying and sanctifying love blazes from My Body in the Most Holy Eucharist. Those who adore Me in My Sacrament of love will be the first to experience the sacerdotal Pentecost by which I intend to renew the priesthood of My Church. The sons of My Mother’s Immaculate Heart will be prepared by her for this work of Mine. (23)

In all of this, have a boundless confidence in My Immaculate Mother. Her hands are open over the Church to dispense graces in abundance, first of all to My priests, and then through My priests to souls everywhere. Call upon My Mother as Mediatrix of all graces, for you and all My priests are called to share in her mediation, as you participate sacramentally in Mine. My Mother is assembling a company of priests to be for her other Saint Johns. These will live in her presence and receive from her Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart an abundance of knowledge and of graces for the days that lie ahead. (34)

Thank My Mother for all that she has obtained for you by remaining faithful to the humble prayer that she so loves, her Rosary. The Rosary will preserve you in purity, in humility, and in all the virtues pleasing to My Mother’s Immaculate Heart and My own Heart. (43)

My Mother’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart is to be your refuge and your place of solace. Go to My Mother in all your needs. She is your Mother of Perpetual Help, that is, of unfailing help. My Mother is at the service of all My priests. She is their Mother, but she is also the humble handmaid of the Lord. In every priest of Mine she recognizes Me, and she places herself wholly at My service in My priests. For all of that, she remains the Immaculate Queen of heaven and of earth. All the riches of My Sacred Heart are hers to give away as she sees fit. She administers the treasury of My kingdom, and all that is Mine is hers to bestow freely and lavishly according to the desires of her maternal and merciful Heart. (43)

John was the friend of My Heart. When he saw My Heart pierced on Calvary, his own heart was pierced too. This created between him and My most holy Mother the deepest of bonds. This it was that sealed the covenant of filial and maternal love that I established between them by virtue of My words from the Cross. This it was that made their life together after the birth of My Church at Pentecost a model of perfect unity and of burning charity. John and Mary together graced the Church by living in fidelity to the words I spoke from the Cross and by abiding in the mystery of My pierced Heart. Their own hearts—the Immaculate Heart of the Mother and the pure heart of the son—were a single channel of mercy and of light for souls. I want it to be the same for you and for all My priests in their relationship to My most holy Mother. (61)

Lord Jesus Christ, Priest and Victim, Lamb without stain or blemish, I come before Thy Face, laden with the sins and betrayals of my brother priests and with the burden of my own sins and infidelities. Allow me to represent those priests who are most in need of Thy mercy. For them, let me abide before Thy Eucharistic Face, close to Thy open Heart. Through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Thy Mother, Advocate and Mediatrix of all graces, pour forth upon all the priests of Thy Church that torrent of mercy that ever flows from Thy Heart, to purify and heal them, to sanctify and refresh them, and, at the hour of their death, to make them worthy of joining Thee before the Father in the heavenly Holy Place beyond the veil. Amen. (90)

Seek out the company of My Immaculate Mother and of the saints. Learn to live with them now so that you will live with them in eternity. Honour My Mother in the mystery of her Immaculate Conception. This is a mystery full of grace and of light for those who ponder it. It is the remedy for many of the ills that afflict My priests and poison their souls. Invoke My Mother conceived without sin and she will communicate to you something of the purity and brightness of her all-holy and immaculate Heart. (94)

My most pure Mother is the secret of priestly holiness. My priests have only to seek Mary, My Mother, and all the rest will be given them in abundance. The greatest saints knew this, but today many priestly hearts have grown dark and cold, and their relationship with My Mother, which is to be a reproduction of My own relationship with her, is almost non-existent. The renewal of holiness in My priests will come about as I have promised only when they become little and childlike, and consecrate themselves entirely to My Mother’s Immaculate Heart. Their hearts need her Heart. (127-28)

I offered myself to the Father from the altar of My Mother’s Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart. She accepted, consenting to bear the full weight of My sacrifice, to be the very place from which My holocaust of love blazed up. She, in turn, offered herself with Me to the Father from the altar of My Sacred Heart. There she immolated herself, becoming one victim with Me for the redemption of the world. Her offering was set ablaze in My holocaust by the descent of the Holy Spirit. Thus, from our two hearts become two altars, there rose the sweet fragrance of one single offering: My oblation upon the altar of her heart, and her oblation upon the altar of Mine. This, in effect, is what is meant when, using another language, you speak of My Mother as Co-Redemptrix. Our two hearts formed but a single holocaust of love in the Holy Spirit. (168)

(Our Lady:) Yes, my beloved little son, the eighth sorrow of my maternal and Immaculate Heart is that my Son is so offended in the Sacrament of His love. This sorrow of mine will endure until the end of time, when the real presence of my Son in the Most Holy Sacrament will give way to the sight of His divine majesty. Then will faith give way to vision, and hope to possession. Then will love be secure and everlasting for all who will have died in the embrace of His divine friendship.
          Until then, know that my maternal Heart suffers and grieves over the irreverence, the coldness, and the ingratitude of so many souls towards the Sacrament of my Son’s undying love. It is in this Sacrament that He loves His own, loving them to the end—to the end of every created possibility and to the end of this passing world. His Eucharistic love surpasses all the laws of perishable nature: there is no greater miracle on the face of the earth than the real presence of my Son in the Sacrament of the Altar. Even so, He is forsaken, neglected, and handed over to sinners to be betrayed, again and again—and this by His chosen ones, His beloved priests, the men whom He chose to be the consolation and joy of His Heart. This is my own Heart’s eighth sorrow: the betrayal and neglect of my Son in the Most Holy Eucharist.
          How is He betrayed? His priests, my own sons, betray Him when they fail to make Him known, when by not teaching the mystery of His real presence they leave souls in the darkness of ignorance, without fire or light. They betray my Son when, by their example, they discourage reverence, and adoration, and a loving attention to His presence. They betray Him when they offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass unworthily, and when they hand Him over to sinners who have no intention of giving Him their hearts and seeking His mercy and His pardon for their sins. They betray Him when they leave Him alone in locked churches and when they make it difficult or impossible for souls to approach His tabernacles and rest in the radiance of His Eucharistic Face. They betray Him when they allow His churches to become places of noise and worldly chatter, and when they do nothing to recall souls to the living mystery of His love, that is, His presence in the tabernacle.
          Shall I tell you more of this eighth sorrow of my Heart? It is when you are lacking in generosity, when you fail to respond to love with love, when you are not generous in being present to Him who is present in the Most Holy Eucharist for love of you. I speak here not only to you, but to all my priest sons and to all consecrated souls who live with my Son under the same roof, and yet treat Him coldly, or casually, or with a distant formality.
          This, too, is the eighth sorrow of my Heart: that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated quickly, with little reverence, with no thanksgiving, and with all the attention given, not to my Son, the Lamb, but, rather, to the human presence of His minister, who, by calling attention to himself, takes from God what belongs rightly to God alone: the loving attention of every heart during the Holy Mysteries.
          What more shall I tell you? Do you not grieve with me over this eighth sorrow of my Heart, made up of many sorrows repeated again, and again, and again? Grieve with me today, and console my maternal and Immaculate Heart by adoring my Son, the blessed fruit of my womb, and by giving Him all that you are in an immolation of love. (183-85)

(Our Lord:) Every seminarian and every priest needs to consecrate himself to the maternal and Immaculate Heart of My Mother. Apart from My Mother they risk growing tepid, and then cold. Apart from her they will succumb to habits of sin and find themselves too weak to rise when they fall. Apart from her their lives will be devoid of joy, of tenderness, of sweetness, and of the warmth that her Immaculate Heart diffuses in the souls of those consecrated to her. (201)

From her did John receive the Word of Life, which became in his Gospel a light illumining the whole world and a fire of Eucharistic love giving warmth to souls grown cold. Expose yourself often to My words in the Gospel of Saint John. Allow them to fall into your soul and to act upon it. You will discover that the Gospel of Saint John, drawn from the Immaculate Heart of My Mother, contains within itself a power to draw souls out of darkness into light, and out of the shadow of death into the radiance of My brightness. (226)

Souls who look to My Mother as to their star shining in the night will never go astray and will never lose sight of the path that leads to Me and to the glory of My kingdom. There is no safer way of coming to Me than through My Mother and under the mantle of her protection. Those who think they can journey through this life without My Mother’s companionship and intercession are blinded by a terrible pride and they sin against My dispositions made from the Cross: “Woman, behold thy son. Behold thy mother.” It is My positive will that all souls should learn of My Mother and live in her company. It is My positive will that souls should so abandon themselves into My Mother’s keeping that they will be like little children held tightly against her Immaculate Heart. (255)