"Jesus wants… to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.”
To establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means to bring people to a full consecration through conversion, self-dedication, intimate esteem, veneration and love. Thus, it is in this spirit of consecration and conversion that God wishes to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
We all know that a mother’s heart represents love in the bosom of a family. In fact, it is love which makes the mother bend over her baby’s cradle, sacrifice herself for it, give herself, rush to the defense of her child. All children trust in the heart of their mother, and we all know that we have in her a place of special affection. The same applies to the Virgin Mary. Thus the Message says: “My Immaculate Heart will be your refuge and the way that will lead you to God.” Hence, the Heart of Mary is the refuge and the way to God for all his children.
This refuge and this way were proclaimed to all humanity immediately after the fall of our first parents. To the devil, who had tempted the first human beings, and had induced them to disobey the divine order they had been given, the Lord said: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15). The “new generation” that God foretold would be born of this woman, will triumph in the battle against the progeny of Satan, to the point of crushing its head. Mary is the Mother of this new generation, as if she were a new tree of life, planted by God in the garden of the world so that all her children can partake of her fruit.
It is from the heart of their mother that children receive their natural life, their first breath, their life-giving blood, the beating of their heart, as if the mother were the spring of a clock impelling movement to two pendulums. When we see how dependent the child is on its mother in those early months of its formation in the womb, we could almost say that the heart of the mother is the heart of the child. And we can say the same of Mary, when She carried the Son of the Eternal Father in her womb. Hence, it follows that the Heart of Mary is, in some sense, the heart of all that other generation, the first fruit of which is Christ, the Word of God.
And it is from this fruit that that other generation of this Immaculate Heart is to be fed, as Jesus said: “I am the bread of life. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As… I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” (Jn 6:48; 56-57). And to live thus because of Christ is also to live because of Mary, since Jesus had received his Body and Blood from Mary.
It was in this Heart that the Father placed his Son, as if in the first Tabernacle. Mary was the first pyx that held Him, and it was the blood of her Immaculate Heart which communicated to the Son of God his life and his human nature, from which we all, in turn, receive “grace upon grace” (Jn 1:16).
This is that new generation born from this wonderful mother: Christ in Himself and in his Mystical Body. And Mary is the Mother of this progeny chosen by God to crush the head of the infernal serpent.
Thus we see that devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary must be established in the world by means of a true consecration, through conversion and self-giving. In the same way, through the consecration, the bread and wine are converted into the Body and Blood of Christ, which were drawn with his very life from the Heart of Mary.
Hence it is that this Immaculate Heart must be for us a refuge and the way that leads us to God.
We thus constitute the retinue of the new generation created by God, drawing our supernatural life from the same life-giving source, the Immaculate Heart of Mary, who is the Mother of Christ and of his Mystical Body. Thus we are truly brothers and sisters of Christ, as He himself said: “My mother and my brethren are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Lk 8:21).
This word of God is the bond which links all the children in the Heart of the Mother; there we hear the echo of the word of the Father, because God enclosed his eternal Word in the Heart of Mary; and it is from this Word that life comes to us: “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water'” (Jn 7:37-38). In fact, we read in the Book of Isaiah: “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your descendants, and my blessing on your offspring” (Is 44:3).
This blessed and watered land is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and God wants our devotion to take root there, because it was for this very purpose that God placed so much love within the heart of the Mother of all human beings, who consecrates and converts her progeny into the Body and Blood of Christ, her First-born, Son of God, the Word of the Father: “In him was life, and the life was the light of men…. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (Jn 1:4,14).
God began the work of our redemption in the Heart of Mary, given that it was through her “fiat” that the redemption began to come about: “And Mary said, ‘Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word'” (Lk 1:38). “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14). Thus, in the closest union possible between two human beings, Christ began, with Mary, the work of our salvation. The Christ’s heart-beats are those of the heart of Mary, the prayer of Christ is the prayer of Mary, the joys of Christ are the joys of Mary; it was from Mary that Christ received the Body and Blood that are to be poured out and offered up for the salvation of the world. Hence, Mary, made one with Christ, is the Co-redemptrix of the human race.
With Christ in her womb, with Jesus Christ in her arms, with Christ at Nazareth and in his public life; with Jesus Christ she climbed the hill of Calvary, she suffered and agonized with Him, receiving into her Immaculate Heart the last sufferings of Christ, his last words, his last agony and the last drops of his Blood, in order to offer them to the Father.
And Mary remained on earth in order to help her other children to complete the redeeming work of Christ, preserving it in her heart as a wellspring of grace—Ave gratia plena—in order to pass on to us the fruits of the life, passion and death of Jesus Christ, her Son.
Ave Maria!
The above article is an excerpt from Sr. Lucia’s “Calls” from the Message of Fatima, Secretariado dos Pastorinhos, Fatima, distributed by Ravengate Press.