St. Therese and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Consecration and Oblation

Without surveying the whole life of Therese, which is replete with Our Lady's presence, we will draw forth the more significant aspects of St. Therese's consecratory stance to Mary. The love Our Lady had for St. Therese of the child Jesus and the Holy Face was miraculous. As a newborn babe, the Martin couple named this new daughter after Our Lady, calling her Marie-Francoise-Therese. Except in the case of their first daughter, whom they called "Marie", they maintained this custom of naming their children after Mary, while they called each of them by their latter names. You might call this act of the Martin couple, something of an act of consecration of their children to the Holy Mother of God.

St. Therese was not remiss in asking "all the angels and saints" to assist her in receiving the Lord of Lords and King of Kings in Holy Communion, but in particular did she ask His own Mother, She approached her with confidence knowing that she alone had exclusive access to the King of Kings precisely because she is the Queen of Heaven. Yet, she asked her as a daughter to a Mother to make her pleasing to her Kingly Son. She would later describe this preparation Mary would make of her soul as a "fixing my disheveled hair and putting on me some clean garments" so that her soul would be adorned by the care and merits of Blessed Virgin, During her first Holy Communion she asked Jesus to^" take away her freedom, she knew herself to be so weak and feeble".¹ Therese was entering by the grace of Holy Communion into the spirit of the Immaculata. Immaculate from the first moment of conception. Mary was already swept up by grace into the freedom of the "children of God" which for the rest of us begins in baptism. Yet, Mary's Immaculate Conception is not a liberation from sin or herself, as many people think. St. Augustine says, "of the Blessed Virgin let no one consider sin". Rather Immaculate Conception is a binding of her freedom, her will, her whole self, body and soul to the Holy Trinity. For St. Therese, we might say that Jesus tbe Son of the Immaculate One in Therese's First Holy Communion bestowed a parcel of this grace of Our Lady's Conception, Thus, we find that very "afternoon I recited the Act of Consecration to the Blessed Virgin". There is no mistaking this grace given to St. Therese whose confessor would later testify in the Sacred Tribunal of the Sacrament of Confession "In the Presence of God, the Blessed Virgin and all the saints, I declare that you have never committed a mortal sin...thank God for what He has done for you."² St. Therese was not mistaken of this truth and placed repeatedly as a perpetual consecration all of her hope and trust in Our Lady as the source of pleasure that the Lord took in her soul. She writes in a poem, "When the white host comes into my heart/ Jesus your sweet Lamb, thinks He is resting in you!"

On her Profession as a Carmelite in Oar Lady's Order, the Feast day chosen by the nuns was September 8, the Nativity of Mary. St Therese was not rash in thinking that her religious vows were something that was an exchange between her and Jesus alone. Rather, she writes "it was the newborn Virgin who presented Her little flower to the little Jesus".³ St. Therese had given herself unreservedly, her whole self over to Mary Immaculate as her property and possession. It was in the hands of Mary her Heavenly Mother that Therese made her vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity.

Yet it was not only in the big things that Therese knew Our Lady, but even in the depths of her soul. She writes about petitioning God for things saying, "I asked this from the Blessed Virgin, I didn't ask God because I want Him to do as He pleases. Asking the Blessed Virgin for something is not the same as asking God. She really knows what is to be done about my little desires, whether or not she must speak about them to God. So it's up to Her to see that God is not forced to answer me, to allow Him to do everything He pleases".⁴ St. Therese understood the Carmelite spirit of which inflamed Father John of the Cross who states the last and fiercest enemy of the soul to be one's own self, inclinations, desires, movements and all. Like him, she knew she must abandon her own thoughts and desires so as to prevent our self from "tainting even the best of our actions".⁵ St. Therese knew that to die to her self love meant to place her self with all of its actions, dreams, and 'little desires" into the heart of the Immaculate Virgin. Therese could do this because it was Mary immaculate who is Jesus' Mediator with Himself, the Mediatrix of All Graces. Yet, Our Lady is not merely a depository but a living person united to the Holy Trinity and so a necessary and abiding affinity and kinship, in. fact a Motherhood and rebirth wrought through her by means of consecration is the way of St. Therese' holiness. This little way of surrender of trust is into the hands of not just "our" but "her Heavenly Mother", For Therese, the Dominion or Queenship of Mary) over her soul was effected by a surrender, an act of consecration, even something of a vow to Mary specifically as "Mother". Since a Mother would have a more direct influence over the life a person, so Therese would write not in dismissal of Mary's Dominion over souls but in fact towards a deeper recognition thereof. Hence she says, "she is more Mother than Queen". The Maternal Mediation is all-powerful but not distant. Every grace is Marian inside and out you might say. For Therese, the life of grace in the Holy Trinity- is a life of Mary living and pleasing the Lord in one's soul. Of Therese we could say that she has "taken those further steps of entering into consecration to Mary" as St. Louis de Montfort speaks of in True Devotion.

At the age of ten St Therese was suffering from an un-diagnosable illness. There was little hope of her recovery, and so in desperation no less inspired did three of her sisters fall to their knees before a statue of Our Lady of the Smile in the Martin home. As they were pleading for their sister, "all of a sudden the Blessed Virgin appeared beautiful to me, so beautiful that never had I seen anything so attractive, her face was suffused with an ineffable benevolence and tenderness, but what penetrated to the very depths of my soul was the 'ravishing smile of the Blessed Virgin". ⁶ This smile of the Virgin made in Therese a cavern of grace, a place of love, an abode for Mary to live in her with Her Jesus. May Our Vow of Perpetual Consecration to Mary create in us for Jesus an offering pleasing to Him with His Father and Holy Spirit.

St. Therese and the Holy Sacrifice 

"O My God! Most Blessed Trinity, I desire to love you and make you loved, to work for the glory of Holy Church by saving souls on earth and liberating those suffering in Purgatory. I desire to accomplish Your will perfectly and to reach the degree of glory

You have prepared for me in Your Kingdom. I desire in a word, to be a saint, but I feel my helplessness, and I beg you, O My Cod, to be Yourself my sanctity. Since you loved me so much as to give me Your only Son as my Savior and Spouse, the infinite treasures of His merits are mine, I offer them to You with gladness, begging You to look upon me only in the Face of Jesus and in His Heart burning with love.

I offer You, too, all the merits of the saints in Heaven and on earth, their acts of love and those of the Holy angels. Finally, I offer You, O Blessed Trinity, the love and merits of the Blessed Virgin, my dear Mother. It is to her that I abandon my offering, begging her to present it to You."⁷

"I offer you" are the words repeated throughout this "act of oblation" of St. Therese. At the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the 'Offertory' is the time when the victuals or the necessary rudiments are presented before they are transubstantiated into the Victim, who as "God offers God to God" in the words of the Great Cure de Ars, St. John. Vianney. The elements presented for the oblation are blessed multiple times in the Ancient Rite of the Tridentine Mass (nearly eight times before the actual consecration), as well as in the New Rite of Mass there are some vestiges of these manifold blessings in the First Eucharistic Prayer). The act of Offering at the Offertory of the Mass and the Acts of Blessing of the soon to be transubstantiated bread and wine to the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of the God Man, Jesus- are akin to the Act of Oblation of St. Therese. She is asking to be like another Victual, like the Bread and Wine on the Altar, presented to the High Priest, Jesus Christ for consecration and oblation. Once the offering and blessing has occurred, there is the consecration. Just as in the Bread and Wine, there no longer remains anything of it's nature, so we have in the Teaching of Our Lord in the Divine and Catholic Faith the truth that all appearance of Bread and Wine is simply that, nothing is left anymore. Like Fire, the Holy Spirit consumes the offering of the Bread and Wine and Transubstantiates it totally into another entirely different substance, only the appearance is not the reality, but a miraculous facade or illusion lifted only by that Divine Catholic Faith and occasionally by a 'double' miracle manifesting, though not entirely or at least partially the flesh of Jesus (please see the footnote)⁸. St. Therese can be likened to this same act of consecration at Mass, when she says later in this same writing,"Consuming all my imperfections like the fire that transforms everything into Itself", and "Remain in me as in a tabernacle and never separate Yourself from Your little victim". Therese is wishing by this consecration to be totally changed into another Host, another Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

This is in essence, the purpose of every consecration to Mary, to have nothing left for ourselves and of ourselves, but to belong totally like Jesus to the Father, and as Jesus who set the example as the God who belonged and consecrated Himself in Mary. St. Maximillian continues this truth saying, "Let us turn our gaze to Jesus the Most Perfect Model. He who is God, supreme Holiness, gives Himself to the Immaculate without reserve and becomes her Son." Also St. Bernard culminates this saying, "Offer Your Son, Most Holy Virgin, and present the fruit of your womb to the Lord, For our reconciliation with all, offer the heavenly victim pleasing to God".⁹ St. Therese's consecration as we recall is directed to Mary, precisely because she is Co-Redemptrix. She says, "It is to her that /abandon my offering, begging her to present it to You, " It is in her consecration, which is abandoned to the Care of the Virgin Mary that St. Therese asks the Most Holy Trinity to "be1 Yourself my Sanctity", and later "to be clothed in Your own Justice'. She says she will appear at Judgment with ''empty hands'. We could say that in Mary, God has become her all, and nothing is left for her. She relies "on the love and merits of Mary" as the very hinge of her offering and the means of her "abandonment" to His Merciful Love, Therese "empty hands" of St. Therese can be seen in many images of the Virgin Mary, but particularly. Our Lady of Grace whose hands are open to us, seemingly "empty" but in act full of "grace and truth" reconciling us to God.

Finally Therese is immolated through consecration in Mary, which is the consequent of every Marian consecration. To "be an instrument in her hands to do what was said of her to "crush the serpent" as St. Maximilian has in his form of consecration., is nothing other than to also be "bruised at the heal" by the serpent. In. other words to suffer, either by affliction of trials from the consequences of original sin caused by the devil (weakened will, darkened intellect, concupiscence or inclination to sin, and others), our own sins insinuated by the demons through, temptation and consented to, or the world affected, by sin seeking to advance itself over the rights and adoration due to Jesus with His Mother alone. In short, to be consecrated to Jesus in Mary, Is to allow Her to love us as She did Her Divine Son and She did not hesitate to begin His mission at Cana or consummate it at Calvary, As Pope Benedict XV says in the Apostolic Letter, Inter Soladicia (1918), "To such extent did Mary suffer and almost die with her suffering arid dying Son; to such extent did she surrender her Maternal rights over to her Son for man's salvation, and immolated Him...".   So also, did Mary immolate Therese who was consecrated by the Divine Victim and into the One Victim, Jesus who "reconciled the world to God" His Father with Mary.