DEVOTION TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY
The Five First Saturdays:
The Child Jesus spoke these words: “Have pity on the heart of your Most Holy Mother. It is covered with thorns, with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment, and there is no one to remove them with an act of reparation.”
Our Lady was holding a heart encircled with sharp thorns and then She said to Sister Lucia:
“Behold my heart surrounded with the thorns which ungrateful men place therein at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. You at least try to console me. Announce in my name that I promise to help at the hour of death, with the graces needed for salvation, whoever on the First Saturday of five consecutive months shall:
1. confess and receive Holy Communion;
2. recite five decades of the Rosary;
3. and keep me company for fifteen minutes while meditating on the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary, with the intention of making reparation to me.”
Why Five Saturdays?
Christians have always honored the Blessed Virgin on Saturday because of her constant faith in Jesus on that first Holy Saturday before the Resurrection.
Five first Saturdays of reparation were requested to atone for the five ways in which people offend the Immaculate Heart of Mary:
1.attacks upon Mary’s Immaculate Conception 2.attacks against her Perpetual Virginity 3.attacks upon her Divine Maternity and the refusal to accept her as the Mother of all mankind 4.for those who try to publicly implant in children’s hearts indifference, contempt and even hatred of this Immaculate Mother 5.for those who insult her directly in her sacred images.
ACT OF CONSECRATION TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY:
Any formula may be used to consecrate oneself to the Mother of God, as long as it involves a total oblation of oneself. As a suggestion, one of the following consecrations could be renewed each first Saturday with the shorter formula renewed daily.
-
0 Virgin Mary, most powerful Mother of Mercy, Queen of Heaven and earth, in accordance with your wish made known at Fatima, I consecrate myself today to your Immaculate Heart. To you I entrust all that I have, all that I am. Reign over me, dearest Mother, that I may be yours in prosperity, in adversity, in joy and in sorrow, in health and in sickness, in life and in death.
Most compassionate Heart of Mary, Queen of Virgins, watch over my mind and heart and preserve me from the deluge of impurity which you lamented so sorrowfully at Fatima. I want to be pure like you. I want to atone for the many crimes committed against Jesus and you. I want to call down upon this country and the whole world the peace of God in justice and charity.
Mindful of this consecration, I now promise to strive to imitate you by the practice of the Christian virtues without regard for human respect. I resolve to receive Holy Communion on the first Saturday of every month when possible, and to offer daily five decades of the Rosary, with all my sacrifices in the spirit of penance and reparation. Amen.
-
I, . . ., a faithless sinner, renew and ratify today in thy Heart, O Immaculate Mother, the vows of my Baptism; I renounce forever Satan, his pomps and works; and I give myself entirely to Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Wisdom, to carry my cross after Him all the days of my life, and to be more faithful to Him than I have ever been before.
Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, in the presence of all the heavenly court, I choose thee this day for my Mother and Mistress. I deliver and consecrate to thee, and to thy Immaculate Heart, as thy child and slave of love, my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions, past, present and future; leaving to thee the entire and full right of disposing of me, and all that belongs to me, without exception, according to thy good pleasure, for the greater glory of God, in time and in eternity. Amen.
SHORT DAILY RENEWAL OF CONSECRATION TO THE IMMACULATE HEART OF MARY:
Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, I renew my consecration to you and to your Immaculate Heart. Please accept me, my dear Mother, and use me as you wish to accomplish your designs upon the world. I am all yours, my Mother, my Queen, and all that I have is yours.
TO JESUS THROUGH MARY:
Lest there should be any misconception about the place of devotion to Mary in Catholic piety, we honor in a special way the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of Jesus, i.e., the person of Mary in her eminent sanctity and glorification by God, because it is the wish of her Son — as Our Lady revealed in her second apparition at Fatima. Jesus knows well that true devotion to His Mother leads souls to Him. As Pope Paul VI wrote in his encyclical celebrating the centenary of the apparitions at Lourdes:
“Everything in Mary leads us toward her Son, our only Savior, by whose foreseen merits she was preserved immaculate and full of grace; everything in Mary lifts up our hearts to the praise of the Holy Trinity.”
“Consecration to the Mother of God,” says Pope Pius XII, “is a total gift of self, for the whole of life and for all eternity; and a gift which is not a mere formality or sentimentality, but effectual, comprising the full intensity of the Christian life — Marian life.” This consecration, the Pope explained, “tends essentially to union with Jesus, under the guidance of Mary.”
