By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY
December is not only the time when we prepare for Christmas, but also the month when we celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.
The belief underlying this feast, that our Lady from the first moment of her existence was, unlike the rest of humankind, free from original sin, goes back to the early days of the Church. But it was only officially dogmatically defined by Pope Pius IX in 1854, in the bull Ineffabilis Deus, which declared it to be an article of faith for Catholics.
Four years later, when the Blessed Virgin appeared to St. Bernadette at Lourdes, she told the young seer that she was the “Immaculate Conception.” But even before Lourdes, during the apparitions at the Rue du Bac convent in Paris in 1830, during the final visitation on November 27, our Lady appeared to Sr. Catherine Labouré and asked to have a medal struck showing her standing on a globe with graces coming from her hands. This design included the text, “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee,” which is a clear reference to the Immaculate Conception.
Nearly a century later, at Fatima, the Blessed Virgin’s message had a different but related focus — on her Immaculate Heart. During both the June and July apparitions, our Lady told the children that God wished to establish in the world devotion to her Immaculate Heart.
This is a somewhat neglected point, but a very important one, since, unlike other themes in the Fatima message, such as the conversion of Russia, this focuses much more on our personal response to the Blessed Virgin.
There are a number of ways of practicing this devotion to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, including saying the Rosary daily and doing the Five First Saturdays communions of reparation, but this particular devotion to her heart is probably best expressed through a personal consecration to her — which must, of course, be then lived out in our day to day to lives. (That is the difficult part!).
Marian consecrations can be done at many levels, ranging from those done for the whole world, or for particular countries, dioceses, or parishes, right down to personal consecrations.
In October 1942, Pope Pius XII consecrated the world to Mary’s Immaculate Heart, and according to Sr. Lucia, this consecration was apparently sufficient for God to intervene and shorten World War II.
Prior to that, the Portuguese bishops had, in 1931, consecrated Portugal to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. In 1936, they made a vow to organize a national pilgrimage to Fatima if the country was kept out of the Spanish Civil War, and in May 1938, they returned to Fatima in thanksgiving and to renew the previous consecration in the presence of half a million people.
It is also the case that the intervention of Mary to obtain the deliverance of Poland from Communism can be traced back to the consecration of the country to the Immaculate Heart of Mary made on September 8, 1946. This was done at the Marian shrine at Jasna Gora in the presence of 700,000 Poles using the same form of words Pius XII used in his consecration. Poland was thus the first country to follow the example of Portugal.
And in the nineteenth century, there was an example of a Marian consecration of a parish which turned out to have great importance for the Church. The parish priest of Our Lady of Victories Church in Paris, Fr. Charles Desgenettes, heard a voice internally during Mass telling him to consecrate his parish to the Holy and Immaculate Heart of Mary. The result was the founding of the famous Confraternity of Our Lady of Victories, an association that was to have a worldwide influence, and ultimately become a global arch-confraternity.
So from the above examples we can see that consecrations to the Blessed Virgin on a corporate level have had immense power and have been of great importance in both building up the Church and as antidotes to violence and war.
Obviously these larger consecrations make more of an impression on the Church and the world, but that doesn’t mean that personal consecrations are unimportant. Rather, they are of great value because they mean that our Lady, as our spiritual Mother, is enabled to take an even more personal interest in our affairs.
The saint most associated with such consecrations is St. Louis de Montfort (1673-1716), who promoted a complete consecration to the Blessed Virgin in the sense of consecrating oneself to Jesus through Mary. His formula of consecration emphasizes the idea of the individual making a total offering of self to God through her, such that it is, in effect, a renewal of our original baptismal vows by which we were consecrated to God.
In his book, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Louis proposed a period of preparation of thirty-three days leading up, ideally, to the Feast of the Annunciation on March 25 — although it can be to any of the major Marian feast days, including the Immaculate Conception.
During this time, the person prepares themselves by reciting prayers daily until finally consecrating themselves using a special prayer of consecration on the thirty-fourth day, the feast day itself. So, for example, if the Feast of the Annunciation was the chosen day, then the person would begin their preparation on February 20 — which coincidentally, is the Feast of Saints Jacinta and Francisco Marto.
St. Louis de Montfort is not the only saint, of course, to have lived out such a consecration in his own life, and we have historical examples of famous saints who were particularly devoted to the Blessed Virgin, including St. Ephraim, St. John Damascene, St. Bernard, St. Bernadine, St. Bonaventure, and St. Francis de Sales.
But more recently there have been a number of important saintly Catholic figures who have lived out a very profound consecration to our Lady, including St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Pope St. John Paul II.
One of the things that St. Maximilian is noted for is that he believed that there were two “Immaculate conceptions.” He saw our Lady as the created Immaculate Conception and the Holy Spirit, as the uncreated Immaculate Conception, in such a way that there was a marvelous union between her and the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.
For Mother Teresa, her total consecration to the Blessed Virgin was an exchange of hearts in which she gave her heart to our Lady, and received her Immaculate Heart in return; she even went so far as to ask Mary to keep her in her “most pure heart.”
Pope St. John Paul II lived out a Montfortian consecration to Mary, and proposed that believers entrust themselves to her so as to come closer to Christ. His own personal motto was Totus Tuus, expressing the idea that he completely belonged to our Lady.
We may not be able to reach the heights these great saints achieved through the profound way they lived out their consecrations to our Lady, but at least we can follow in their footsteps and make our own personal consecration to her as a way of ensuring her continuing protection and help.
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(Donal Anthony Foley is the author of a number of books on Marian Apparitions, and maintains a related website at www.theotokos.org.uk. He has also written two time-travel/adventure books for young people, and the third in the series is due to be published next year — details can be seen at: http://glaston-chronicles.co.uk.)
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