A Sermon Preached by Rev. Fr. Casimir Puskorius, CMRI on August 23, 2009
Recognizing Our Lord and Our Lady as Real Persons Like Ourselves is a Great Blessing
Venerable Brothers and Sisters, dear parishioners, I would like to speak to you today about the blessings hidden in the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I gave a sermon on this topic yesterday for Her Feast, but since the whole month of August is dedicated to the Immaculate Heart, I wish to speak more in-depth about this very vital devotion.
My dear brethren, our Catholic Faith (including particular devotions) is often difficult to practice on a fundamental level because we don’t see the Mysteries or devotions as relating to a person; i.e. – to Christ as a Person, or in this case, to our Blessed Mother as a person. Alice von Hildebrand brings up an excellent point in her book, The Privilege of Being a Woman, when she says that one of the gifts of womanhood is the ability to see the person more readily than men, as the latter tend to think more in an abstract manner. By nature and by gift, women see the Person of Christ more easily than we men do. Men tend to think of God as an abstraction, an idea, a topic to discuss. But God is not a mere abstraction. We can talk about Him, but we also need to talk to Him. He is a real Person. It is a struggle because we cannot see God like we see one another. We have the same difficulty with our Blessed Lady. It is easy to think of her as just an idea; as just an abstraction. Therefore, what I wish to do today for your benefit, and mine, is to help you see her as a real person. By gift and by nature, women will understand this better. This is one reason mothers are so well-suited to raise children. Mothers can teach their children to see Jesus as a real Person; to see Our Lady, the saints and angels as real persons, rather than abstract ideas.
What kind of relationship can you have with an abstract idea? You can’t. It is only when you begin to be aware of the other person that the relationship really starts being effective. This might be the source of some of the troubles that occur in marriages. Husbands don’t always see the person in their wives the way they should. A man’s wife is not an abstraction; she is a real person, just as real as he is, and he needs to remember that.
How Can We Make Our Blessed Mother More Real for Ourselves?
But let us speak now about our Blessed Mother. How can I make her become more real to you? How can I help your faith? You know, of course, that she is a historical person. There is no doubt that Jesus had a human mother. But our faith isn’t just about history; our faith is about believing. Even though we do not see our Blessed Mother, we believe in the Catholic dogmas about her. We believe that she is the Mother of God; that she was immaculately conceived; that she was taken up body and soul into Heaven. We also believe that she is the Mediatrix of All Graces; that she is the Co-Redemptrix; that she plays an incredible part in God’s plan. It is not that God needed her – He has no absolute need of anyone. But God chose this beautiful role for Her and it is much grander than we can imagine.
I want to make Our Lady more real for you today by speaking about her Heart. She has a living, beating human heart; it has been beating for over 20 centuries. Since, as you know, her Heart and her entire body, along with her soul, were taken up into Heaven, it was a very real thing when she appeared to Sister Lucia and showed her Heart to her. It was very much like Our Lord revealing His Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary. Our Lord’s Heart has been physically beating for over 20 centuries. Our Lady’s Heart is also beating. But it is more than just a physical organ. The heart is the very symbol of love. The heart, we even say, is the core being of something. “Get to the heart of the matter,” we say. When we see the Heart of Mary, we are seeing what she is at her core: the human being with the most love imaginable. I believe it was St. Louis Marie de Montfort who said that if you could put all the love of all the mothers in the world into one, you would have some idea of the love of Mary for each one of us individually.
Do Our Sins Still Hurt the Hearts of Jesus and Mary?
But the Immaculate Heart of Mary is also a hurting Heart, and that is what I want to especially tell you today. Let me first, however, clarify what I mean. It is not that Our Lady is suffering now in Heaven; she has been in her glory as Queen of Heaven and Earth for 20 centuries. But we say that Mary’s Heart is hurting in the sense that when she was on earth, she suffered in her role as Co-Redemptrix to atone for all the sins that would be committed until the end of time. How many sins offended Jesus? All we need to do is count our own sins. Very few of us could actually count all our sins, there are so many. The worst of them all, of course, were the mortal sins. Mortal sin is a real thing; it is a great offense against God when we break His law in a serious way. But even our venial sins – those that we so thoughtlessly commit – are part of the thorns around Mary’s Immaculate Heart.
The following words were spoken to Sister Lucia on December 10, 1925, when the Child Jesus appeared to her with His Mother. This was after little Jacinta and Francisco had already died, having offered up many prayers and sacrifices in their young lives. Sister Lucia would live on for many years afterwards. These words are also part of the Fatima message, even though they were not part of the 1917 apparitions. Since they were approved by the Church, we may safely believe them. “The Child Jesus was at Our Lady’s side elevated upon a cloud of light. Our Lady, resting one hand upon Lucia’s shoulder, held in her other hand a heart surrounded with sharp thorns. The Child Jesus spoke first, saying, ‘Have pity on the Heart of your Most Holy Mother. It is covered with the thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment and there is no one to remove them with an act of reparation.’“
Why are the Five First Saturdays and Our Communions of Reparation of Vital Importance?
Then Our Lady herself spoke, and it is in these words that we have the Promise of the Five First Saturdays:
“My daughter, look at my Heart encircled with the thorns with which ungrateful men pierce it at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. Do you at least try to console me, and announce in my name that I promise to assist at the hour of death, with the graces necessary for salvation, all those who on the First Saturday of five consecutive months go to confession and receive Holy Communion, recite the Rosary, and keep me company for a quarter of an hour while meditating on the Mysteries of the Rosary with the intention of making reparation to me.”
You see, then, why I promote the Communion of Reparation so much. There are also the wonderful promises of the Sacred Heart of Jesus for those who make the Nine First Fridays. But let us not just make the Nine First Fridays or the Five First Saturdays and be done with it. No, both the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary asked us to keep making Communions of Reparation on First Fridays and First Saturdays. And it is so easy! Our Lord did not ask us to fast all day on the First Friday of the month. Our Lady did not ask us to scourge ourselves on the First Saturday of the month. They simply asked us to make a Communion of Reparation. That’s all. And yet how many excuses do we make to not fulfill Their requests! My dear brethren, I hope that when Our Lord and Our Lady look down on our parish, They do not see a list of excuses as to why we don’t make Communions of Reparation.
Let Us Make Reparation to Jesus and Mary Out of Love Rather Than Out of Mere Habit or Guilt
In a 1958 interview Sister Lucia said, “The Blessed Virgin is very sad because no one has paid any attention to her message, neither the good nor the bad.” Believe me, my dear brethren, I am not trying to make this a guilt trip. Feeling guilty is not the right reason to come to church on First Saturdays. Please do it only because you want to make reparation. It will not have meaning otherwise. We don’t like others to do an act of kindness for us only because they would feel guilty if they didn’t. The Communion of Reparation needs to come from our hearts to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. If you don’t have that zeal or even the desire right now, pray for it! Pray thus: “Dear Blessed Mother, please help me to be more sensitive to your Heart.” So, as you see, it’s really all about love. As we see in the Gospel today, our Catholic Faith is about love: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart and thy whole soul and thy whole mind and thy whole strength; and secondly, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” All I ask, my dear brethren, is that we think about that loving Heart of our holy Mother. The more we think about it and honor it, the more will our hearts grow in love for our Holy Mother. At the same time, we will also be growing in the two great commandments of loving God and our neighbor. May God bless you. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
–Taken from the Reign of Mary Quarterly Magazine, Issue 139
