A Love Unmatched

by Thomas A. Droleskey

The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, that perfect fountain of unmatched love for us fallen creatures, was formed out of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. There is a perfect communion of love that exists for all eternity between these two Hearts, the One beating within the Body of the God-Man and the other beating within the body of His Most Blessed Mother. This simple, undeniable reality of the perfect communion between the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary teaches us the necessity of being totally consecrated to the latter as the path to being totally absorbed into the Mercy of the former. The path to take shelter in the Divine Mercy of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus runs through total consecration to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The Sacred Heart was pierced by the centurion's lance after Our Lord had breathed His last on the wood of the Holy Cross on Golgotha on Good Friday. Blood and water, the sacramental elements of the Church, flowed out from Our Lord's pericardium through His Wounded Side onto the dirt of the earth of Calvary, dirt that would be brought back to Rome by Saint Helena and placed under the floor of the Church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart was pierced at that moment fully by the sword of sorrow that had been prophesied by the aged Simeon at the moment of her Purification in the Temple on February 2. The two Hearts rejoiced as one at Cana as Our Lord transformed water into wine. The two Hearts suffered as one on Calvary as Our Lord completed the first Mass by offering Himself up to the Father in Spirit and in Truth as propitiatory offering for our sins.

The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is the repository of the infinite treasures of God's ineffable mercy to us erring, ungrateful sinners. The Immaculate Heart of Mary is the instrument that pleads for us to have the humility necessary to approach the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with contrition in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance and to make a firm purpose of amendment as we prepare to receive sacramental absolution for our sins and sanctifying grace to strengthen us to root out vice and to grow in sanctity. The Immaculate Heart of Mary pleads for us to receive Our Lord in Holy Communion, Wherein beats the Sacred Heart Itself, with greater fervor and devotion every day of our lives, keeping us mindful of the necessity of spending time with Our Beloved as that Heart of all hearts beats with fervor for our sanctification and our salvation in tabernacles even until the end of time. Yes, the occasion of the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus reminds us that there would be no Sacred Heart, no Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity as Man, without Our Lady's perfect fiat to the Father's will at the moment of the Annunciation.

Total consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary teaches us to renew the pledge of consecration to the Most Sacred Heart, keeping in mind especially the promises Our Lord revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque concerning the keeping of the nine First Fridays. It is no accident that Our Lady added to devotion of the nine First Fridays a promise of assistance to those who fulfill the five First Saturdays by the observance of all of the conditions she established for the propagation of devotion to her Immaculate Heart, to which the cause of world peace itself has been entrusted by her Divine Son and which is pierced anew by the swords of sorrow thrust at it by the sins of ungrateful men. One who is totally consecrated to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart is thus able to offer up any and all merit gained by the fulfillment of the nine First Fridays as her consecrated slaves, leaving it to her to determine what share of that merit might be ours as we give unto her all of our liberty and all of the merit of whatever good actions we perform for the honor and glory of God and for the sanctification and salvation of souls, starting with own.

Our puny hearts, stained as they are by the effects of our sins and our selfishness, are so slow to comprehend the profundity of the perfect love that is expressed by the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary for us. We have no idea how much our sins and our ingratitude and our indifferences caused these hearts to suffer once in time on Calvary and how they continue to wound the Church Militant today. We can only hope and pray to live penitentially to offer our prayers and our sacrifices and acts of reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary so that we will come to fall so deeply in love with the Sacred Heart of Jesus that the thought of sin will become as repugnant to us as the effects of our sins was so unspeakably horrendous for these twin hearts.

One of the many, many ways in which we can make reparation for the coldness and ingratitude of our sin-stained hearts is to practice the Supernatural Virtue of Charity with everyone Our Lord puts into our lives. God's love for us is an expression of His Divine Will, the ultimate end of which is the salvation of our immortal souls. In like manner, therefore, the love we have for others must be premised on willing their good, the ultimate end of which is the salvation of their immortal souls. We must do or say nothing that in any way makes it less possible for another human being to be saved as a member of the Church Our Lord founded upon the Rock of Peter, the Pope. We must be assiduous in our efforts to bring all people into the true Church--and to propagate to the best of our ability the fullness of the Faith that Our Lord has entrusted unto her without any taint of the errors and the novelties of the past forty years.

To do this, though, we must never be self-righteous or arrogant. We must understand that each of us is a work in progress, that God is attempting write straight with the crooked lines that are represented by our very own tortuous, willful lives. Keeping this in mind will help us to be balanced and patient when explaining the state of our situation at present to those who are not yet ready to examine things as they really are, remembering that most of us (and I included myself here most especially) have re-discovered the Tradition of our youth precisely because others had the charity to confront us with the fullness of truth even though we may not have been ready to have received it with joy at that particular time. They prayed for us. They commended us to Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart and through her beseeched her Divine Son's Most Sacred Heart. And those who have always maintained the fullness of the Tradition of the Church without compromise must understand that is precisely the fact that they have received special graces from the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus that they were able to persevere in all truth at a time when confusion reigned supreme. Such people have received countless, gratuitous graces that have been used by God to help others to join them in the small, wandering remnant of Catholics who are ostracized and belittled for keeping fast to everything that the Church taught, including its form of worship in the Roman Rite, prior to the novelties and innovations of the past forty years. We make whatever efforts we can with others, ultimately commending them to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and through it to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus with complete and utter confidence and without despairing one little bit of the results.

Moreover, we must remind ourselves on this great feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that we are to forgive others as we ourselves are forgiven in the Sacrament of Penance, which is, ultimately, the hospital of Divine Mercy. Nothing anyone does to us is the equal of what one of our least venial sins caused Our Lord to suffer in His Sacred Humanity on the wood of the Holy Cross. Nothing anyone does to us or says about us causes us to suffer our sins caused Our Lady to suffer at the foot of the Cross on Good Friday and how they cause her to grieve so much in these our days. The words contained in the Pater Noster (Et dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimmitimus debitoribus nostris) bind us to act consistently as people who do indeed forgive others their sins against us as we are forgiven by God Himself through the actions and by the words of an alter Christus acting in persona Christi in the confessional. It is thus a grave sin against the Charity that is Incarnate in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus to hold a grudge against others.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque was asked by her spiritual director, Saint Claude de la Colombiere, to ask Our Lord during His next apparition to her what was the last sin she had confessed. This was designed to test the authenticity of Saint Margaret Mary's claims that Our Lord was appearing to her to spread devotion to His Most Sacred Heart. "I forgot" was Our Lord's answer to Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque. Saint Claude de la Colombiere knew as Saint Margaret Mary related that answer to her that Our Lord was indeed appearing to her. For although Our Lord knows all things as God, He wills to forget  our sins that are absolved in the Sacrament of Penance. Can we do any less? Any claim to be devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary is false if we nurture grudges of any kind, petty or small, and if we do not make excuses for those who sin against us just as Our Lord made excuses for us, His executioners, as He hung on the wood of the Holy Cross. We must pray for the conversion of all men on a daily basis, starting with ourselves, hoping that there will be a happy reconciliation among all of the souls of the just in an unending Easter Sunday of glory in Heaven at least by the time of the General Judgment of the Living and of the Dead on the Last Day.

This great Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, which was once observed universally as an octave in the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church, lessons that we can only hope to learn more about as with each passing year, especially by spending time in prayer before His Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament. One of these lessons, though, is quite apposite: the consequences of failing to do that which Heaven asks of us to do.

That is, King Louis XIV and the bishops of France refused to consecrate the entirety of France to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus after entreaties from Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque that this consecrated had been willed by the God-Man Himself. The year was 1689, one hundred years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, which is still wreaking its horrid consequences in the world and in the Church today. How sad it is that Our Lady's solemn request, given to Blessed Jacinta and Blessed Francisco and the recently deceased Sister Lucy on July 13, 1917, for a Pope to consecrate Russia specifically to her Immaculate Heart with all of the world's bishops has not yet been heeded. The consequences of this infidelity are plain for all who have the eyes of the Holy Faith to see and to admit.

We must, therefore, intensify our prayers to the Blessed Trinity through Our Lady's Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart that Pope Benedict XVI will be so moved by a love for the Immaculate Heart and the peace that will flow from it into the world as a token of the love of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus that he will without any further delay or deconstruction of the Fatima Message do specifically what Our Lady said must be done. The errors of Russia, which are the errors of Modernity in the world and Modernism in the Church, will cease to be spread. The love of the twin Hearts of Jesus and Mary will flow with abundance into the souls of men and out of them into a world of cold self-centeredness and an abject hostility to the necessity of belief in the Incarnation and acceptance of the totality of the Deposit of Faith entrusted by Our Lord to Holy Mother Church as the foundation of both personal and social order.

We rejoice today in the fact that we are loved with an unmerited love that is beyond our comprehension. May we never take this love for granted, flying unto the patronage of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, she who is the Queen of All of the Saints, to help us drink always from the fountain of love that is the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus now and unto eternity.

Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.

Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.

Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us.

Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, pray for us.

Saint Getrude, pray for us.

Saint Mechtilde, pray for us.

Saint Claude de la Colombiere, pray for us.

Saint Padre Pio, pray for us.

Blessed Jacinta, pray for us.

Blessed Francisco, pray for us.

Sister Lucia, pray for us.