What is it and why should I consider it?
What is it and why should I consider it?On Oct. 7 the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Holy Rosary, which for many centuries had been known as "Our Lady of Victory." It was established to honor Mary for her role in the 16th Century naval victory which secured Europe against Turkish invasion. In anticipation of this battle, Pope Pius V had asked all of Christendom to pray the rosary, and he credited Europe's victory to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. St. Matthew Church chose this particular feast day this year to provide people with a formal ceremony to make or renew their consecration to Jesus through Mary.
I was so excited to be able to renew my consecration on this special occasion with others who spent the prior 33 days preparing to make theirs. Interestingly, I hadn't even heard about the consecration to Jesus through Mary until about four years ago and, frankly, after learning more about it I still had difficulty understanding it.
St. Louis de Montfort has described the consecration to Jesus through Mary as "the shortest, easiest, most secure and perfect way to become a saint." If this sounds a little out of reach, listen to what Pope Francis told youth in 2013: "We need saints without cassocks, without veils – we need saints with jeans and tennis shoes. We need saints for the 21st Century. We need saints to live in the world, to sanctify the world and to not be afraid of living in the world by their presence in it. We need saints who love God in the first place and need saints who love the Eucharist. We need saints."
In its simplest form, the consecration is about us asking Mary to bring us closer to her Son Jesus. In turn, we give Mary permission to work within us and through us by offering her all that we have and all that we are.
However, this begs the question, "Why do we give Mary everything if the goal is to get closer to Jesus? Can't we just go directly to Him?" Yes, we can, but it has helped me to understand that Mary is like a sherpa who guides a climber up Mount Everest. The climber can go out on his or her own, but will probably have an easier trip accompanied by someone who lives in the area and has successfully climbed the mountain before and knows the best way.
Asking for Mary's intercession is an acknowledgement of our need for assistance and is not an implication that Jesus is inaccessible or needs help drawing us to Him. We do recognize, however, that God has involved Mary from the very beginning in bringing Jesus to humanity at the Nativity and humanity to Christ at the Miracle at Cana. It was God who entrusted His beloved Son to Mary to teach Him and care for Him. He also gave Jesus to Mary to prepare her for the fullness of her role as our spiritual mother, which was given to her at the foot of the cross by Jesus Himself.
Through my consecration, I have truly begun to experience this beautiful gift of Mary bringing me closer to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I encourage you to learn more about the consecration to Jesus through Mary. Two books to consider are "33 Days to Morning Glory" by Father Michael Gaitley and "Total Consecration to Jesus Christ through Mary" by Montfort Publications.
As Mary promised us at Fatima, "To all those who embrace my Immaculate Heart, I promise salvation and their souls will be loved by God as flowers placed by Me before His throne."
Lennie Cox is a member of St. Matthew Church in Charlotte, where she serves as volunteer coordinator.
What we think is the right road
We need to "chill out." Just relax! The Supreme Court decision legalizing homosexual marriage hasn't made the sky fall, has it? The moral doomsayers were wrong, weren't they? The republic still stands, and no bolts of lightning have struck any high-ranking political or judicial figure. Just stay cool – and be tolerant!
But it's the wrong road
Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a scholar and senator. In 1993, he wrote an article called "Defining Deviancy Down" in which he discussed growing public tolerance of and permissiveness toward what formerly had been intolerable behavior. Consider, for example, "public language." Things are said now in public – with contemptible language – which would never have been heard in the locker rooms of the 1950s. Movies and television offer "entertainment" which is hard to distinguish from a sewer. Social codes have changed, for the worse. And this is not even to mention appalling problems with regard to drugs, sexual ethics and rampant violence.
Recent polls indicate that the American public is much more inclined to accept conduct on a number of moral issues which, we would have rejected as immoral not long ago. As one source put it: "On a list of 19 major moral issues of the day, Americans express levels of moral acceptance that are as high (as) or higher than in the past on 12 of them, a group that also encompasses social mores such as polygamy, having a child out of wedlock, and divorce."
There are two possibilities here.
One is that we have "evolved" and are willing to permit, even to commend, behavior that would have astonished and ashamed our grandparents. We have finally stopped being "judgmental," and we're willing to let people enjoy themselves. Welcome to the 21st century!
The second is that, worn down by the tsunami of moral evil swirling around us for the last 42 years (I begin with the date of Roe v. Wade), we have accepted, step by evil step, greater and graver evil. We have too often ignored the reality of mortal sin. Welcome to Dante's Inferno!
We would be mistaken to confuse correlation with causation; that is, just because two things happen together doesn't mean that one of them has caused the other. Still, we must ask: Is there a broad societal contempt for Gospel truth that has led to legalized abortion, to increasing acceptance of euthanasia, to decreasing moral standards, and, almost inevitably, to homosexual marriage? Have liberalized codes of speech and conduct in movies led to an increasingly coarse and vulgar society? Is the moral sky falling?
Have we defined deviancy down? Have we too often compromised with evil? Have we apathetically accepted behavior and speech which are contrary to the Gospel? There is a Catholic answer to these questions.
The Church teaches that evil has a first cause: our fallen nature. "Ignorance of the fact that man has a wounded nature inclined to evil gives rise to serious errors in the areas of education, politics, social action, and morals," the Catechism teaches (407; also see 418 and 1783). Vatican II said that the whole of human history "has been the story of dour combat with the powers of evil" ("Gaudium et Spes," 37), and St. Paul instructed the Ephesians and us that our combat is against "the cosmic powers of this dark age" (6:12 GNB).
When we tell ourselves that certain decayed moral standards won't cause the skies to fall, we deceive ourselves. We are playing the devil's game. Unrepented venial sin can, and often does, lead to mortal sin, for we are what we repeatedly do (CCC 1863). "If we do not behave the way we believe," observed Bishop Fulton Sheen, "we will begin believing the way we behave." That is why it is so important for us Catholics to hear sound preaching and to have holy, reverent Masses. St. Paul, learning of bad teaching in Ephesus, warned, "Some people there are teaching false doctrines, and you must order them to stop" (1 Tim 1:3).
God graciously gives us time to repent (2 Peter 3:9, Rev 2:21), but repentance must not be delayed (Acts 17:30). The sky hasn't fallen because of sin and evil. Not quite yet.
Deacon James H. Toner serves at Our Lady of Grace Church in Greensboro.