First Friday - Love of the Sacred Heart Through the Prayers of the Immaculate Heart of Mary!

Greetings in Jesus and Mary....

Today is First Friday of December and a couple of days away from the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. At a time when we are feeling so OVERWHELMED with all going on around us in the world and in the Church; may we turn to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Below are some important words regarding the power of the devotion to the Sacred Heart and how this devotion is necessary to be the warriors of Christ that we need to be in this time of Spiritual War with the help and intercession of our good Queen and Mother Mary!

In the mid-17th Century, Our Lord appeared to a simple 24-year-old nun of the Order of the Visitation of Our Lady at Paray-le-Monial. “Behold this Heart which has so much loved men,” He said, and through St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, He invited the whole world to return to this divine intimacy and friendship by means of devotion to His Sacred Heart.  It is a message of mercy and love!!

So often devotion to the Sacred Heart, when fostered, is only encouraged for individuals or families. There is a real and sincere devotion that has developed around the Promises made to individuals who make the reparatory communions on the First Fridays and who make the solemn enthronement of the Sacred Heart in family homes. But this is still not the ideal requested by Our Lord Jesus Christ, who as Master of the parts of the social body, i.e. individuals, families, and even institutions, must evidently also be Master of the whole human society.

All nations, too, are the work of God and belong to Him, and hence Christ is their Master, Lord and King. The Heart of Jesus wants to reign in the very heart of nations, and in the first place those who rule and represent them, who should recognize this dominion and submit to it. This submission should be more from love than from a sense of duty, not so much because Christ has a right to demand it from rulers, as because they desire to submit to His love.

The cry of Our Lord to St. Margaret Mary “Behold this Heart which has so loved men that It spared nothing, even going so far as to exhaust and consume Itself to prove to them Its love” is a call of conversion not only to men or families, but also to nations. In a certain way, it was the restoration of Christendom that was being placed within the reach of the King and nobility of France. The plan of Our Lord was to touch all nations and all social classes, beginning with France, First Daughter of the Church. Thus would the Sacred Heart be the cornerstone of a new Christendom. (sadly, this plan failed with France and Freemasonry spread not only in that nation but throughout the world)

There is a tendency in our days to emphasize the goodness, gentleness and pity of the Magnificent Heart of Jesus, Who is certainly moved by the weakness and distress of those whom He loves. But the good shepherd is also a hero and a warrior; and His love is essentially a contending kind of love. The Heart of Christ longs to win a battle. As He said in the Gospel, He did not come to bring peace to the earth, but the sword.

At the time when Our Lord chose to make His revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in the mid-17th Century, the influence of Jansenism was strong among the religious and intellectuals. Jansenism emphasized God’s justice and severity with little emphasis on His willingness to forgive or His divine mercy. The Jansenist doctrine was born from a spirit of pride and self-sufficiency. It suggested man could not receive anything from God without having first merited it morally or intellectually. It was an attempt to harness the infinite largesse of God to the small confines of  the finite limits of the understanding of man.

Our Lord gave the gift of His Sacred Heart to the world to counter this harsh and puritanical spirit that has survived even to our days. In the Sacred Heart of Jesus man finds pardon for the past, peace for the present, hope for the future. The mercy of this Heart, the fountain of all living waters, is so superabundant that even in what seems to be the most irreversible and hopeless moral situations, man can find in this devotion a possibility of pardon and a full return to the life of grace and peace.

The key to the Sacred Heart was given by Our Lord to St. Gertrude: that all can be won with unlimited confidence and unbounded desires. She understood that confidence is the key that opens the treasures of the infinite mercy of God. To her confidence alone, she attributed all the gifts she received. Our Lord Himself told her: “Confidence alone easily obtains all things.” Once when St. Gertrude was troubled with temptation, she implored divine assistance. Our Lord comforted her with these words:

“Anyone suffering from human temptations, who flees to My protection with firm confidence, belongs to those of whom I can say: ‘One is My dove, My chosen one out of thousands, who has pierced My Heart with one glance of her eyes.’ And this confidence wounds My Heart so deeply that were I unable to relieve such a soul, it would cause my heart a sadness which all the joys of Heaven could not assuage … Confidence is the arrow which pierces My Heart, and does such violence to My love that I can never abandon her.”

Hand in hand with confidence Our Lord desires that we become men and women of great desire - an unlimited desire for the glory of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary. St. Gertrude taught the great secret for our times: that Our Lord “accepts the will for the deed”. “The goodwill in undertaking a work to fulfill My desire, notwithstanding the difficulty met with, is most agreeable to Me, and I accept the goodwill for the deed. Even if he be unable to succeed, I will reward him as if he had accomplished it,” Our Lord revealed to her.

With the Sacred Heart, all can be won by an unlimited confidence and unbounded desires.
Our Lord accomplished the desires of His friends in proportion to their earnestness and intensity. He accepts the desires of His friends as if they were realized. This is a key for the latter days, when men, weakened by sin and overwhelmed with the problems and chaos confronting them from every direction, feel incapable of an action proportionate to the need.

Thus has this devotion been given to the Church to help to form the warriors who will come to confront the Anti-Christ and his followers. These will be the Apostles of the last times, described by St. Louis Grignion de Montfort:

“In a word, we know that they shall be true disciples of Jesus Christ, walking in the His footsteps of poverty, humility, contempt of the world, charity, teaching the narrow way of God in pure truth, according to the holy Gospel, and not according to the maxims of the world; removed from any human concerns, without attachment to anyone; sparing, fearing and listening to no mortal, however influential he may be. They shall have in their mouths the two-edged sword of the Word of God. They shall display on their shoulders the bloody standard of the Cross, the Crucifix in their right hand and the Rosary in their left, the sacred Names of Jesus and Mary in their Hearts, and the modesty and mortification of Jesus Christ in their own behavior.

“These are the great men who are to come; but Mary is the One who, by order of the Most high shall fashion them for the purpose of extending His empire over that of the impious, the idolaters and the Muslims. But when and how shall this be? God alone knows.”

The Sacred Heart of Jesus wants to inspire the hearts of men of our days with a great combativity and a great desire to accomplish the deeds of which it can seem we are not even capable. These will be the sons and daughters of the Blessed Mary: it was from Her Immaculate Heart that Christ drew His humanity. His Heart began its first beating within the pure virginal womb of Mary who was conceived without original sin. How could God be placed in the womb of a woman who was for even an instant the slave of the devil through sin?? No, She was created special. She was His first Tabernacle!  No human heart will ever be more closely attuned to the Heart of the God-Man than was, and is, that of His Mother. And just as the prayers and desires of Mary hastened the coming of Our Lord, so the prayers and desires of Our Mother with Her children will shorten the days of tribulation, and will hasten the triumph of Her Immaculate Heart! May we pray to be Her children!

O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to Thee!
O Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, HAVE MERCY ON US AND HEAR THE CRIES OF YOUR MOTHER AND HER CHILDREN FOR THE REIGN OF HER IMMACULATE HEART SO THAT YOU MAY REIGN ON THE THRONES OF ALL OF OUR HEARTS!!

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