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Forty-six years ago this October, I first made my Act of Consecration to Jesus through Mary according to the teaching of St. Louis de Montfort.
I was told then that the Mother of God knew more about Jesus and faith in him than did all the saints who had ever existed. That was a word from my spiritual director at the time, and I was sufficiently impressed by it that on October 7, feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, I became a “slave of Mary.”.
I don’t think I’ve been a particularly good one. There are many others with a better understanding of the Mother of God. Or who are more devout, more pure of heart. Or so it appears to me. But I’m consecrated all the same, and Mary isn’t one to give up on any of her children.
What a different world we live in now, in 2019, compared to 1973! Yet the current state of things was already finding voice by that year, and of course, even much earlier.
I remember a high school class in 1967 or 1968 where a discussion about abortion and contraception took place. I think it was in Advanced Biology.
I didn’t know about Church teaching about most of this subject, as catechesis for Catholic students in public schools was then in a pitiable state, but I knew enough to know that abortion and contraceptives were wrong and blurted out: “Wouldn’t that be murder?”
A shock of tension went through the room, and a classmate said, “You mean, if I used such-and-such as a contraceptive, you would consider me a murderer?”
The teacher told me afterwards that I would probably have “a very interesting life” if I continued on that course. But at the same time, I was having some personal difficulties and barely survived that year, emotionally speaking. So I was certainly in no shape for spiritual combat at that point in my life!
By the time I was in college a couple of years later, I was holding on as bravely as I could to my Catholic faith in, once again, a public-school setting. I found myself in conversation with friends and classmates about topics like this:
Friend: Why does the Catholic Church forbid abortion? It’s my body, and I have a right to do with it as I believe best.
Me: But doesn’t a baby also have a right to live?
Friend: But what about my life? Doesn’t it matter to your Church?
Or this one:
Jim: My girl friend and I don’t believe in contraception, and if we conceived, we would keep the child.
Me: Oh…
Jim: Do you believe human beings can fly? When I’m on acid, I just feel so strongly I can jump out a 3rd story window and not fall to the ground!
Me: I hope you don’t try that! About sleeping with —- are you sure it’s wise to be doing that without some kind of commitment?
He just smiled, and we went into poetry class together.
Jim was convinced that our gorgeous teacher was a former nun! I scoffed at that until she used the Agnus Dei of the Catholic Mass as a beautiful example of the power and beauty of repetition in composition!
Meantime, in courses like Sociological Thought, faith and the Church were under more direct attack. The teacher was an engaging fellow from Greece who loved an argument and was constantly trying to provoke one.
With me he was somewhat successful, to the point that I was invited with a few others to his home for a delicious meal featuring Greek cuisine, something I was not familiar with in “chicken, taters and dumpling” country where I was from.
Other than that delicious repast, I found myself the lone Catholic, or so it seemed, trying to bring reason to bear on the likes of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Auguste Comte—”the fathers of modern sociology.”
I found them all brilliant and deficient at the same time but had practically nothing at hand to give as an example of an alternative way of thinking.
I was also intrigued that Comte, an avowed atheist, spent his final years reading only one book: The Imitation of Christ! Meantime, my atheistic professor took his new-born daughter home to Greece to be baptized!
All this to say: the craziness of thinking today was already well established when I was a young man, and my experience of the Church, though profound in some ways through the issue of personal suffering, was of an institution in disarray with little to offer that provided a vivid, coherent, and alternative way of life to what was emerging in American society and elsewhere at that time.
I didn’t make it through year four of college. I dropped out, ended up at Madonna House, and less than a year later was consecrated to Mary.
I know this is a roundabout way to talk about Mary and the rosary and the consecration, but I felt the need to make the point that right thinking and right living go together with the consecration, which is called “true devotion to Mary.”
No one of these three works as it should without the other two. Right thinking about the issues of the day is given to us by reason enlightened by the teaching of the Church. Right living comes through obedience to the Gospels and to the Church’s understanding of same.
True devotion to Mary is not a side hobby or a soothing piety that one practices as one can in the midst of life’s complications and “real” issues.
Rather, it is a kind of steadying compass from the Lord that keeps us turned in the right direction: that is, towards the face of Jesus Christ as contemplated by his Mother. This view steadies us in the face of contemporary challenges to Catholic thinking and a Catholic way of life.
By turning towards the face of Christ with Our Lady, I am not referring to mystical visions or to otherwise extraordinary spiritual experiences. What I mean is that being consecrated to Mary and living with her, under her mantle so to speak, steadies a deep place in our souls. She constantly leads us to turn to her Son in every circumstance.
She inspires us to call on him, to seek his help, to repent of our sins, to abide in his love. By doing so constantly, we are opened to grace not only to have “Catholic answers” but to present those answers in a spirit of Christlike compassion, humility, and mercy, yet seared with an iron determination to be faithful to him who is the way, the truth, and the life.
And should conversation one day cease, and only the witness of an offering be left for us, Our Lady will steady those devoted to her to give that kind of testimony or martyrdom. And to do so with love of enemies and prayer for their conversion to Christ, the eternal joy of all those for whom Mary is Mother and Queen and resting place for the weary.
