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Dear Friends and Benefactors,
This month it is exactly ten years since the then Superior
General, Father Franz Schmidberger, blessed the newly remodeled Regina Coeli
House, enthroned it to the Sacred Heart, and consecrated the District to the
Immaculate Heart of Mary. The date was May 13. This coming May 13 it will be 85
years since the first apparition of Our Lady to the three children at Fatima.
Our Lady’s message when she appeared to the children on
that May 13, radiant with sparkling light, poised over a holm-oak sapling, was
perfect simplicity. After declaring that she had come from heaven, and assuring
the children that they also would go to heaven, but only after praying many
Rosaries, she made her point very directly:
Do you wish to offer up to God
all the sufferings He desires to send you in reparation for the sins by which He
is offended, and in supplication for the conversion of sinners?
After waiting to receive their fiat, embracing this
act of offering, she comforted them with an assurance and strengthened them with
a command:
"Go then, for you will have
much to suffer, but the grace of God will comfort you" and "Pray the Rosary
every day in order to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war."
If only we also could have the childlike simplicity to
offer our lives and our hearts in reparation for sin and the conversion of
sinners, if only such a perfect love of God and our neighbor could penetrate our
hearts, if only each one of us offered his Rosary every day to make up to the
Immaculate Heart of Mary for all the insults and blasphemies directly against
her purity and innocence, her fullness of grace and her love of the Cross, we
also could obtain the end of the spiritual war initiated by the modernists, and
the triumph of the tranquillity of the peace of God’s kingdom.
Let this May 13 be an invitation
to the simplicity of this Immaculate Heart, that we might share to some measure
in the experience that Sister Lucia describes so vividly:
Our Lady opened her hands for the
first time, shedding on us a light so intense that it seemed as a reflex
glancing from her hands and penetrating to the inmost recesses of our hearts,
making us see ourselves in God, Who is that Light, more clearly than we could
see ourselves in a mirror. Then by an interior impulse, also communicated to us,
we feel upon our knees, repeating in our hearts:
"O Most Holy Trinity, I adore Thee. My God, My God,
I love Thee in the most Blessed Sacrament."
It is to embrace this spirit of Fatima, which is the
spirituality of the Church, as our own, that I propose a special ceremony for
this coming May 13, that we might make our own the adoration and the loving
reparation taught by Our Lady to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco. It seems to me
eminently appropriate that on this 10th anniversary of the first
blessing of the Regina Coeli House would also take place the blessing of the new
Angelus building, and its apostolate, as well as the enthronement and
consecration of this apostolate of the Press to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and
the renewal of the Consecration of the U.S. District to the Immaculate Heart of
Mary. I consequently invite those of you who are able to do so to come here for
these ceremonies, and those of you who cannot to unite yourselves to us on that
day by reciting the act of Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that is
enclosed in this report. It is the very same text as that used for the
consecration of the entire Society to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Econe in
1984.
The schedule will be as follows:
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