Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Blue Army Shrine, Ashbury, NJ
108th Anniversary Celebration of the Sixth Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima
Votive Mass of Our Lady of Fatima
October 13, 2025
Jud 13:17-20.15:9, Lk 1:46-55, Lk 11:27-28
To watch a video of the homily, please click below:
To watch a video of the homily (and of the Mass in which it took place), please click below:
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided the homily:
Today’s celebration of the culmination of Our Lady’s Apparitions in Fatima and the great Miracle of the Sun is unlike any other in Church history, because it is taking place in the first Jubilee of Hope in ecclesiastical annals. And like any Church holy year, it’s meant to influence everything the Church does during that time. And the theme of hope has a great deal to do with what Mary said and did and tried to provoke all of us to do 108 years ago in Fatima.
What Hope Is
What is hope? When Pope Francis gave us his Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee of Hope, he didn’t define what hope is, because he said, everyone already has an idea of what it is. When Pope Benedict published his encyclical on hope in 2007, he likewise did not give us a clear definition of hope, but he did give us a very important clue. Quoting St. Paul who in his letter to the first Christians in Ephesus reminded them that before the Gospel arrived in their famous city, they were “living without hope” because they were “living without God in the world” (Eph 2:14), Pope Benedict implied that hope is precisely “living with God in the world.” We know that this is true. Everything changes when we know that Christ is with us. Think about any challenge you’re facing now, or any major challenge you have faced in life, if you could see Jesus present with you, if you would hear him whispering into your ears or your heart, “Don’t be afraid. I am with you. We will meet this challenge together. Remember, nothing is impossible for God,” would we not be filled with enormous hope that that challenge won’t have the last word? St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, who built an empire of hope for Italian immigrants in New York City and then spread hope in 67 missions in 11 different countries, did it all based by echoing the hope St. Paul’s gave witness to in his Letter to the Philippians: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (4:13). To recognize that God-with-us, Emmanuel, is still very much with us, and that he can strengthen us to do even the humanly impossible, that with faith in him the size of a mustard seed we can even transplant mountain ranges, we are filled with hope not matter how tall those mountains seem to be.
The Hope Mary Gave the Shepherd Children
This is something Our Lady came to teach us in Fatima in summoning us to consecrate ourselves to her Immaculate Heart. I’ve always been blown away by what Mary taught the three young shepherd children, 7-year-old Jacinta, 9-year-old Francisco and 10-year-old Lucia. She had shown them a vision of hell where poor sinners go. She had given them a glimpse of the destruction that would come from atheistic communism. She had even permitted them to see how much the Church would suffer, with a vast city of Christian corpses and even a bishop in white assassinated.
After these vision, Mary said to them, “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go,” a clear indication that Hell is a real possibility of human freedom and doesn’t seem to be empty. “To save them, God wishes…,” she continued, and told them about a specific practice. I think it’s worthwhile to pause to consider what we think would have been fitting for her to indicate: what practice would be a remedy for Hell and an antidote for the sinful choices that lead there? Well-formed Christians might posit several reasonable guesses: Repent and believe in the Gospel. Prayer. Frequent Confession. Live faithfully the promises of our baptism. Keep the Commandments. Live a Eucharistic life. Love God and neighbor. Care for the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, ill and imprisoned. Our evangelical brothers and sisters might say: Confess with your lips and believe with your heart that Jesus is Lord and accept him as Lord and Savior. Prior to the Fatima apparitions, I don’t think any of us, even if we were given 100 guesses, would ever have come up with the answer Mary actually gave.
Consecration to Mary’s Immaculate Heart and Its Connection to Hope
The means by which God wished to establish to save sinners from Hell, she said, was “devotion to my Immaculate Heart” throughout the world. “If what I say to you is done,” she emphasized, “many souls will be saved and there will be peace.” Our Lady went on specifically to request that Russia — which in 1917 was experiencing the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution — be consecrated to her Immaculate Heart, lest Russian communism “spread its errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church.” Atheistic communism, for our Lady, was not a neutral political system, but a violent conceptual attack on God and on those made in his image that would bring incalculable harm, as we saw over the course of the 20th century.
But we have to ask what it means to consecrate ourselves, or particular countries, or the world to Mary’s Immaculate Heart? It means first and fundamentally to entrust ourselves to Our Lady, to belong to her, to enter into a covenant with her. At a deeper level, consecration to her “immaculate heart” means to beg her to help make our heart like hers, since Jesus declares that “the pure of heart shall see God” (Mt 5:8). The future Pope Benedict, commenting in 2000 on Mary’s message in Fatima, said that Mary’s is a “heart that, with God’s grace, has come to perfect interior unity and therefore ‘sees God.’ To be ‘devoted’ to the Immaculate Heart of Mary means therefore to embrace this attitude of heart, which makes the fiat—‘your will be done’—the defining center of one’s whole life.”
In the Preface for the Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in the Compendium of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary that we are celebrating today, there is a beautiful commentary on the characteristics of Mary’s heart that one seeks to embrace through consecration. “You gave the Blessed Virgin Mary,” you will hear me pray later, “a wise and obedient heart, that she might perfectly carry out your will; a new and gentle heart, in which you were well-pleased and on which you inscribed the law of the New Covenant. You gave her an undivided and pure heart, that she might be worthy to be the Virgin Mother of your Son and to rejoice to see you forever. You gave her a steadfast and watchful heart, so that she could endure without fear the sword of sorrow and await in faith the resurrection of her Son.” A heart that’s undivided and pure like Mary’s, that’s wise and obedient, that’s faithful and watchful, is a heart that gives a wholehearted yes to God. It’s a heart that treasures God within. Such a heart “open to God, purified by contemplation of God,” Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 2000, “is stronger than guns and weapons of every kind. The fiat of Mary, the word of her heart, has changed the history of the world, because it brought the Savior into the world.”
This is the type of heart that God wants each of us to have. It’s a heart that, like in the Gospel today, hears the Word and observes it so much that that world, pondered and treasured, takes on her own flesh. It’s a heart that, like Mary prayed in her Magnificat which we used as the response to the first reading, bursts out with joy for all that the Almighty in his goodness does for us.
God wishes, Mary said, to establish throughout the world devotion to her heart, so that our hearts will freely entrust themselves to her love and seek to emulate her wholehearted fiat to God’s will, word and work in our life.
This is, in short, the means by which to live with hope. To live with God in the world is to live like Mary, to grasp that through preserving sacramental and sanctifying grace that comes to us through the Sacraments, through pondering and treasuring God’s word, especially through receiving in Holy Communion the same Emmanuel whom Mary bore in her womb for nine months — he just looks different and is now risen from the dead — we are able to live with God and therefore live with hope in the world. Mary’s immaculate heart was “full of grace” and therefore, because grace is our participation as creatures in God’s own life, it was “full of God.” If we through consecration to Mary’s heart learn to live with a heart like hers, we, too, will be full of hope because we will be full of God. And we will be capable, like Mary, our Mater Spei or Mother of Hope, to bring that hope to the world. She said to the Shepherd Children, “my Immaculate Heart will triumph!,” which cannot but be a profound source of hope to all of us, that despite the evils we still very much encounter in the world, Mary’s trust in God will be validated, that Jesus’ eternal victory on Calvary, his resurrection, his promise of eternal life will have the last word.
Consecrating the World to Hope
But we have to ask: What does it mean to “Russia” or the “world” — we can think of all war torn areas today — to Mary’s Immaculate Heart, as Mary also requested? How can we consecrate others or foreign countries? This means prayerfully and perseveringly — not just as individuals but the whole Church in unison — entrusting all peoples to Mary’s intercession and maternal care, seeking to transform the world one person at a time to become more Marian in relation to God. This consecration happened according to the wishes of our Lady, the surviving seer Lucia confirmed in 1989, when St. John Paul II, in union with the bishops across the globe, consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart on March 25, 1984. In his beautiful, nearly 1000-word prayer of consecration that day, St. John Paul II begged Mary to “accept the plea that we make in the Holy Spirit directly to your heart and embrace … those whose act of entrustment you too await in a particular way,” a clear reference to Russia. “Before your Immaculate Heart, we desire, together with the whole Church, to unite ourselves with the consecration that, for love of us, your Son made of himself to the Father (Jn 17:19). … The power of this consecration lasts for all time and embraces all individuals, peoples and nations. … Help us to live in the truth of the consecration of Christ for the entire human family of the modern world. … Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today.”
He then implored her to deliver us from famine, nuclear war, incalculable self-destruction, sins against the life from its very beginning, hatred, the demeaning of human dignity, every kind of injustice, readiness to trample on God’s commandments, attempts to stifle the truth, loss of awareness of good and evil, and sins against the Holy Spirit. “Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit,” he continued, “to conquer all sin: individual sin and the ‘sin of the world,’ sin in all its manifestations,” so that “the infinite saving power of the Redemption, the power of merciful love, may … put a stop to evil [and] … transform consciences.” He finished by entreating, “May your Immaculate Heart reveal for all the light of hope.”
Mary’s Immaculate Heart indeed reveals the light of hope! That’s why to live this Jubilee Year well, we must live it according to what Mary revealed 108 years ago in Fatima. We must live together with Mary and make or renew our consecration to her within her consecration to her Son. And not just entrust ourselves to her maternal intervention in our life, but also our families, neighborhoods, parishes, dioceses, countries, and the various countries of the world to her in prayer, so that they, too, may see the light of hope that radiates from her heart. Saint John Paul II taught us all how to consecrate ourselves each day to Mary’s immaculate heart. He would pray each morning, using St. Louis de Montfort’s consecratory formula, “I am all yours, O Mary, and all I have is yours. I receive you into the whole of my life. Give me your heart!” I likewise try to pray that prayer every day in my morning holy hour. During this Jubilee, we should all be seeking constantly to renew that consecration, which helps us to live with hope, to live with Jesus in the world, and to share his light.
Following Our Lady of Fatima as Pilgrims of Hope
There’s one other connection between this Jubilee of Hope and what Mary came to Fatima to announce. While Popes Francis and Benedict didn’t define hope for us in precise terms, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has. It tells us, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Hope is the spiritual muscle that helps us to relate to desire God and heaven, to trust in Jesus’ promises and to rely on the Holy Spirit.
These were the characteristics of Mary’s immaculate heart. She loved and longed for God, desired his kingdom to come and hungered to dwell with him forever. She trusted in God’s promises even when God’s angel told her she would conceive a Son without a man, that that Son would not only be hers but miraculously God the Father’s, that that Son would reign over the house of David forever, even when he was being crucified on Calvary. And she totally relied on the Holy Spirit, who overshadowed her at Jesus’ virginal conception and continued to guide her throughout life. To consecrate ourselves to Mary’s heart is to choose to imitate her hope in God, to desire heaven, to trust in Jesus fully, and to live by the Holy Spirit.
That’s why Pope Leo, in his homily for her Assumption two months ago in Castel Gandolfo, said, “Mary, who the risen Christ carried body and soul into the glory, shines as an icon of hope for her pilgrim children throughout history,” and echoed St. Bernard in calling her “the living fountain head of hope” as well as the Second Vatican Council in saying she is “a sign of certain hope and comfort to the pilgrim people of God” (LG 68).
The theme of this Jubilee Year is “Pilgrims of Hope” and Pope Leo preached: “Pilgrims need a goal that orients their journey: a beautiful and attractive goal that guides their steps and revives them when they are tired, that always rekindles in their heart a desire and hope. On the path of life, our goal is God, infinite and eternal Love, fullness of life, peace, joy and every good thing. The human heart is drawn to such beauty and it is not happy until it finds it; and, indeed, it risks not finding it if it gets lost in the middle of the ‘dark forest’ of evil and sin.”
But then he said we cannot forget the grace God has given us so that we can have a heart filled with him. He said, “God came to meet us, he assumed our flesh fashioned from the earth, and has carried it with him into the presence of God, or as we commonly say ‘into heaven.’ … Inseparable from him is also the mystery of Mary, the woman from whom the Son of God has taken flesh, and of the Church, the mystical body of Christ. … Just as Jesus said ‘yes,’ so also Mary said ‘yes;’ she believed in the word of the Lord. All of her life has been a pilgrimage of hope together with her son, the Son of God, a pilgrimage which, through the Cross and Resurrection, has reached the heavenly homeland, in the embrace of God. For this reason, while we journey forward, as individuals, families and communities, especially when the clouds come and the road seems difficult and uncertain, let us lift our gaze, let us look at her, our Mother, and we will rediscover the hope that does not disappoint!”
Yes, today, supported by this Jubilee, we turn to Our Lady of Fatima as our fountain head and mother of hope. We consecrate ourselves anew to her heart that longs for God, that desires holiness, happiness, and heaven, that trusts in all her Son’s promises and journeys with the fire of the Holy Spirit. We ask her prayers to help us, just like she did Saints Francisco and Jacinta and Venerable Lucia, to live with God in the world always so that we will witness the fulfillment of our hope, the triumph of her Immaculate Heart and the light of hope that will never set.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Judith
All the people were greatly astonished. They bowed down and worshiped God, saying with one accord, “Blessed are you, our God, who today have brought to nought the enemies of your people.” Then Uzziah said to her: “Blessed are you, daughter, by the Most High God, above all the women on earth; and blessed be the Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth, who guided your blow at the head of the chief of our enemies. Your deed of hope will never be forgotten by those who tell of the might of God. May God make this redound to your everlasting honor, rewarding you with blessings, because you risked your life when your people were being oppressed, and you averted our disaster, walking uprightly before our God.” And all the people answered, “Amen! Amen!” When they had visited her, all with one accord blessed her, saying: “You are the glory of Jerusalem, the surpassing joy of Israel; You are the splendid boast of our people.
Responsorial Psalm — The Almighty Has Done Great Things For Me
“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my savior. For he has looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness; behold, from now on will all ages call me blessed. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. He has shown might with his arm, dispersed the arrogant of mind and heart. He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty. He has helped Israel his servant, remembering his mercy, according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
A Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke
While he was speaking, a woman from the crowd called out and said to him, “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.” He replied, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download