Consecrating Ourselves to Mary’s Immaculate and Eucharistic Heart, Immaculate Heart of Mary, June 25, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Francis de Sales Chapel
Archdiocese of Oklahoma City Pastoral Center
Retreat for the Sovereign Order of Malta
Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
June 25, 2022
Is 61:9-11, 1 Sam 2:1.4-8, Lk 2:41-51

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Mass, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In 1969 Pope St. Paul VI moved the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from August 22 to the day immediately after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart in order to highlight the connection between the two feasts. Yesterday with Catholics across the world, we prayed with devotion, “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine.” If we wish to have a heart like Jesus’, we can learn so much from Mary, who shows us how to respond to the love of Jesus’ heart and be transformed by it. Mary’s heart was the one that Jesus heard from the first moment his human ears began to function. Hers is the heart that most received and best reflects her Son’s love and today is a day on which we seek not only to admire her, not only to imitate her, but to enter into her loving relationship with her Son. Today we say, with St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort and St. John Paul II who used to pray this every morning, “Praebe mihi cor tuum, O Maria!,” “Give me your heart, O Mary!”
• Mary wants us to have such a heart. Jesus wants us to have such a heart. In 1917, when Mary appeared to the three shepherd children in Fatima, SS. Francisco and Jacinta Marto and their cousin, the Servant of God Sr. Lucia Santos, she said to them, “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” She invited all of us to consecrate ourselves to her heart as an antidote to the sin that leads to what she showed the children in three visions: to hell, to the destruction wrought by atheistic communism, and to the persecution of the Church and even attacks against the Holy Father. In order to live out well our consecration to Jesus’ Sacred Heart we do so through consecration to her Immaculate Heart. United with her, we enter into the consecration of her Son to the Father for our sanctification (Jn 17).
• Today we contemplate her heart, a heart that was full of grace because it was full of God. It was a heart full of thanksgiving, one that “rejoiced heartily,” as we see prophesied in Isaiah, because her joy was in God who clothed her with the robe of salvation, wrapped her in a mantle of justice, adorned her like a bride bedecked with jewels. Her heart constantly exulted in the Lord, as we see in her Magnificat, which fulfills what we heard in Hannah’s praise in 2 Samuel. It was a contemplative heart that, as we heard at the end of today’s Gospel, “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” She cherished in her heart the words that came to her from God and pieced them together like a priceless mosaic, a treasure that kept paying out dividends within her, pondering God’s word so profoundly that that word could take on her flesh.
• One of the best meditations on Mary’s immaculate heart and one of the best ways to learn from it is the Preface of the Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary taken from the most beautiful liturgical book in the Latin Rite: the Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It gives us eight adjectives that describe her heart and chart for us the path to a heart like hers. The Preface reads: “You gave the Blessed Virgin Mary 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.” We can briefly ponder each of the attributes:
  • Wise — Her heart was like the young Solomon’s, because pondering and treasuring everything as pieces of a mosaic within. It was wise because it was filled with God’s wisdom.
  • Obedient — Her heart hears the word of God and keeps it, perpetually saying fiat. When the anonymous woman from the crowd screamed to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the breasts that nursed thee,” he, even though no woman’s womb or breasts were ever as blessed as Mary’s because of their association with him, upped the ante in his praise saying, “Blessed, rather, are they who hear the word of God and observe it.” Mary’s real beatitude came from her holy obedience that lived in complete harmony with God’s will and whose whole life developed according to her response to Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” Wisdom that allows us to see things as God does, and obedience that helps us to live that wisdom, is what allows us “perfectly [to] carry out [God’s] will.”
  • New — In her heart we see the fulfillment of God’s promises through Ezekiel to give us a new heart, taking away our stony hearts and giving us hearts of flesh, hearts that beat in love.
  • Gentle — Her heart was one that learned from her Son, who says, “Learn from me for I am gentle and humble of heart.” The freshness and meekness of a heart like Mary’s pleases God, as the Preface says, and is the proper writing material for the Holy Spirit upon which inscribe the new law.
  • Undivided — From the moment her immaculate heart first formed in St. Anne’s womb, it sought above all God’s kingdom as the pearl of great price worth everything else. Hers was an unbroken echo chamber of an Amen to all God’s desires.
  • Pure — The pure of heart see God, as Jesus mentions in the Beatitudes, and her heart did, because there was no room in it for sin. The untainted eyes of her heart allowed her to see God in her Son growing within her from his first moments and to rejoice in him.
  • Steadfast — Her heart persevered through vicissitudes. It loved on despite being pierced so many times. At the Presentation, Simeon foretold that her own heart would be pierced on account of her Son’s being a sign that would be contradicted. That heart was pierced when Herod sought to assassinate him, when they needed to flee to Egypt, when her fellow Nazarenes tried to hurl him to his death, when so many rejected him during his public ministry, when the mobs chose Barabbas, when she saw him mocked, scourged, condemned, crucified and killed. But her heart didn’t give up. She kept loving to and through the Cross. She kept standing, loving right alongside her Son.
  • Vigilant — Her heart waited for her Son’s resurrection with faith and hope and awaits our responding to God’s graces until we, by God’s mercy, come to be with her forever. Her steadfastness allowed her to ensure the sword of sorrow without fear and to remain alert for her Son at all times.
• That’s the type of heart that Mary wants us to have and to imitate. That’s the heart that will fulfill the prayer we made yesterday when we begged for a heart like her Son’s. That’s the heart we seek when, consecrating ourselves to her, we say, “Praebe mihi cor tuum, O Maria!”
• As we examined yesterday, Jesus’ Sacred Heart is Eucharistic. It is a Sacramentum Caritatis Divinae et Humanae, a Sacrament of Divine and Human Love. Mary’s heart is similarly Eucharistic. It was kept pure from the first moment of her existence in the womb of her mother St. Anne so that it would be able to be conformed to the heart the Son she would virginally conceive at the Annunciation and receive with just as much faith and love from the hands of St. Peter, St. John, and the other apostles in the early Church. To consecrate ourselves to her Immaculate Heart is to consecrated ourselves to her consecrated Eucharistic Heart, which beats in unison with the Sacred Eucharistic heart of Jesus.
• Saint John Paul II, in his beautiful 2003 encyclical on the Eucharist, Ecclesia de Eucaristia, said that the Immaculate Virgin “can guide us towards this most holy sacrament, because she herself has a profound relationship with it.” The Church, he said, not only “looks to Mary as a model” but “is also called to imitate her in her relationship with this most holy mystery.” She, he said, is a “woman of the Eucharist in her whole life. … In a certain sense Mary lived herEucharistic faith even before the institution of the Eucharist, by the very fact that she offered her virginal womb for the Incarnation of God’s Word. … At the Annunciation Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood.” Her Fiat in reply to the Archangel Gabriel, he said, is profoundly analogous to the “Amen that every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord. … In continuity with the Virgin’s faith, in the Eucharistic mystery we are asked to believe that the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine.” At the Incarnation, she also “became in some way a ‘tabernacle’ — the first ‘tabernacle’ in history’ in which the Son of God, still invisible to our human gaze, allowed himself to be adored,” first by Mary, then by St. Elizabeth and St. John the Baptist. Her “enraptured gaze … as she contemplated the face of the newborn Christ and cradled him in her arms” is, John Paul says, an “unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Eucharistic communion.” When Simeon at the Presentation prophesied not only that her Son would be a sign of contradiction for the rise and ruin of many in Israel but that her own heart would be pierced, she experienced from that point forward, John Paul prayerfully notes, a “daily preparation for Calvary” and “a kind of anticipated Eucharist – one might say a ‘spiritual communion’ – of desire and of oblation, which would culminate in her union with her Son in his passion” and death. After the Resurrection, she would have participated in the celebrations of the Eucharist in the Upper Room and with St. John who after Golgotha had taken her into his home. As she said to the servants in Cana, so Mary doubtless encouraged her apostolic sons, “Do whatever he tells you,” as they obediently repeated what Christ said and did at the Last Supper, “Do this in memory of me!”
• John Paul poignantly asks, “What must Mary have felt as she heard from the mouth of Peter, John, James and the other Apostles the words spoken at the Last Supper: ‘This is my body which is given for you’ (Lk22:19)? The body given up for us and made present under sacramental signs,” he notes, “was the same body that she had conceived in her womb! For Mary, receiving the Eucharist must have somehow meant welcoming once more into her womb that heart which had beat in unison with hers and reliving what she had experienced at the foot of the Cross.” That’s why he encourages each of us to enroll ourselves in the “school” of Mary and allow her, the “woman of the Eucharist” to teach us how to approach the celebration of the Mass a heart like hers, training us in authentic Eucharistic spirituality so that we might in turn become conformed to the sacred Eucharistic heart of the blessed Fruit of her womb. She is, as Pope Benedict would say about her later, the “singular model of the eucharistic life” who shows us how to become men and women of the Eucharist and of the Church” and ultimately, in the words of Saint Paul, “holy and immaculate” before Him (cf. Col 1:22; Eph 1:4).
• At this Mass, as we consecrate ourselves to her immaculate heart anew, we enter her school begging her to help us obtain a heart wise, obedient, new, gentle, undivided, pure, vigilant, steadfast, immaculate and Eucharistic like hers, so that we might relive her mystery in Christ her Son as with enraptured gaze we behold him, become a tabernacle for him, united ourselves with him interiorly, seek to bring him with love and haste to others, and faithfully and joyfully do whatever he tells us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download