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Father John Gregory of the Trinity, O.D.M. Mary, the Speedway Translated from the French Editions Magnificat PO Box 4478, Mont-Tremblant, Quebec J8E 1A1 Canada – 2014 –
Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, 2014 ISBN 978-2-7623-2727-4 Editions Magnificat 1408-252-2727 Printed in Canada
ARY, Mother of God and our Mother: there is no doubt that She is the One who makes us progress rapidly and makes almost easy what seems virtually insurmountable at first sight. Mary is the Mediatrix of all grace. It is this good Mother’s desire for us to call upon Her continually so that She may lead us to Her Son, Jesus Christ. That is all She asks to operate our sanctification. The Blessed Virgin came one day to explain this secret. “Consecrate all My children to Me,” She said, “I want to protect them against all the assaults of hell, which will be powerless against them, provided they say to Me frequently, “My Mother, I give myself to You, keep me!” That
4 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY is all I ask of these dear children. And in return, never will they be able to abandon My Son’s road. I will make them progress along spiritual pathways, I will take them by the hand; it is I who will make them progress wonderfully. They will be totally enchanted by it.”1 We must do our part generously, of course. “God helps those who help themselves.” We must correspond to grace, and if we ask Mary incessantly for it, we will correspond to it. “I want to perform wonders in favor of My children present here, wonders of sanctity,” said the Blessed Virgin. “Let them abandon themselves into My hands and constantly renew this consecration of their entire being to Jesus through My motherly Heart.” The Blessed Virgin assures me that you will attain great perfection through Her help. The spiritual life and all the renouncements you will have to accomplish will be made much easier for you by the help of the heavenly Mother. You will be totally surprised at the progress you will —————— 1. Given at St. Jovite on October 16, 1964.
make in very little time if you have unceasing recourse to Her. This is a great secret: to have recourse to the Blessed Virgin. But the world is unaware of this secret, and even the Church, following in the wake of the Protestants, wants to deny it, if not in words, then at least in practice. “They are in the process of becoming more Protestant than the Protestants them- selves,” said the Blessed Virgin. “My Son has given Me every power to help souls, lead them to God and make them go through every spiritual phase, make them follow the itinerary of paradise.” Oh, how encouraging it is! My dear brothers and sisters, you could never have enough confidence in the Blessed Virgin’s loving designs, designs She has upon each one of us. God wants us to become saints, and the Blessed Virgin confirms this for us. Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect,2 says the Gospel. Mary wants to protect us from all dangers and to act in such a way that the assaults and attempts of hell will be fruitless and come to nothing. MY MOTHER, I GIVE MYSELF TO THEE... 5 —————— 2. St. Matthew 5:48.
Let us be little children in the hands of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Let us abide in simplicity and humility; thus the work of God will be accomplished in our souls. Without Me you can do nothing,3 says Our Lord. But with Mary’s help the very strength, power and holiness of God will act in us. We will be under God’s control, we will be His little instruments, as a radio we listen to is only the instrument that transmits the voice of the person speaking into the microphone. If we are synchronized with God, that is, if we are in harmony with Him, united to Him, we will become those little speakers that will be able to transmit His word. It is the Blessed Virgin who will make us flexible, docile, conformed to all the divine intents. She will inspire us with what to do. She is the One who will guide us and speak to our soul: “My child, no, do not do that... Yes, do that.” Perhaps you will say to me, “Oh no, we don’t hear anything.” Oh yes, what inspirations! We must acquire the faculty of listening to the voice of God. It does not 6 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY —————— 3. St. John 15:5.
necessarily make our eardrums vibrate, but the soul hears it. What inspirations are given to us every day! And the more faithful we are, the more easily we hear these inspirations. They become louder and louder; it is the voice of Heaven in us. God always speaks quite clearly to the soul that is faithful to listening to Him minute by minute. MY MOTHER, I GIVE MYSELF TO THEE... 7 I do not think that a soul can acquire an intimate union with Our Lord and a perfect fidelity to the Holy Spirit without a very great union with the Blessed Virgin and a great dependence on Her help. SAINT LOUIS MARY DE MONTFORT
What does a mother do? There is nothing new about the Blessed Virgin playing the role of Mediatrix of all grace with souls, nor being the instrument of God to sanctify and guide them. Perhaps we think this is a novelty, but in reality, Mary has always exercised this role, even on behalf of those who are unaware of it. The book called The Mystical City of God 4 goes so far as to say, “If the Heavenly Mother had not intervened between Christ and the human race, the world would never have come into the possession of the Gospel, nor ever merited to experience any of its effects.”5 This clearly shows how much we are beholden to the Mother of God who has interceded on behalf of humanity, and therefore on behalf of each one of us even before we were born and without our even having recourse to Her. A tiny child cannot ask his mother to come and help him; he does not realize what his parents do for him and does not 8 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY ————— 4. Life of the Blessed Virgin which She personally dictated to Ven. Mary of Agreda. Saint Pius X called this work The Summa Theologica of the Christian People. 5. Ven. Mary of Agreda, The Mystical City of God, translated by Fiscar Marison (Corcoran: Albuquerque, 1949), Vol. III, Bk. II, chap. 3, no. 346.
appreciate their dedication, but this constant, hidden dedication of the parents exists all the same, and the child benefits from it. It is the same situation for humans as regards the Blessed Virgin. From the very moment Mary became the Mother of God, She exercised Her role as Mediatrix on behalf of men. No soul has ever been sanctified without Her intercession, for the Blessed Virgin adopted all of humanity in advance, and She has always interceded for each one of Her children, even those who have not had recourse to Her. A mother does not wait for her child to call upon her before coming to his assistance. If she sees that he needs anything, she hastens to help him. Spontaneously, she mends the clothes he has torn. And if she sees an object anywhere that might hurt him, at once she goes to remove it without the child’s asking her to. So then, can we not expect her to do even more if the child comes and asks for her help? The Blessed Virgin says, “Innumerable are those whom I have saved from the WHAT DOES A MOTHER DO? 9 ————— 6. The Mystical City of God. Vol. IV, Bk. 7, no. 301.
infernal dragon because of their devotion to Me, even though they recited only one Ave, or said only one word in My honor and invocation. So great is My love for them that if they would call upon Me in time and with sincerity, none of them would perish.”6 The great secret If the Blessed Virgin is so sensitive to such meager devotion, we can easily imagine the wonders She will perform on behalf of those who abandon themselves to Her without reserve and invoke Her unceasingly, as She asks us to do. This abandonment into the hands of Mary is the wonder 10 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY As holy and exalted as Mary is, She is just as sweet andmerciful toward sinners who invoke Her with a true desire to amend. SAINT GREGORY VII
of wonders. I did not grasp it, but the Blessed Virgin made me understand it. “That is the whole secret,” She said. The secret is in the renewal of this complete abandonment into Her hands, with total faith. The greater our faith in the Blessed Virgin, and the more this absolute confidence exists in our soul, then the more effects will we experience. All the rest results from that. Perhaps it seems unlikely, but this is the great secret of Mary. In the Mystical City of God, the Blessed Virgin goes on to say, “They should seek My most kind and powerful intercession and fear the judgments of the Most High; for in this lies the efficacious means of salvation and of meriting higher reward (that is, our sanctification). I wish to remind you once more that among the divine secrets which My most holy Son revealed at the Last Supper to John, His beloved and Mine, was also this: he had become the beloved disciple of Christ on account of his love toward Me, and Judas fell because he despised the mercy and kindness which I had shown him.”7 THE GREAT SECRET 11 ————— 7. The Mystical City of God, Vol. III, Bk. 2. chap. 5, no. 386.
This is a very powerful thought: the road to salvation and sanctity can be summed up, after a fashion, as recourse to Mary, the Mediatrix of all grace interceding for us. The soul which lives habitually in dispositions of abandonment and complete confidence in Mary is wonderfully instructed by this good Mother Herself. You will not notice it, but at a given moment your ideas will change, you will understand things that were obscure to you. You will say, “I don’t know what happened.” Transformations will be worked mysteriously within you, even during your sleep. The workings of God in souls are very mysterious. How is it that sometimes from one day to the next your ideas change, your tastes for earthly, carnal things vanish and are replaced by an attraction for virtue and holy things? It is the work of grace. Before making these transformations, however, God can allow certain souls to suffer. Sometimes it takes quite a long time; do not despair! Never will God deceive a person who has placed all his trust in Him. If you expect everything from the Blessed Virgin, if you expect everything 12 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY
from God, you will obtain everything. Even though it is only five minutes before your death, you will be great saints. After all, the important thing is to end well. Time does not exist for God. Perhaps you will say, “I have been trying to correct myself of my faults for five years, ten years, and I have even more of them than before. It’s so frustrating! With all your fine theories of absolute trust in God, I am no further advanced than I was five years ago.” Just wait! God sees the sincerity of your efforts, and He will hear and answer you. Perseverance is the important thing: to take up your task day after day, minute after minute. The road of perfection is like THE GREAT SECRET 13 If you persevere till death in the true devotion to Mary, have the firm confidence, without the shadow of a doubt that your salvation is certain. SAINT ALPHONSUS LIGUORI
an immense mountain. We try to climb it, we take one step forward, two steps backward.., we climb some more... We have the impression we are getting nowhere; but at a given moment, God takes hold of us and carries us up to the mountain summit Himself. If we really take the means to amend ourselves, and despite everything we have the impression that we are running around in circles, we must still go on hoping... hoping against all hope. With this absolute confidence in God, you can be sure that you will not go wrong. Rest assured of this, despite any appearance to the contrary. Usually, God does not make us wait until five minutes before our death to transform us. He comes sooner than that to reward our confidence and crown our efforts. Shortcut or detour? Certain people think that devotion to Mary turns us away from Jesus Christ or that it is a useless detour, since Jesus Christ is the great Mediator between God and men. This is a serious misunderstanding of 14 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY
Mary’s role in the economy of salvation. While Jesus is the Mediator between God the Father and men,8 the Blessed Virgin is the Mediatrix between Jesus and men. It would be totally erroneous to think that devotion to the Virgin Mary is going to divert us from Jesus Christ or delay our union with Him. It is just the opposite. The Blessed Virgin does not want to monopolize us and prevent us from going to God. Essentially, Her desire, Her role is to bring us to God rapidly. All Her happiness and Her reason for being reside in that. So there is no danger in having unceasing recourse to Her, for She Herself will make it Her duty to lead us to Her Son, without any detours. She is the shortest road to uniting ourselves to God. I do not even dare to tell you everything on this point. I am afraid of making you lazy. I will limit myself to saying that in the final accounting, God is only asking us to take the trouble to come and seek His graces and to put ourselves in the dispositions to make them efficacious. These dispositions are also obtained through prayer. SHORTCUT OR DETOUR? 15 ————— 8. St. Paul, I Timothy 2:5 – There is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus.
16 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY My Mother, I give myself to You, keepme!
If we ask without ceasing, “My God, give me Your grace, give me the dispositions that will merit this grace, give me the grace of fidelity to grace,” then God is “cornered,” so to speak. And He will be more certainly cornered if we pray to Him through the intermediary of the Blessed Virgin, His Mother, to whom He can refuse nothing. True devotion or superstition? Many people say they have the Marian devotion, but what exactly does TRUEdevotion to Mary consist in? Very simply to be given to the Blessed Virgin. Devotee means given. And when we give ourselves to the Blessed Virgin, do you know what She does with us? She gives us to God, because this good Mother keeps nothing for Herself. She does not try to monopolize souls the way humans often seek to do in their apostolate; instead, She hastens to give us to God. “To Jesus through Mary.” She is a road to God, and if we do not TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 17
reach God through Mary, our Marian devotion is not authentic. Certain people develop a sort of devotion that is all sentimental: “Oh, how I love the Blessed Virgin!” That is fine, but we have to prove it. We devote ourselves for our loved ones in every way. True devotion to the Blessed Virgin must also consist in a dedication, a gift of self, by the practice of the Christian virtues. You will recall the Gospel parable: “A man had two sons; and he came to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in my vineyard.’ And he answered and said, ‘I will go,’ but he did not. And he came to the other and spoke in the same manner. And this one said, ‘I will not go.’ But afterward he regretted it and went. Which of the two did his father’s will?” asks Jesus.9 With this example, Our Lord wanted to make us understand that it is not feelings that God expects of us. It is good to have feelings; certainly God does not reject them, but the expression of these feelings must correspond to a disposition of soul. God is not satisfied with words. If we tell 18 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY ————— 9. Cf. St. Matthew 21:28-32.
Him we love Him, He expects us to prove if. It is likewise with the Blessed Virgin. We do not have a true devotion to Her if we do not accomplish what pleases Her. And to please the Blessed Virgin, we must please Her Son, we must please God. TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 19 OMary, how could You refuse Your support to poor wretches when You are the Queen of Mercy? Who are the objects of mercy, if not the poor wretches? You are the Queen of Mercy, and I am the most wretched of all sinners, so I rank first among Your subjects, and Youmust take more care of me than of all the others. Therefore, have mercy on us, OQueen of Mercy, and think of saving us. SAINT BERNARD
Basically, that is true devotion. It is not the person who says the most rosaries and the most litanies, the one who has the greatest number of statues in his home or the one who makes the most pilgrimages that has the greatest devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Understand what I mean: it is good to recite rosaries and make pilgrimages, but what I want you to realize is that true devotion does not reside chiefly in these things. You can do all that, have all that, and not be true devotees of the Blessed Virgin. What makes a devotee of the Blessed Virgin is the accomplishment of what pleases Her. The more we accomplish what pleases Her – and consequently what pleases God – the more we will be Her devotees. The rest is merely the means. Let us return, for example, to the recitation of the rosary, a wonderful prayer that was requested by the Blessed Virgin Herself: we say it precisely to obtain the grace to please God, to meditate on the life of Jesus and Mary, to learn to conform our life to Theirs, in order to resemble Them, imitate Them. That is the purpose of reciting the rosary. 20 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY
True devotion to the Blessed Virgin is the one that produces fruits of life; do not forget this, my brothers and sisters. We can fall into the illusion of believing that with statues and pictures, processions, rosaries, medals, scapulars and pilgrimages, we’ve got it made, we have true devotion. All these outward signs of piety, without conformity to the will of the Blessed Virgin and of Her Son, are false devotion. And that is why the Marian devotion has been criticized so much. It is one of the reasons Protestants have come to hold it in aversion; they saw that among a great number of Christians, this sort of devotion produced nothing. It was a fruitless devotion. Not everyone who says to Me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the Will of My Father,10 says Jesus in the Gospel. It is not words, considerations, exclamations that God expects of us, it is acts. Obviously, this does not mean that we must not have any sentiments of love toward Heaven. Certainly there must be some, but that is not everything. In family life, for example, there are affectionate exchanges between parents and children, TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 21 ————— 10. St. Matthew 7:21.
PRAYER TO MARY, THE FAITHFUL VIRGIN O Mary, Mother of Jesus, You never refused anything that God asked of You! And He asked You for a great deal, far more than what He asked of any other creature in the world. He asked You to sacrifice wealth, well-being, Your judgment, Your will, Your heart... You always said Yes. “Be it done unto Me according to Thy word, O Lord!” That was, and always was, Your response! That is why the Holy Spirit filled You with supernatural Wisdom, with divine Fortitude: You led a holy life to perfection, like Jesus, Your Child. O Mary, we too must give a great deal to God if we want to live in grace with Him and be united to Him in heaven. Pray for us, O faithful Virgin – for us, poor men, so faint-hearted, so timid before the Cross; pray so that we may generously accept what God will ask of us today, this month, all our life. We want nothing more. Amen.
husband and wife, but that is not their whole life. If one or the other limited himself to marks of tenderness and neglected in other respects his primordial duties, such as providing for the needs of the family or rendering various services, the couple and their children would not believe in the sincerity of this love for very long, and rightly so. We understand these very human examples. God created all natural life in the image of what happens in the divine world. Thus God accepts our sentiments and words of love; certainly we must not neglect them. The spiritual masters have always taught that there must be an affective aspect to our spiritual life. This heart that God has given us, all this affection of our heart must be oriented toward God; but words of love without the corresponding acts are an illusion; it is self-deception. Are we doing what we must in order to be true devotees of Mary? To be so truly, my brothers and sisters, the earth should no longer matter to us. If a certain thing pleases God, we accomplish it; the world no longer matters. Yes, I repeat, there must be declarations of love; they are a little TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 23
like two stones we strike together to light the fire. But once the fire is lit, we have to keep it burning; otherwise it goes out. Now, the combustibles that keep the fire of the love of God burning are all the acts we accomplish to please Him, to obey Him. It is in this that true devotion to the Blessed Virgin resides. Jesus and Mary are one; those who have wanted to separate Them have not understood anything. You cannot separate a son from his mother, a mother from her son. Mary is one with Her divine Son in the Work of our Redemption; that is why She wanted to be called Our Lady of Salvation, the Mother of Salvation. Salvation is Jesus; Jesus means Saviour. She is the Mother of the Saviour. That is what “Mother of Salvation” means. That is why our salvation is inseparable from Mary. We are really in the sound doctrine when we associate Jesus to Mary, Mary to Jesus. So then, true devotion to Mary consists in the accomplishment of Her wishes, and consequently those of God, and also – let us not forget – in unceasing recourse to Her. In every circumstance, my brothers and sisters, let us have recourse to Mary. In our temptations, our sorrows, our labors, 24 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY
TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 25 In danger, anxiety and confusion, think of Mary, invoke Mary. Have Her always on your lips, always in your heart... When you pray to Her, you do not despair; when you think of Her, you do not go astray. With Her support, you cannot fall; under Her protection, you fear nothing; beneath Her direction, you do not growweary; with Her favor, you attain your goal. SAINT BERNARD let us ask for Her help, let us ask Her for the strength to accomplish what God expects of us. Instead of mulling over our discontent caused by ruffled self-love, our disappointments, our sufferings of all kinds, let us say to Her at once, as She
asked us to: My Mother, I give myself to You, keep me! And help will come, wonderfully... When we fall, let us have recourse to the Merciful Heart of Mary, that She may obtain pardon and new graces from God for us. The goodness of Mary, our Mother, is boundless; if we have recourse to Her, She will lead us surely, not only to heaven, but to holiness. In his writings, Saint Louis Mary de Montfort speaks of all the wonders that Marian devotion is supposed to accomplish in the life of a Christian. It is supposed to work extraordinary, miraculous, magical transformations. Whoever practices true devotion to Mary no longer walks on the path of perfection; he flies on it, he has wings. Constant recourse to Mary in all things, application to imitating Her virtues, and abandonment into Her hands of all our spiritual and temporal interests: that is ultimately all that the Blessed Virgin is asking, to be able to operate the sanctification of Her children. “As there are secrets in nature by which natural operations are performed more easily in a short time and at little cost,” writes Saint Louis Mary de Montfort, “so 26 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY
TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 27 OMary, Your power and goodness are so great that no quantity of sins can overstep their bounds. Nothing resists Your power, because Your Creator, who is also ours, regards Your glory as His own, and considers that He honors Himself by honoring His Mother; therefore He does so with extreme joy: one might say that by answering Your prayers, He is settling a debt. SAINT GEORGE OF NICOMEDIA
28 MARY, THE SPEEDWAY are there secrets in the order of grace by which one may more quickly and easily perform supernatural operations, such as ridding ourselves of self, filling ourselves with God and becoming perfect. The practice I wish to disclose is one of these secrets of grace, unknown to the majority of Christians, known only to a few of the devout, and practiced and relished by a lesser number yet.”11 Why is it that in practice, we find these fruits of spiritual transformation in so few souls? You have known very pious people who, in reality, do not improve very much; they always have the same faults. Perhaps you yourselves, my brothers and sisters, who for years have been claiming to be devotees of the Blessed Virgin, great servants of Mary, perhaps you find that there has not been any enormous change in your lives. It is because your devotion has not been true enough. You know, you must have the courage to put yourself on trial. Most souls like to remain in illusion, like to deceive themselves. But if we want to get somewhere, we must have the courage to look the truth in the face. ————— 11. St. Louis Mary de Montfort, True Devotion to Mary, no. 82.
“We must not rely upon our efforts or our natural talents, our credit or the authority of men,” says Saint Louis Mary de Montfort. “We must have recourse to Mary and count on nothing but Her help.”12 ————— 12. St. Louis Mary de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, no. 71. TRUE DEVOTION OR SUPERSTITION? 29
Table of Contents What does a Mother do? . . . . . . . . . . . . .8 The great secret . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10 Shortcut or detour? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 True Devotion or superstition? . . . . . . .17
In the same collection: #1 • The Most Important Thing: Prayer #2 • To Serve God Better #3 • Indispensable Effort #4 • Blessed Suffering #5 • Beyond the Legitimate #6 • An Underestimated Power: The Priesthood, The Eucharist #7 • The Ways of God #8 • An Inexhaustible Treasure: The Holy Gospel #9 • The Holy Spirit, Sanctifier of Souls #10 • Jesus Host, Source of all Holiness #11 • To Live by the Spirit of God #12 • Kindheartedness #13 • Let Us Live Our Magnificat #14 • Christians in Name – Atheists in Practice #15 • The Kingdom of God Is within You #16 • A Gift from Heaven to the Earth: St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus #17 • The Church Will Be Saved by Humility
#19 • Being True #20 • Saint Joseph, Model of Faith and Prayer #21 • “Humanity has not developed as God intended.” #22 • Sins of the Tongue #23 • Come, Holy Ghost #24 • Silence and Purity of Heart #25 • The Maxims of Saint John of the Cross #26 • “Watch therefore! for you know neither the day nor the hour...” Website: http://www.magnificat.ca
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