A story for every day...
A Christian reconciliation.
One of the promises made to those who devote themselves to the Heart of Jesus is to bring union back into the most divided families. We have seen something even more difficult: to bring together, when they are divided, those who by their vocation should love each other in God, much more than members of the same family.
Here is a remarkable fact written (in an unpublished letter of May 13, 1829) by the Duchess of A… a German princess who converted to the Catholic faith in 1825, and died in 1848 in Vienna, Austria.
«Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has just saved a diocese which was in flames: the priests being in open rebellion against the archbishop, refusing him obedience, etc., etc… This great diocese, with a million and a half thousand Catholic souls, influencing by its geographical position the Catholics of almost all of Germany and Poland, was all the more to be pitied, since it was located in a heretical kingdom. This sad scandal had been going on for three whole years. The archbishop, a venerable old man, was dying of grief. God wanted him to turn to me for advice in this thorny matter. I understood what God had in mind, and I answered firmly that there was only one way to try to save what was already almost lost. It was to make two novenas; the first to the Sacred Heart of Mary, and the second to the Sacred Heart of Jesus; that the Blessed Virgin was the way that led us to the Son; that it was She who most defended the Church against the attacks of hell. – The archbishop agreed. At the end of the first novena, an order came from the heretical ministry which had always protected the revolt against the archbishop, an order that His Grandeur should use all his episcopal rights to bring back to obedience his rebellious children, and a second order to the rebellious to submit to the spiritual power, if they did not want the temporal power to teach them the right way. – In the middle of the second novena, the priests arrived, bursting into tears; they humbly asked for forgiveness, they refuted their own errors, and peace suddenly returned at a time when certainly one no longer dared to hope for it from a human perspective. It is worth noting that Our Lord left all the honor to His holy Mother, reserving for Himself, as is only natural, the forgiveness which He granted through the mouth of His bishop, the good shepherd.»
