|
III.
Three Inevitable Conclusions
24. Marian
Apparitions Honor the Faith
IT WAS
DURING HER THIRD APPEARANCE at Fatima that Our Lady broached the subject.
Having requested the consecration of Russia to her Immaculate Heart, she
then expressed a desire that the faithful receive Holy Communion on the
first Saturdays. They were to do this "in reparation," which presupposes
of them a worthiness. The mother of the All-Holy was not recommending
sacrilege. She would have more to say on the subject afterwards, in 1925,
to Lucia alone. For the present, she asked only for a worthy reception of
the Blessed Eucharist every first Saturday.
She was by no means restricting the devout
communicant to a reception once a month. Such an idea would be absurd.
Everything about the Fatima message calls aloud to its followers to make
the most of the Blessed Sacrament against the evils of the day. She, whom
tradition knows to have received Communion from the apostle John with a
fervor no seraph could match, had in mind simply to focalize the need to
appreciate the hidden Christ in our midst as a first means of repairing
the outrages upon his infinite love. Yet how is it possible to focalize
unless one narrows the broad spectrum to a point? That is all Our lady of
Fatima did. She focused attention on just one day of the month, its first
Saturday, without intending to exclude its other days as suitable for
going to Holy Communion.
Did not her Son do likewise? The Church knows
from St. Margaret Mary that He did. Long before Fatima, Jesus was urging
devotion to His Sacred Heart on first Fridays. That the fastidious would
find the devotion offensive to taste, did not deter Him. Let them learn
not to despise honest sentiment.
The heart is everywhere considered the symbol
of love. Literature from time immemorial has so understood the term. The
idiom means the same in any language to every generation. The phrase
with all my heart, the imperative take my heart, a retarded
child would understand. But the word has come to mean, besides the organ
pulsating to the emotion of love or even the emotion itself, the person
who feels it. Why else do we call a lover and his fiancée sweethearts?
The same variance of meaning applies to the
Sacred Heart. Now identified with the Divine Person of Jesus as in the
litany, in another sense it but represents his compassion: that is, all
the love which induced the Savior to become man, assume our sins, die for
them on the cross, then renew His sacrifice daily on the altars of the
world and unto the end of time abide with us in the Sacrament of the
Eucharist. The insatiable yearning for human souls, which Jesus expressed
in his parable of the Good Shepherd, which he showed to the weary and the
sick and the bereaved of Palestine, throbs in his Sacred Heart.
Its counterpart, short of the divinity that the
Sacred Heart enjoys from the Person of Jesus, is the Immaculate Heart of
Mary. None other comes so near to the absolute goodness of his as hers.
It pulsates benevolence. It did so on earth, it does so now in a
glorified body beyond the splendor of angels. To desire anything mean,
however slightly mean, is simply inconceivable of the Immaculate Heart of
Mary. When she entreated her clients to observe the first Saturdays it
was because the observance would honor God and benefit them. The
interests of her Son and his Church motivated all her apparitions and the
requests she made during them.
The first Fridays and the first Saturdays do
not compete. They complement. Reparation is their mutual purpose. Both
require Holy Communion. Each devotion demands a set period of prayer: the
one a holy hour before the Real Presence, the other at least five decades
of the rosary with fifteen minutes of meditation on its mysteries either
during the recitation or sometime else on the same day.
Our Lady did not ask for this at Fatima. She
appeared to Lucia in her convent eight years later to petition it and,
additionally, to specify that the first Saturdays make up a series of five
in succession. She added still another requirement. Her clients, besides
going to Communion and reciting the rosary meditatively on the first
Saturday, were further to please her Immaculate Heart by going to
confession, if not on the day proper, then within the week before or
within the week after it.
Why do grumblers against the first Saturdays,
who say the practice diverts attention from our divine Lord, not see
through their hollow claim? It is his Sacrament of Love and his Sacrament
of Mercy that Mary urges her clients to receive. And in recommending the
rosary she is really asking them to nourish their minds on scenes from the
life of their divine Brother, which would endear him to them the more,
sharpen their sorrow over the outrages committed against him, and rouse
them to acts of reparation. If she further asks that a measure of that
reparation be offered to her Immaculate Heart, the request has nothing
selfish about it. From her close intimacy with Jesus she knows and has
simply acted on the knowledge that offenses against her offend him and
that he desires the proper apologies to so deserving a mother.
Between the two, a perfect understanding
prevails, Sister Maria of the Sorrows, the Lucia who came to the convent
from Fatima, has left on record a striking instance from an evening in the
May or 1930. At meditation in chapel the favored nun may have been
wondering why Our Lady had fixed the series of first Saturdays at five and
not as well some other number. Anyhow, of a sudden, One who knew the
answer was standing there in the sanctuary. It was not Our Lady this
time. It was her adorable Son, recognizable as the Christ of the Last
Supper, now resplendent with a beauty beyond telling.
"My daughter," he said with a voice that
soothed away her perplexity, "the motive is simple."
He explained. His mother had asked for exactly
five first Saturdays of reparation to match five particular insults to
her, which were an abomination to him. Our Lord enumerated these insults
as blasphemies: 1, against her Immaculate Conception; 2, against her
Perpetual Virginity; 3, against her divine Maternity; 4, against her right
to be introduced to young minds for what she is and not misrepresented by
purblind educators as an object of derision; 5, against her sacred person
indirectly by the desecration of her statues or pictures.
Sister Maria of the Sorrows wrote of her
mystical visions, not on her own initiative, but always on the advice of
her confessor. She wrote of them clearly, unpretentiously, in detail.
But the particular that emerges foremost from the record of her
post-Fatima apparitions is the perfectly unselfish motive which originated
the first Saturday devotion. The all-loving mother whom the scorners of
her prerogatives were outraging implored their omniscient Judge to allow
others to make amends in this way for the offenders—and he agreed. "As
for you," Jesus counseled Sister Maria, "try incessantly to move me to
mercy toward those poor souls."
Pitiable souls they truly are, who blaspheme
the Holy Mother of God. But the blasphemers cannot evade her outreaching
love. Her feeling for them has in it a compassion intimately akin to the
cry from the cross: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do"
(Lk. 23:34). But isn't this what we should expect from the mother of the
dying Savior whom three popes unequivocally named our coredemptrix?
Leo XIII did in his encyclical Jucunda semper, and Pius X in his
approval of the feast of Mary's Seven Dolors, and Pius XI in his
concluding prayer for a Holy Year.
These arbiters of sound doctrine naturally
understood her co-redemptional role to be a subservient collaboration with
the totally sufficient act of redemption by our divine Mediator, Jesus
Christ: yet still an important role which God assigned to Mary and she
fulfilled. She herself understood her role for what it was. In all such
apparitions which show the sorrowful mother with a crown of thorns around
her heart, or a sword thrust into it, or with whatever symbol of distress,
never does her anguish assume a coequality with the sufferings of her
adorable Son. Never! She emphasizes to her seers the supremacy of Christ
Jesus, their sole Redeemer, as well as hers.
All heavenly apparitions respect the Creed. It
wouldn't make sense otherwise. The envisioned Christ who spoke from the
sanctuary to Sister Maria took for granted inhis denunciation of their
abuse of the three great dogmas pertaining to His mother. And a fourth
dogma of his teaching Church, which indirectly involves Mary, he equally
vindicated. It is in the report from the visionary who listened intently,
that the Son of God looked deeply sorrowful as He referred to the
desecrators of His mother's holy images. He was but agreeing with the
Second Council of Nicaea. It decreed an anathema upon the iconoclasts.
The Mother of his Church, sharing his regard
for its dogmas, would naturally not disregard its magisterium of Pope and
Bishops in concert with him. Nor did she. She awaited with the apostles
the glory of Pentecost. She did not oppose them. She honored their
Christ-given authority, praying that they use it to the best advantage of
souls. Toward their successors from then till now she has shown the same
consideration. In her numerous apparitions not once did she work against
the institutional Church. She invariably urged her seers to work with it
and by means of it to achieve her benevolent aims.
Was there ever in late centuries a clearer
display of heaven's belief in the structured Church than the apparition at
Knock, in County Mayo, Ireland? I know of none. Not a word was spoken by
the three human figures, not a bleat from the figure of a lamb, but the
vivid tableau conveyed the message clearly. It deserves better than a
passing notice. To the honor of the Sacred Heart and of the Immaculate
Heart, since it involves both our Mediator and our mediatrix, it will at
least receive so much.
Outside the village church, along its gable
wall, an altar of normal size stood in the center and on the altar stood a
lamb to be sacrificed and behind the lamb rose a wooden cross to a
conspicuous height. The combination leaves no doubt that the lamb
represented Christ the willing Victim in every offered Mass and that the
upright cross suggested the sacrificial nature of the Mass—precisely, the
renewal of the Savior's death on Mount Calvary. To the side of the altar,
the Gospel side, stood a mitered bishop in his liturgical vestments, who
gave evidence of preaching a homily on the subject, for his head was
turned slightly toward the altar, and in one hand he held an open book
while the other was raised in a gesture of admonition. This mute
representative of the teaching Church has been identified with the apostle
John, since he wore no beard and the author of the Apocalypse makes
no less than twenty-seven references to the immolated Lamb of God.
Next to the prelate, to his right, stood a
queenly young woman of the holiest charm. Her robe of white shone like
silver, and her golden crown glittered with little ornamental crosses, and
on her brow beneath the crown lay a gorgeous rose. Mary Beirne, one of
the first to come upon the multiple tableau, exclaimed at once to her
companion: "They are not statues. They're moving. It's the Blessed
Virgin!" And so indeed did every other seer believe that lovely figure to
be the Mother of God. Fervently praying, her gaze intent on heaven, she
held her hands apart and shoulder-high and turned inward, with the palms
facing each other—just like the hands of a priest, it was observed, "when
he is praying at Mass."
That observation hints of the meaning of the
symbolism. Only the ordained minister in the group possessed the faculty
to offer Mass, but while the Divine Victim gave himself up to be thus
offered in a daily renewal of his death on the cross, the mediatrix of his
graces did not stand idle. She acted. She cooperated. She interceded
for the sinners of the world with him. And the sublime truth that the
Savior desired it so, had arranged it so, was strongly indicated by the
way the sacrificial lamb stood on the altar facing the vested bishop and
the praying queen, with a look of willing docility.
That was not all of it. To the right of the
queen, the mediatrix, the Mother of the Church, stood a somewhat elderly
layman whom the fourteen sworn witness took to be St. Joseph, a picture of
benevolence, the special Patron of the Church. His hands were devoutly
folded and his graying head was bowed in reverence toward the other
figures. He felt privileged. His observers could see it in his benign
features that he was gratefully aware of belonging there. He knew, St.
Augustine would have said, that he belonged to the Mystical Body of
Christ.
This row of three human figures, Joseph and
Mary and John, and an altar with a lamb and a cross upon it, remained
standing along the church wall in a softly brilliant aura of light for two
solid hours from dusk into the August night, when the tableau
disappeared. But all during the apparition the rain fell heavily, and
drenched the seers, yet did not touch the area of splendor. A farmer half
a mile away saw the illumination and mistook it for that of a huge brush
fire which he thought some fool had started so near the sacred building,
despite the impossibility of it in such a downpour. But Patrick Walsh saw
what he saw from a distance, and had no other explanation of fourteen
on-the-scene observers of various ages and both sexes, the point of real
significance emerges: the multiple apparition that didn't talk enacted a
pantomime, as plain as words, of the institutional Church at work around
its central mystery—the Holy Sacrifice of Mass.
It was befitting of heaven thus to dramatize
the significance of the Mass in the country that endured the severest
persecution on account of its devotion to it. Homes in Ireland kept their
doors open to the fugitive priest who would come in and offer Mass at the
peril of his life and at the risk of unjust reprisals on the families.
The devout of the land, while their churches were denied the Real Presence
because the altars therein stood unused, were in no mood to lock out
Christ from their homes. That would have made them feel as craven as
those apostles must have felt, who were too timid to show themselves on
Mount Calvary. The nation rather had the spirit of St. John, so that the
typical Irish cottage welcomed the chance opportunity of Mass under its
thatched roof, during which the worshippers knelt in gratitude to the
unbloody Sacrifice of the Cross and at Communion received their Lord and
God with all the greater ardor because of the rarity.
The persecuted, in their enforced privation,
hungered for and lost no opportunity to avail themselves of the Holy
Sacrifice and its Holy Sacrament. This, observed Augustine Birrell, is
what kept their Catholic faith alive and whole and afraid of nothing. As
Chief Secretary of the British Crown in Ireland, he ought to know. His
report, not satisfied with saying it once, said it again and again to make
of the words a refrain: "It is the Mass that matters."
What he said was true; he saw that it was true;
but he might have added a concomitant observation of history. During the
long intervals between Masses in the home, when no priest would come, many
a family of persecuted Ireland would substitute for the Holy Sacrifice the
rosary. Parents and children would together recite decade after decade
and ponder the mysteries in order to stay in touch with the Christ of
their love. Needless to add, with so much the greater joy they would
still pray their beads on the rare day of Mass in the home. But that they
did consider the rosary the closest equivalent of the irreplaceable
Eucharist on all the other days when they were denied the divine Sacrifice
and Sacrament, may be inferred from this: on such days they called the
recitation of their family rosary "our dry Mass."
It kept their ardor for the Holy of Holies
burning like a perpetual sanctuary lamp while their tabernacles stood
empty. It incited their yearning for a return of the daily Sacrifice of
the Mass in their midst. Against the cruelties of a government bent on
crushing out their "Romish superstition," it obtained for them the grace
of fortitude. They persevered. Yet even as we marvel, the French
Revolution the reliable Curé of Ars has remarked, those of the persecuted
who prayed the rosary when they could find no Mass to attend retained the
Faith.
The time may come, in countries now free of the
atheist domination, when the faithful will be forcibly deprived of the
Mass. They would be wise to form and maintain the habit of the daily
rosary, which will then sustain them, as it did the persecuted Irish. In
a Communist prison Bishop James Walsh had his beads taken from him. That
did not stop him. He prayed the blessed decades through much of the day,
keeping count of the Hail Mary's on his fingers. He observed every first
Friday and every first Saturday and every other day as best he could, with
a spiritual Communion and his meditation on the fifteen mysteries. He
emerged from prison strong of faith.
It does not need mentioning, with all that is
known of Fatima, that the Church has generously approved the cult of the
Immaculate Heart. On December 12, 1942, the Holy See granted a plenary
indulgence to those who on each of the five first Saturdays would fulfill
the conditions. On March 3, 1952, the Holy See issued another decree
recommending special acts of reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on
any first Saturday whatsoever. This was obviously to encourage the
faithful not to stop the sequence at the number five but to go on with it
month after month, year after year, without a break. Saturday had long
before Fatima been the liturgy's day for the Blessed Virgin: but now the
first Saturday of the month assumed a new significance in harmony with the
first Friday.
Both days should be punctiliously observed, to
honor God, and shame the devil. If it be asked, "why on earth drag in
that infernal hater of man?" the answer is that Christ in his visions to
St. Margaret Mary did. "The devil," she quotes the Omniscient, "has a
most intense fear of this devotion." Our Lord was speaking there of
devotion to his Sacred Heart, but the reason he gives for its embarrassing
Satan would apply as well to the related devotion to Mary's Immaculate
Heart. Reparation for wrongs done to his infinite love, especially in the
Blessed Sacrament, which brings dismay to hell because it leads souls to
heaven, is the essential purpose of the first Fridays and the first
Saturdays alike. They differ in this: while both devotions atone for the
outrages which the Son of God feels in the horrible insults to his mother,
the one does so implicitly, the other explicitly and with emphasis.
Our Lord does on his word of truth desire both
devotions. And since he does, so does his mother, and so do all the holy
angels and the saints, and on earth the better educated among men in the
one thing needful (Lk. 10:42). We adore the Sacred Heart of Christ
because, as an organ of his human body which is hypostatically united with
his divinity, his Heart deserve adoration. We honor the Immaculate Heart
of Mary in reparation because it pleases the Sacred Heart, which is why it
also pleases Mary.
Her apparitions have made that abundantly
clear. She explained to little Jacinta on her deathbed, years before she
explained it to the surviving seer of Fatima, that only what offends God
offends her and that acts of reparation to her Immaculate Heart rejoice it
because they rejoice the Sacred Heart. Her visionaries, being so
instructed, have accordingly all shown an intense ardor for the Blessed
Sacrament.
Jacinta was but acting typically of the others
when Lucia hurried into her sick room from Holy Mass and Communion, yet
stood somewhat away from the bed, so that the saintly child called out
from an impulse of yearning: "Come over here, near me, since you have
within you the hidden Jesus."
Attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion,
without which there could be no observance of the first Friday or the
first Saturday, will for the more zealous clients of Mary be an everyday
event. They will follow her maternal advice to avail themselves of the
sacrament of penance no less than once a month, knowing that absolution
brings an inflow of grace over and above the forgiving of sins. They will
do a holy hour in advance of the first Friday, say their rosary and
meditate on its mysteries as a demand of the first Saturday, yes,
emphatically yes: but that would never satisfy their ambition to grow in
sanctity under the guidance of Our Lady of Fatima, who has asked for the
daily rosary, daily periods of meditation, daily visits to the Blessed
Sacrament beyond the attendance at Mass, and of course daily acts of
self-denial.
The summation has been saved for one whose pen
knew the subject so well. In the very last encyclical of his pontificate,
the uncanonized St. Pius XII wrote: "By the will of God, the Blessed
Virgin Mary was inseparably joined with Christ in accomplishing the work
of man's redemption, so that our salvation flows from the love of Jesus
Christ and his sufferings, intimately united with the love and sorrows of
his mother. It is, then, highly fitting that after due homage has been
paid to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Christian people who have obtained
divine life from Christ through Mary, manifest similar piety and the love
of their grateful souls for the loving heart of our heavenly mother."
|