Text of Sermon at Consecration Service

June 22, 1947

His Emminence, Edward Cardinal Mooney of Detroit

Taken from link below

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“During these days of Marian praise and prayer our Catholic hearts have kept spiritual tryst with the Blessed Mother of the Blessed Christ, our God and Saviour. In the full Spirit of the Christian centuries we have been brought nearer to God through closer communion of mind and heart with the one human sinless human minister of God’s saving mercy to sinful man.

“This Marian Congress conceived in the traditional Catholic piety of your Archbishop, blessed with the participation of Christ’s vicar on earth, through the mission of his Cardinal Legate, widened to nation and even international stature, by the presence of prelates, priests and faithful from all parts of Canada, from neighbor nations on this continent and from abroad prepared and carried out with impressive solemnity, by the devoted clergy and laity of a diocese, which through the hundred years of its history has grown and prospered under the patronage of Mary Immaculate, fittingly approaches its spiritual climax in this ceremony of the consecration to the Immaculate heart of Mary. This public act of dedication to Mary the Mother of God is a solid corporate affirmation of our Catholic Faith in God’s providential way of salvation for men and nations – “Ad Jesum per Mariam”, to Christ through Mary. But its full spiritual significance and fruitful effect depend on the extent that each one of us in his heart today and in his life from this day forth makes this act his very own. It is practical, therefore, for each of us to consider briefly what, in its fullness, this act of consecration can mean and what, at the very least, it must imply.

“The import of a perfect act of consecration to our Blessed Mother has never been set down more explicitly than in the writings of a sainted French Missionary priest, the blessed Louis Marie de Montfort, whose solemn canonization will take place in St. Peters in Rome four weeks from today. His teaching cannot be unfamiliar to the Catholic people of this Archdiocese, where his spiritual sons of the Company of Mary carry on the apostolate of Marian devotion which he so zealously exercised. To those who would love God with their whole heart and mind and soul he proposed this perfect act of consecration to Mary as a complete dedication of our entire spiritual patrimony – of all that we have and all that we are in the order of grace and merit, of intercession and satisfaction - to Christ our God and Saviour through His Blessed Mother and ours. To do this is to make Mary our Spiritual trustee - to place at her disposal our prayers, our penances, our good works, with what value they have in the sight of God, that according to their nature she may keep them and enhance them for us, or turn them to account for others, in that perfect union of will which makes her one with Christ as Christ is one with His Father in Heaven.

Tribute of Love

“There is in the fulness of this dedication a supreme tribute of love, an expression of the unquestioning confidence with which a child places all that he has in the hands of his mother. There is in it, too, a small incentive for us to make our gift reflect ever more closely, in the manner of our giving, the humble self effacement, and the utter submission to God’s will of the human mother through whom we offer it to her Divine Son

“ Short of this perfect and all embracing dedication, our act of consecration to Mary may cover a wide range of personal preference in the free and devout use of her personal meditation. But there is something fundamentally Catholic which this public consecration to Mary must imply for each of us if it is to be a vital influence in our spiritual life.

“It must, first of all, bring home to us the deep felt conviction of the Catholic centuries that ‘the closer we keep to Mary the closer we shall be to Christ’. There is a deep spiritual significance in what the gospel tells us of the Magi who, following the star of Bethlehem ‘found the Child with Mary, His Mother’. It was no more circumstance in the mystery of the Incarnation that God Incarnate was to have a human mother. By His coming He wished to capture the minds and hearts of men and one part of His plan was to be born of a woman and live in the home she ruled as a mother. To those who fail to honour the mother the figure of Jesus easily becomes dim and shadowy – so that He is, at best, the great human teacher, the preeminent social reformer, the exponent of the Golden Rule. But for those who acclaim Mary as the Virgin Mother of God, Jesus is the Christ- the Son of God, divinely born, divinely healing men’s bodies and men’s souls, divinely teaching those He has chosen to govern His Church, divinely rising from the dead to prove His mission, divinely acting on human minds and human hearts until the end.

“Our act of Consecration must imply further that we take Mary as our model in loving Christ and serving God. To do this is to go direct to the heart of holiness in Christian living. The most telling single test of holiness is complete and whole hearted compliance with the will of God as it is made known to us. In the daily struggle of the Christian life how many times a day must every one of us face that test. In meeting it, our most inspiring human example is that of Mary, who, when God’s will was made clear to her, in the supreme crisis of her life, bowed her head in all simplicity and humility and said “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done to me according to Thy Word. Significantly, indeed, has a modern Spiritual writer seen in those words Mary’s own Act of Consecration.

“And finally, our act of Consecration to Mary must point the path we are to take when sorrow clouds our spirit or the shadow of sin falls across our soul. That path leads up the hill where Christ on the Cross taught the world the value of suffering in human life and became the ‘propitiation for our sins and not for ours only but for those of the whole world’. One detail in the Gospel description of the crucifixion cannot escape our notice: ‘There stood by the cross of Jesus, Mary His Mother.’ It was in that sacred union of suffering that Jesus, seeing His Mother and the disciple whom he loved standing by, said to the disciple-and through him, to every disciple Jesus loves – ‘Son behold thy Mother’. And from that hour the disciple took her to his own. So, too, may it ever be with us.

“ The faithful of all the Christian ages have taken Christ’s Mother to their own invoking her as a Mother of Divine Grace, Comforter of the Afflicted, Refuge of Sinners, Help of Christians and Queen of Peace. In that same tradition today, with the confidence of children in a mother, we place in her hands the prayers of our hearts for an agonized world , asking her to present them, enhanced by her powerful intercession, to God that He may guide and strengthen those among the victor nations which retain something of their Christian heritage, to bind up the wounds of war, to restore hope where men are tempted to despair, and to lay the firm foundation of peace in justice and in the charity of Christ.

“I have said that with today’s Solemn Act of Consecration, this Marian Congress approached its Climax. That climax will be reached tonight when we pay public tribute to Christ in the Sacrament of His Love to which He designed to be the very life of our souls. Thus again as ever does Mary lead us to Christ that in Him and by Him we may live to God. Thus again is verified in her whom the Church hails as the Seat of Wisdom which the inspired voice of Wisdom proclaimed of old: “He that shall find me shall find life and have salvation from the Lord.”