Editorial: By Right of Consecration

By Right of Consecration

There’s an age-old axiom that says, ”No one can give what he does not have”. Applied to our relations with God and His Blessed Mother, the axiom, if I may dare say, rings truer still. And in the measure in which we remember that everything we have belongs to God and to our Blessed Mother. In the same measure shall we understand the real meaning of our consecration to Jesus and Mary. In fact, our consecration will then emerge as an acknowledgment  rather than an outright gift to Jesus and Mary.

It is indeed unsound theology to think that we creatures can ever ”give” anything to Christ, anything, I mean, that does not already belong to Him by nature and by conquest.  Christ is God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, true God and true Man. He is, therefore, our Creator, our absolute Master. Everything we have, everything we are, whether it be in the order of nature or of grace, comes from Him. In the words of St. Paul: ”For all things are yours . . . and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s” (I Cor. 3:23).

We Belong to Christ

We belong to Christ also because He is our Saviour. Christ has bought us at an infinitely dear price, the price of all His Blood. We are therefore His property and possession. ”Do you not know,” writes St. Paul, ”that your members are the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been bought at a great price” (I Cor. 6 :19,20) . Whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we submit to His rule over us or not, Christ is our King and Sovereign Lord for Whom we must live, work and die, as servants and slaves of love. With the Apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, we should glory in our title of Slaves of Christ.

But there is yet another title by which Christ becomes, in a special way, our Lord and Master – and that is by consecration. This title Christ acquires, so to speak, from us when, by a free and loving act of the will, a man consecrates Himself to Christ and promises to follow Him all the days of his life. Despite his poverty and utter destitution, it is in man’s power to do this. And Christ not only accepts this ”gift, ” at Baptism, but He desires man to renew it from time to time. That is why he says to the soul: ”My son, give me thy heart!” (Prov. 23:26).

It is this title which is perhaps dearest to the Heart of Christ for it assures Him of a complete sway over a man’s heart. A classical example of this is when the Sacred Heart asked of Margaret Mary that she consecrate herself to His Sacred Heart.

Through Consecration

In consecrating the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pope Pius XII established a parallel between consecration to Jesus and consecration to Mary. ”Just as Our predecessor of immortal memory, Leo XIII, at the dawn of the 20th century saw fit to consecrate the whole human race to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, so We have likewise, in the role of representative of the whole human family which He redeemed, desired to consecrate it in turn to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary” (May 1, 1948).

Now this parallel was not the effect of mere chance. It was intended to bring into focus the two consecrations thus helping us understand better their intimate relationship.

Of course, Mary’s rights over our souls are not absolute, nor are they independent of the rights of Christ. Pius XII tells us that ”Mary is Queen by grace, by divine relationship, by conquest and by singular election; her kingdom is as vast as that of her Son and God, since nothing is excluded from her dominion” (May 13, 1946).

Mary has, therefore, rights over us. Not by nature (for she is a mere creature), but by grace – by the grace given her by Christ Himself because of her divine Motherhood. But Mary also possesses these rights over us by right of conquest – that is to say, because with Christ and subordinated to Him she shared in the actual work of our redemption. To quote the words of St. Pius X: ”By this community of pain and will between Christ and Mary ‘she merited to become in a most worthy manner the Reparatrix of the lost world’ ” (Ad diem illum).

By Right of Consecration

But there is yet another title by which, like Christ, Mary exercises her sovereign rights over us – it might be called ”by right of consecration.” When a soul freely and lovingly consecrates itself to her as a child and slave of love, it not only renews its baptismal consecration but places itself directly under Mary’s maternal sway and domination. Mary then becomes Queen of that soul in the most exhaustive sense of the word.

Why not consecrate yourself to Jesus through Mary, dear reader, following the example of the Holy Father who wrote: ”Have We not, We Ourself, given the signal (Consecration to the Immaculate Heart) as providential complement of mankind to the Sacred Heart of Jesus?” (Letter, 1946).