St. Anthony the Abbot Catholic Church

We have all heard of devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but maybe not all of us know the story of how it was spread, a story that illustrates God's surprising ways of working in the world. It was Our Lady of Fatima who gave this devotion its real push.

 

It happened in 1917, when she appeared to three poor shepherd children in the hills of Portugal. She appeared to them six times, on the 13th of the month from May through October. By the last appearance, a huge crowd of somewhere near 70,000 people were in attendance, and they all witnessed a promised miracle in which the sun spun around and then moved dramatically up and down in the sky. Throughout this series of apparitions, Mary instructed the children (a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a ten-year-old) to pray the Rosary and to offer sacrifices for the conversion of sinners.

 

Mary didn't appear to a community of monks in a monastery. Nor did she ask a group of priests and bishops to do sacrifices in reparation for sin and to console her Immaculate Heart. Instead, she gave her heavenly message to three poor shepherd children. The children responded with great faith to Our Lady’s entreaties, dedicating themselves passionately to prayer and penance in spite of their age.

 

One day, for example, they were with their sheep in the fields, and they were talking about what sacrifice they could offer to God. One of them suggested that they give their lunch to their sheep instead of eating it themselves – which they did. Other days they gave their lunches away to nearby children even poorer than themselves, and they would just eat pine nuts instead. This was the unlikely and unexpected way God in His Providence reminded humanity of the importance of prayer and repentance at the very beginning of the bloodiest century in human history.

 

Jesus came to earth in order to call forth God’s pleasure on sinful mankind, to lift us back into membership in God’s family and give us, once again, the hope of true, lasting happiness. He did that by taking our place, uniting His divine nature to our human nature. But for us to experience the benefits of this saving grace, we in turn have to unite ourselves to Christ.

 

Now this is not something that happens from one minute to the next. Developing our friendship with Christ is the main project of our whole life. But even so, we can identify three steps that can help us focus our ongoing efforts to become more and more united with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ: knowing Him, loving Him, and imitating Him.

 

When we were baptized, God’s own life was poured into our souls; it was planted like a seed in fertile soil. But every seed, in order to grow to maturity, needs three things: water, sunlight, and nutrients. The seed of divine life in our souls also needs three things in order to grow to maturity: to know, love, and imitate Christ a little bit more every day. The more fully we come to know Christ, especially through prayerful reading of the Gospels and time spent with Him in the Eucharist, the more we will come to love Him. The more we love Him, the more we will want to follow and imitate Him, especially in His perfect fulfillment of the Father’s will and His tireless, active love for all people.

 

If we let these three motifs of knowing, loving, and imitating Christ set the rhythm for our daily living, we too can please the heart of God and be filled to overflowing with His life-giving love, just like our Lord.