Philippine bishops to reconsecrate nation to Immaculate Heart of Mary
April 26, 2013
The bishops of the Philippines will reconsecrate the nation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on June 8.
The bishops’ conference has directed “all our dioceses and parishes, schools and other institutions, even all our families, of course, to offer solemnly a joint public act of entrustment to the Blessed Mother, Mother of our people and our country,” at the same hour on the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
“Our Philippine Bishops, representing all of us Catholics in our land, all joined Pope John Paul II – who in Rome, before an image of Our Lady of Fatima — and with him all the Catholic Bishops of the world in their own dioceses, offered the world-wide Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on 25 March 1984,” said Archbishop Jose Palma of Cebu, the president of the episcopal conference as he recalled previous instances when the nation had been entrusted to the Immaculate Heart.
After recounting the political and social challenges facing the nation, Archbishop Palma said that
Deeper than all the foregoing, a genuine “return to God and turning truly to the Gospel” and the more authentic living of our faith, these call us and challenge us, in pursuing our vocation to be truly God’s People, to be Christ’s Body in our land. A “practical atheism” (so emeritus Pope Benedict so-often refers to it), secularism and forgetfulness of God and of the Gospel spread more and more in our de facto culture; the wrong elements of so-called “post-modernism and globalization” increasingly affect our minds and mindsets, our moral conduct and our lives, above all the lives of our young people. On Ash Wednesday we are told, “Repent and be converted to the Gospel!”: The Year of Faith reminds us of this mandate, renews its summons to true Christian fidelity.
He added:
As part of our Consecration to the Immaculate Heart, there are also the adjoint practices of (1) the Mass and Communion of Reparation on the First Saturday of each month, and (2) Prayer and Penance, in our daily lives offered also by us, in union with Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart. As much as possible, the daily recitation of the Rosary will be the ongoing-practice of prayer asked of us. We are reminded that the Fatima message teaches the “immense power of the Rosary” for faith-life in the world of grace.
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