Immaculate Heart of Mary, be my salvation!
August 22, the octave day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, marks the Extraordinary Form feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Speaking at Fatima in 1982, St. John Paul II makes these profound remarks concerning the love of Mary's Immaculate Heart:
"When Jesus on the Cross said: "Woman, behold, your son" (Jn 19: 26), in a new way he opened his Mother's Heart, the Immaculate Heart, and revealed to it the new dimensions and extent of the love to which she was called in the Holy Spirit by the power of the sacrifice of the Cross.
"In the words of Fátima we seem to find this dimension of motherly love, whose range covers the whole of man's path towards God; the path that leads through this world and that goes, through Purgatory, beyond this world. The solicitude of the Mother of the Saviour is solicitude for the work of salvation: the work of her Son. It is solicitude for the salvation, the eternal salvation, of all. Now that sixty-five years have passed since that 13 May 1917, it is difficult to fail to notice how the range of this salvific love of the Mother embraces, in a particular way, our century.
"In the light of a mother's love we understand the whole message of the Lady of Fátima. The greatest obstacle to man's journey towards God is sin, perseverance in sin, and, finally, denial of God. The deliberate blotting out of God from the world of human thought. The detachment from him of the whole of man's earthly activity. The rejection of God by man....
In the Ordinary Form, the Queenship of Our Lady is celebrated on this day. Of this privilege of Mary, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange writes,
"Mary is the mother of Him Who from the instant of His conception is King of the universe by His hypostatic union and His fullness of grace.... Mary has a radical right to universal queenship by the fact of her Divine motherhood, but the Divine plan was that she should merit it also by her union with her suffering Son, and that she should not exercise it fully before being crowned queen of all creation in Heaven. Her royalty is spiritual and supernatural rather than temporal and natural, though it extends in a secondary way to temporal affairs considered in their relation to salvation and sanctification.... Thus Mary's queenship is truly universal. There is no region to which it does not extend in some way."