August is Mary’s Heart’s Month

The Sacred Heart of Jesus contains the infinite divine love. So we always seek to live in His Heart.

The Immaculate Heart of Mary shines invisibly with the purity of a human heart in the Garden of Eden. So we strive to live in her heart, too. She shows us and helps us to have hearts that receive the infinite divine love of Jesus’ Heart.

The relationship between their two hearts teaches us all virtue.

Jesus is perfectly religious, and Mary is perfectly religious by receiving into her heart Jesus’ perfect religion. Jesus is perfectly just, and Mary is perfectly just by receiving into her heart Jesus’ perfect justice. Jesus thinks and acts with utter prudence, with a vision of the true goal. Mary is perfectly prudent by receiving Jesus’ own inner vision into her heart by an act of faith and obedience. Jesus is perfectly temperate, perfectly chaste, perfectly pure—and Mary’s heart is purified completely by her reception of Jesus’ white-hot charity. Jesus is perfectly brave and strong, and Mary is, too, by receiving into her heart all of Jesus’ fortitude and indomitable power—which she manifests by unflinching, silent devotion at the foot of the Cross.

Immaculate Conception Homily

Pope Benedict at the Spanish Steps in Rome for a prayer to the Immaculate Virgin on December 8

Here is your humble preacher’s homily for today’s Solemnity…

The Solemnity of our Lady’s Immaculate Conception takes us back to the Garden of Eden. It takes us back to the life our First Parents had before they sinned.

That life is deep in the misty past now; it is like a dream. It is hard for us now even to imagine how fresh and lovely everything was in the garden. Nothing had grown old; nothing had withered. Everything was vigorous and full of life. Everything was full of promise and possibility.

God originally made the world to be like that. He created us in innocence. We could have lived that way forever—without any deceit or betrayal, without any hurt or meanness, without selfishness or hardness of heart.