Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

In the Kingdom of the Divine Will

From the Writings ofThe Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta

The Little Daughter of the Divine Will

The Twenty-Four Hours of The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Twenty-third Hour

From 3 to 4 PM 

Jesus, dead, is pierced by the thrust of a lance.

The deposition from the Cross 

My dead Jesus, all nature has sent out a cry of sorrow at your last breath, and has cried over your sorrowful death, recognizing You as its Creator. The Angels, thousands upon thousands, hover around the Cross, and cry over your death. They adore You as our true God, and accompany You to Limbo, where You go to beatify many souls who have been ardently longing for You for centuries upon centuries. My dead Jesus, I cannot pull myself away from your Cross, nor can I be satiated of kissing and kissing again your Most Holy Wounds, which eloquently speak to me of how much You have loved me. In seeing the horrendous tearings, the depth of your wounds, to the point of uncovering your bones – ah, I feel I am dying! I would like to cry so much over these wounds as to wash them with my tears. I would like to love You so much as to heal You completely with my love, and restore the natural beauty of your unrecognizable Humanity. I would like to open my veins to fill your empty veins with my blood and call You back to life.

O my Jesus, what can love not do? Love is life, and with my love I want to give You life; and if mine is not enough, give me your love. With your love, I will be able to do anything – yes, I will be able to give life to your Most Holy Humanity. O my Jesus, even after your death You want to show me that You love me, prove your love for me, and give me a refuge, a shelter, in your Sacred Heart. Therefore, pushed by a supreme force, to be assured of your death, a soldier rips your Heart open with a lance, opening a profound wound. And You, my Love, shed the last drops of Blood and water contained in your enflamed Heart.

Ah, how many things does this wound, opened by love, tell me! And if your mouth is mute, your Heart speaks to me, and I hear It say: “My child, after I gave everything, I wanted this lance to open a shelter for all souls inside this Heart of Mine. Opened, It will cry out to all, continuously: Come into Me if you want to be saved. In this Heart you will find sanctity and you will make yourselves saints; you will find relief in afflictions, strength in weakness, peace in doubts, company in abandonments. O souls who love Me, if you really want to love Me, come to dwell in this Heart forever.

Here you will find true love in order to love Me, and ardent flames for you to be burned and consumed completely in love. Everything is centered in this Heart: here are the Sacraments, here my Church, here the life of my Church and the life of all souls. In It I also feel the profanations made against my Church, the plots of the enemies, the arrows they send, and my oppressed children – there is no offense which my Heart does not feel. Therefore, my child, may your life be in this Heart – defend Me, repair Me, bring Me everyone into It.”

My love, if a lance has wounded your Heart for me, I beg that You too, with your own hands, wound my heart, my affections, my desires – all of myself. Let there be nothing in me which is not wounded by your love. I unite everything to the harrowing pains of our dear Mama, who, for the pain of seeing your Heart being ripped open, falls into a swoon of sorrow and love; and like a dove, She flies in It to take the first place – to be the first Repairer, the Queen of your very Heart, the Mediatrix between You and the creatures. I too, with my Mama, want to fly into your Heart, to hear how She repairs, and to repeat Her reparations for all the offenses You receive. O my Jesus, in this wounded Heart of Yours, I will find my life again; therefore, anything I may be about to do, I will always draw from It. I will no longer give life to my thoughts; but if these want life, I will take Yours. My will will no longer have life; but if it wants life, I will take your Most Holy Will. My love will no longer have life; if it wants life, I will take your Love. O my Jesus, all of your Life is mine – this is your Will, this is my will.

Jesus is deposed from the Cross.

My dead Jesus, I see that your disciples hasten to depose You from the Cross. Joseph and Nicodemus, who have remained hidden until now, with courage and without fearing anything, now want to give You an honorable burial. So they take hammers and pincers, to perform the sacred and sad unnailing from the Cross, while your pierced Mama stretches out Her maternal arms to receive You on Her lap.

My Jesus, while they unnail You, I too want to help your disciples to sustain your Most Holy Body; and with the nails they remove from You, nail me completely to Yourself. With your Holy Mother, I want to adore You and kiss You, and then enclose myself in your Heart, never to leave again.

Reflections and Practices

After His death, Jesus wanted to be wounded by a lance for love of us. And we – do we let ourselves be wounded in everything by the love of Jesus; or do we rather let ourselves be wounded by the love of creatures, by pleasures, and by attachment to ourselves? Also coldness, obscurity and mortifications, both interior and external, are wounds which the Lord makes to the soul. If we do not take them from the hands of God, we wound ourselves, and our wounds increase passions, weaknesses, self-esteem – in a word, every evil. On the other hand, if we take them as wounds made by Jesus, He will place His love, His virtues and His likeness in these wounds, which will make us deserve His kisses, His caresses and all the stratagems of a divine love. These wounds will be continuous voices which will call Him and force Him to dwell with us continuously.

O my Jesus, may your lance be my guard which defends me from any wound of creatures.

Jesus allows Himself to be deposed from the Cross into the arms of His Mama. And we – do we deposit all of our fears, our doubts and our anxieties in the arms of our Mama? Jesus rested on the lap of His divine Mother. Do we let Jesus rest by casting away our fears and our agitations?

All: My Mama, with your maternal hands remove from my heart all that may prevent Jesus from resting in me

 Letter of Luisa Piccarreta to Federico Abresch from Bologna

Don’t you know that Redemption is preparation for the Kingdom of the Divine Will? And the Sacred Heart of Jesus is nothing other than the immense Reign of His Will. It is not the Heart that dominates; it is the Divine Will that dominates His Divine Heart. Poor Heart, if it did not have a Will to dominate it, it would be good at nothing. If the will is good, the heart is good; if the will is holy, the heart is holy. If our will gives place to the Divine, letting It raise Its throne in our will, the heart acquires the divine qualities by grace. Therefore, both in the Divine and in the human order, it is always the will that has the first place, the prime act, it’s rule. The heart and all the rest are in the secondary order…  

Therefore, to say that the Heart reigns, if the Divine Will does not reign, is absurd. They can be called devotions, pious practices…; if the Divine Will does not reign, the Kingdom does not exist. It exists in Heaven, but has no place on earth. However, the Holy Church, organ and messenger of the Supreme Fiat, through the Sacred Heart, through the Celestial Mama, beseeches the Kingdom of the Divine Will. She does not say it with words, but says it with facts. The Divine Volition is the King – His Heart, His wounds, His precious Blood, the sweet Queen, form the ministers that surround the King, and through them beseech the Kingdom of the Divine Will in souls.

Now, how can one know It? All the necessary things, the different circumstances in which we may find ourselves, are Will of God for us. If we are really determined to live in It, God is so pleased that, if miracles are needed, He will make them in order not to let us use our will. It is up to us to truly decide, and be willing even to give our lives in order to live in It; and dear Jesus and the Sovereign Queen will take on the commitment, will be our sentries, and will surround us with such graces as to not let us be betrayed by our own wills. More so, since our Lord does not teach difficult things, nor does He impose them or want them, but He facilitates all that He wants from us in an admirable way; even more, He puts Himself in our place to make it easy for us, and does together with us all that He wants us to do.

Prayer For the Glorification of the Servant of God

LUISA PICCARRETA

Oh august and Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we praise and thank You for the gift of the holiness of Your faithful servant Luisa Piccarreta. She lived, Oh Father, in Your Divine Will, becoming under the action  of the Holy Spirit, in conformity with Your Son,  obedient even to the death on the cross, victim and host pleasing to You,  thus cooperating in the work of Redemption of mankind. 

Her virtues of obedience, humility, supreme love for Christ and the Church,  lead us to ask You for the gift of her glorification on earth,  so that Your Glory may shine before all, and Your Kingdom of truth, justice and love,  may spread all over the world in the particular charisma of the

Fiat Voluntas tua sicut in Caelo et in terra. 

We appeal to her merits to obtain from You, Most Holy Trinity the particular grace for which we pray to You with the intention to fulfill Your Divine Will.  Amen.

 +Archbishop Givoan Battista Pichierri

Three Glory be,

Our Father

Queen of all Saints, pray for us.

  Trani, October 29, 2005

Our Lady of Meliapore

June 26:

Our Lady of Meliapore, East Indies 1542

This is the shrine in the East Indies, where Saint Francis Xavier often retired to pray during his eleven years with the people of India. The Blessed Virgin Mary was Francis’ constant source of strength and inspiration. The image before which Saint Francis used to pray is called Mylai Matha in Tamil, or Our Lady of Mylapore in English. It is an ancient statue about three feet tall, Our Lady of Meliapore can still be venerated at the church.

The church of Saint Thomas of Mylapore – spelled somewhat differently from the above – contains Mary’s shrine. According to tradition, the Apostle Saint Thomas came to India in 52 AD. Due to his success making converts to the True Faith, he was persecuted and finally martyred in the year 72 AD. Saint Thomas is buried at the shrine of Our Lady of Meliapore, and there are relics of Saint Francis Xavier.

There was a church known to be in Mylapore going back to the 1st century, and built by St Thomas. According to tradition, there was a huge log that had washed down the river to a place where it blocked the water and caused massive flooding. The local king was at a loss to remove the blockage, but having heard that St Thomas was a miracle worker, asked him for his assistance. Saint Thomas prayed and then touched the log, which made it so light that the king’s men were suddenly able to easily pull it from the river. The king, in thanksgiving, gave the massive log to St Thomas, who used the wood he obtained from it to construct his church.

The famed traveler Marco Polo visited the shrine in 1292, and a visitor known only as “Joseph” in 1501 thought the church comparable to the Church of Saint John and Saint Paul in Venice, but by the time the Portuguese came in 1517 the shrine was nothing but ruins.

The good people knew that they were Christians, and nothing more; but they had Mary as their Mother, and she cleared the way into their hearts for the zealous Francis to sow the seed of Christ’s Gospel. It was at Mary’s shrine that Francis obtained the miraculous favors to raise people from the dead, cure the sick, convert sinners and bring to Christ thousands of souls. Regardless of where his journeying took him, Francis always returned to his “Lady of the Wayside;” at Miliapore.

Our Lady of Meliapore was his most beloved Mother and from her he received consolation and strength, spiritual delights second only to the joys of Paradise.

The spirit of Francis is still at this shrine, and Mary continues to bestow upon her children miraculous graces and blessings.

Divine Motherhood of Mary

June 25:

Divine Motherhood of Our Lady, declared at the Council of Ephesus in 431

In the year 431, the council of Ephesus, which declared that the Blessed Virgin must be called Mother of God. As the Archbishop Cyril stated, “The Word was made flesh” can mean nothing else but that he partook of flesh and blood like to us; he made our body his own, and came forth man from a woman, not casting off his existence as God, or his generation of God the Father, but even in taking to himself flesh remaining what he was. This the declaration of the correct faith proclaims everywhere. This was the sentiment of the holy Fathers; therefore they ventured to call the holy Virgin the Mother of God, not as if the nature of the Word or his divinity had its beginning from the holy Virgin, but because of her was born that holy body with a rational soul, to which the Word being personally united is said to be born according to the flesh.”

The title of Mother of God with which the Catholic Church honors Mary, is not only the source of incomparable greatness in her, it is also a potent means to ground us firmly in the possession of the true Faith, and to bring us to a more perfect knowledge of God.

The Divine Maternity is the starting point of the work of salvation. In believing Mary to be the Mother of God, we believe also that the Word was made Flesh.

A faithful Christian cannot do better than follow the example given us by the Church, which never tires of proclaiming the truth of the Divine Motherhood of Mary to the universe at large. She does this by erecting shrines and churches in Mary’s honor, by the establishment of sodalities consecrated to her, by the approval of religious orders devoted to her service, and by the institution of practices of piety in her honor.

To Mary we can apply the words addressed to Judith of old: “Blessed art thou, O daughter, by the Lord the Most High God, above all women upon the earth.”

Prayer For the Glorification of the Servant of God

LUISA PICCARRETA

Oh august and Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we praise and thank You for the gift of the holiness of Your faithful servant Luisa Piccarreta. She lived, Oh Father, in Your Divine Will, becoming under the action  of the Holy Spirit, in conformity with Your Son,  obedient even to the death on the cross, victim and host pleasing to You,  thus cooperating in the work of Redemption of mankind. 

Her virtues of obedience, humility, supreme love for Christ and the Church,  lead us to ask You for the gift of her glorification on earth,  so that Your Glory may shine before all, and Your Kingdom of truth, justice and love,  may spread all over the world in the particular charisma of the

Fiat Voluntas tua sicut in Caelo et in terra. 

We appeal to her merits to obtain from You, Most Holy Trinity the particular grace for which we pray to You with the intention to fulfill Your Divine Will.  Amen.

 +Archbishop Givoan Battista Pichierri

Three Glory be,

Our Father

Queen of all Saints, pray for us.

  Trani, October 29, 2005