“Sacred Heart of Jesus,
Immaculate Heart of Mary,
give us holy religious”
Look at us Heart of Jesus with that tenderness with which you looked at your Mother, listen to us with that sweetness with which you cared for her, embrace with your heartbeat all our intentions as if they were those of your Mother and wipe away our tears as if they were hers. She weeps as we do for the same reason, souls are condemned because they lack religious. Who will bring your Word, your adorable Eucharistic Heart to so many in need of your Goodness?
We can do nothing more pleasing and more honoring to your Generosity than to ask you the impossible: change the course of history by our humble and small prayer. Raise up a legion of religious saints who will not hesitate to fight against Satan and snatch from his hands the thousands of souls he is leading to hell.
Quickly, O Heart of Jesus, work swiftly to stop so many evils, and give us holy religious! Contemplate in the tears of your Mother, contemplate in her sobs, our agony for the countless souls who are lost without knowing You.
She, the queen of all battles, can open the floodgates of the immense graces we need for them.
Today, united we cry out in the silence of our souls asking once again for the holiness of religious and the increase of vocations.
Sacred Heart of Jesus, Immaculate Heart of Mary, give us holy religious.
The vocation to be a spiritual mother of priests is too little known, too little understood and, therefore, too little lived despite its vital and fundamental importance. This vocation is often hidden, invisible to the human eye, but it aims at transmitting spiritual life. Pope St. John Paul II was convinced of this: this is why he wanted a cloistered monastery in the Vatican where his intentions as Supreme Pontiff could be prayed for.
“What I have become and how, I owe to my mother” (St. Augustine)
Regardless of age and marital status, all women can become a spiritual mother to a priest, and not only mothers of families. It is also possible for a sick woman, a young single woman or a widow. This is especially true for missionaries and religious women, who offer their whole life to God for the sanctification of humanity. St. John Paul II even thanked a little girl for her maternal help: “I express my gratitude also to Blessed Jacinta for the sacrifices and prayers she offered for the Holy Father, whom she had seen in great suffering” (May 13, 2000).
Every priest is preceded by a mother, who is often also a mother for the spiritual life of her children. Giuseppe Sarto, for example, the future Pope Pius X, as soon as he was consecrated bishop, went to meet his seventy-year-old mother. She respectfully kissed her son's ring and suddenly, becoming meditative, showed her poor silver wedding ring: “Yes, Peppo, but now you would not wear it if I did not first wear this wedding ring”. St. Pius X confirmed this with his experience: “Every priestly vocation comes from the heart of God, but it passes through the heart of a mother!
The life of St. Monica demonstrates this very well. St. Augustine, her son, who at the age of nineteen, a student in Carthage, had lost his faith, has written in his 'Confessions': “....You have stretched out your hand from on high and have taken my soul out of this dense darkness, since my mother, being faithful to you, wept over me more than mothers weep over the physical death of their children... yet that chaste, devout, faithful widow, of whom you prefer, made more animated by hope, but not for that reason less easy to weep, did not cease to weep before you, in all the hours of prayer.” After the conversion, he said with gratitude: “My holy mother, your servant, never abandoned me. She gave birth to me with the flesh to this temporal life and with the heart to eternal life. What I became and how, I owe to my Mother!
(Letter sent by the Congregation of Clerics with the aim of promoting Eucharistic adoration for the sanctification of priests and spiritual motherhood, pp. 10-11)
To increase our fervor:
Every vocation is God’s work and not my own merit, I answer every time someone wants to attribute to me, in some way, those that God raised up in our family, even beyond having asked the Lord for them. If there is any personal merit, I continue to respond, it is to have created conditions for them to consider this alternative before God. Something so simple and so unaccustomed in our Catholic environments, including families, schools, institutions?
To our children and young people we only present (and almost force) as the only “vocational” option the choice for this or that professional career. An alternative that today, sadly, is becoming more and more a merely economic option. And the shorter the preparation/training time and the faster the economic return, so much the better! And there we throw them into “succeeding in life”!
I remember reading some time ago an interview with a well-known Argentinean priest, son of Catholic parents of proven piety. When asked how he had discovered his vocation, he replied that, when he was a grown-up and a professional, in a casual conversation with a friend, the latter said to him: “You never thought of becoming a priest? And, obviously, it had never occurred to him to ask himself such a question before! And, boy, did he change the course of his life and of the many souls that God had in store for him – and only him – to bring them to salvation. Incredible!… such simple things that we usually take for granted but which, evidently, are not so in most people and need an external voice to awaken the inner voice. How many vocations remain and will remain truncated and ignored because we don’t bring up this wonderful possibility as something natural and good in our conversations with family and friends.
We insist that every vocation is God’s work, but we also know the preponderant place that prayer occupies in all this. “Ask and it will be given to you. Ask and it will be given to you!
And here comes to my memory an image that has been impressed on me by fire. When we were emptying the drawer of Mom’s bedside table -that drawer of simple but important things that we want to have at hand- because she would no longer need them on this earth, we found her little prayer book. Those big-print ones as they used to be made in the old days. Mom, in turn, had inherited it from hers -she will be at least 90 years old-. The passing of the years was well marked! But the most striking thing was the imprint that my grandmother and my mother had left on a little leaf, particularly blackened by wear and tear -all eaten away at the level of the thumb-. It was the leaf on which the prayer for priestly vocations was written… Precisely, in one part of that prayer -for what we mentioned at the beginning- we implored the Blessed Virgin Mary asking her in this way: -Mary, Mother and Queen of the Clergy: -Awaken the vocations that are unknown. – Discover the vocations that are hidden?
If I tell you that the memory of that image blurs my vision and accelerates the rhythm of my heart as I write it, I am sure you will understand, won’t you? Is it possible to add anything else after thanking her for such a great inheritance…?
Let us pray and show our young people that God’s call to continue his work here on earth can be a life option. Let us also be like those mothers and grandmothers who left traces of eternity!
Isabel Woites de Berarducci