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This consecration should imply the desire to unite ourselves more and more with our Savior. This means identifying ourselves with Him as His members, who seek the perfection of charity and mystical transformation, which is the end of our religious consecration. It also means seeking to bring to fulfillment in us the effects of our baptism by which we were incorporated into Christ. This devotion entails not simply a partial identification with Christ, but rather one with the characteristic of totality, and, therefore, of perfect identification with Him.
To identify ourselves with Him and to transform ourselves into Him also means to immolate ourselves with Him in reparation for both our personal sins and the sins of all our brothers through the holocaust of our religious life. In fact, reparation is an essential element of this devotion, as the Lord deigned to reveal to Saint Margaret Mary.
“These fruits of life and health [that the devotion to the Heart of Jesus will bring] will renew us in the original spirit of our holy vocation.” Elsewhere she says: “Satan wanted to throw up his anger by destroying the spirit [of our Institute], and hereby ruin it. But I think he will not achieve its intent, if we want, according to the intentions of our holy Father [St. Francis de Sales], to use the means he gives us [this devotion] to restore to the first vigor the spirit of our holy vocation, living according to the maxims of the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ.”
This follows from the renewal of the Institute’s original fervor. Recalling a vision in which the Most Blessed Virgin Mary gave the devotion to the Heart of Jesus to the Order of the Visitation and to the Society of Jesus, the saint says: “In proportion as they give Him pleasure, this Divine Heart, source of blessings and graces, will pour them so abundantly on the tasks of their ministries that they will produce fruits far beyond their labors and expectations. And this also regarding the health and perfection of each one in particular.”
In a letter, after listing several promises to religious communities, Saint Margaret Mary adds: “And (He promised) that He would pour this sweet ointment of His ardent charity in all the religious communities where He would be honored and that were under His special protection, and that He would maintain united in them all the hearts so as to form but one with His.”
The saint says, “I am sure that our holy Founder, fearing that the foundations of his edifice will begin to crack, had asked for a support able to defend it. He was given the devotion to the Heart of Jesus as the means to repair the cracks of the edifice and to serve him as the defense against the attacks of his enemies, and as the support so that it may not succumb in the future.”
[1] On the teachings of the Magisterium cf. Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Haurietis aquas, 4.
[2] This is one of the strongest and central ideas developed by St. John Paul II in Vita Consecrata; cf. 16-26 and passim.
[3] The Letters of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (Rockford, IL: TAN, 1997).
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