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March 25, 2022By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press
WORCESTER – In a cathedral filled mostly with Catholic school students, Bishop McManus consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary – in union with the Pope, and his fellow bishops.
It was March 25, the solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, which celebrates the angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would be Jesus’ mother. (Lk 1:26-38)
Pope Francis invited all Catholics to pray an Act of Consecration for all humanity, particularly Russia and Ukraine, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary on that date. He himself pronounced the Act of Consecration after leading a Lenten penance service in St. Peter's Basilica.
Bishop McManus prayed the consecration prayer at the 10 a.m. Mass for Life at St. Paul Cathedral, which he celebrates annually on the Annunciation. He presents awards to local witnesses for life at that Mass, which students from Catholic schools throughout the diocese attend.
The bishop told the young people they were giving a wonderful witness to society.
Before praying the Act of Consecration in front of a statue of the Blessed Mother set up for the occasion, Bishop McManus said that Pope Francis – with bishops, cardinals, priests and people – would turn his gaze to an image of the Blessed Mother and beg her to intercede with her Son Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
“It is our privilege … to storm heaven … in begging the Lord” to bring peace, Bishop McManus said.
He told how the Blessed Mother appeared in 1917 at Fatima to three Portuguese children about the age of some of his listeners, telling them they should pray for peace. Russia was in the midst of the Bolshevik Revolution and became communist, he noted. World War I, taking place at the time, did not turn out to be “the war to end all wars,” as it had been called.
In the 1980s Pope John Paul II consecrated the world to the
Mary, and now Pope Francis is doing it, Bishop McManus said, “so that we may be instruments of peace in a world that desperately needs it.”
“I ask you to join in this Act by inviting the priests, religious and faithful to assemble in their churches and places of prayer on 25 March, so that God’s holy people may raise a heartfelt and choral plea to Mary our Mother,” Pope Francis said in a March 21 letter to the world’s bishops. He included the Act of Consecration with the letter, “so that all of us can recite it throughout that day, in fraternal union.”
He wrote about the war in Ukraine inflicting suffering on its people and threatening world peace, and said he wanted to entrust the nations at war to the Mary in response to the “numerous requests by the people of God.”
He said the consecration was “meant to be a gesture of the universal Church, which in this dramatic moment lifts up to God, through his Mother and ours, the cry of pain of all those who suffer and implore an end to the violence, and to entrust the future of our human family to the Queen of Peace.”
Bishop McManus, speaking about the consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, noted that this is the same Mary who, at the Annunciation, said “yes” to being the mother of the Prince of Peace. The angel Gabriel urged Mary not to be afraid, but she had reason to fear, as the law of her time said unmarried pregnant women were to be put to death, the bishop said. He assured his own listeners that they do not need to be afraid when God calls them; on their own they can do nothing, but all things are possible with God.
The bishop spoke of Jesus giving his life for us and said every life is sacred. No one – no president, no congress – has the right to take that life, he said.
At the end of Mass he presented the following awards: the Mother Teresa Pro-Life Award to Louise Faiola and Robert and Frances Pike, the Ruth V.K. Pakaluk Pro-Life Youth Award to Marya Makuc and Simon Rees and the Gospel of Life Award to Jesuit Father James M. Hayes.
see PHOTO ALBUM
see ACT of CONSECRATION PRAYER
