As we begin our Christmas celebrations, what should be the prayer of every man and woman consecrated to Mary in filial slavery of love?

I would suggest that it be the prayer of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen found in his short work entitled Meditations on the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary. In honor of the Nativity, the holy bishop wrote,

In this Mystery we pray to become pregnant with the Christ spirit, giving Him new lips with which He may speak of His Father, new hands with which He may feed the poor, and a new heart with which He may love everyone, even enemies.

A Prayer of True Devotion

This prayer is imbued with the Montfortian spirit of total consecration. The very reason we have consecrated ourselves to Mary is so through her, with her and in her we may become “pregnant” with the spirit of Christ. To belong completely to Him, we have freely chosen to belong completely to Mary. We recognize that she is the forma Dei who most perfectly molds us into true likeness of her Son. It is she who gives birth to Christ in us.

In case you have forgotten about this final end of Marian consecration, allow me to quote for you a few lines from St. Louis de Montfort’s “manifesto” of true Marian devotion^[1]. It is not an exhaustive selection, but only a sampling.

Montfort’s Teaching

I quote them not for the sake of introducing them to you—since you will be familiar with them already—but for the sake of reminding you about them. Again, they should remind you of the goal of our total consecration to Mary: to become “other Christs”. And in having this goal clearly in mind, hopefully you can be more efficient and more enthusiastic about living out your consecration as true devotion.

(1) It is by the most holy Virgin Mary that Jesus has come into the world, and it is also by her that He has to reign in the world.

(22) The conduct which the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity have deigned to pursue in the Incarnation and first coming of Jesus Christ, They still pursue daily in an invisible manner throughout the whole Church, and They will still pursue it even to the consummation of ages in the last coming of Jesus Christ.

(30) All the true children of God, the predestinate, have God for their Father, and Mary for their Mother. He who has not Mary for his Mother, has not God for his Father.

(31) God the Son wishes to form Himself, and, so to speak, to incarnate Himself, every day by His dear Mother in His members.

(33) If any one of the faithful has Jesus Christ formed in his heart, he can say boldly, “All thanks be to Mary!”.

(34) We can apply to her more truly than St. Paul applied to himself those words, Quos iterum parturio donec formetur Christus in vobis,—“I am in labour again with all the children of God, until Jesus Christ my Son be formed in them in the fulness of His age.”

(35) Mary has produced, together with the Holy Ghost, the greatest thing which has been, or ever will be, which is a God-Man; and she will consequently produce the greatest things that there will be in the latter times. The formation and education of the great Saints, who shall come at the end of the world, are reserved for her.

(220) It seems to me that I can very aptly compare devout persons, who wish to form Jesus Christ in themselves to sculptors who trust in their own professional skill, ingenuity, or art, and so give an infinity of hammerings and chiselings to a hard stone or a piece of badly polished wood, to make an image of Jesus Christ out of it. Sometimes they do not succeed in giving any thing like the natural expression of Jesus, either from having no knowledge or experience of the Person of Jesus, or from some blow awkwardly given, which has spoiled the work. But for those who embrace the secret of grace which I am revealing to them, I may reasonably compare them to founders and casters, who have discovered the beautiful mold of Mary, where Jesus was naturally and divinely formed; and without trusting to their own skill, but only in the goodness of the mold, they cast themselves and lose themselves in Mary, to become the portraits of Jesus Christ after nature.

Seize Christmas Day, making it and the coming New Year, all Hers!

^[1] All quotations are taken from Saint Louis de Montfort’s True Devotion, published by Catholic Way Publishing (2013).