Editor’s Note: In the most recent Issue of The Fatima Crusader (#135), numerous writers –including priests and religious – explored how Catholics are to live the Fatima Message. Each article deals with a practice that is essential to Catholic life, and they can all be summed up as a threefold spiritual orientation of Conversion, Reparation, and Consecration. Frère Michel de la Sante Trinité addresses each of these three spiritual themes in his magnus opus, a three-volume work entitled The Whole Truth About Fatima. What follows is an excerpt from his work which details how the theme of Reparation is related to the Message of Fatima.
Read Part 1, Fatima: Call to Conversion by Frère Michel.
During the messages of the Angel in 1916, and again during the apparitions of Our Lady on June 13 and July 13, and shortly after that in the apparitions of Pontevedra, Heaven urgently asks for reparation for all “the sins by which God is offended,” “for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference” which wound the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, and finally, for “the blasphemies and ingratitude” of men who pierce the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
It is remarkable that at Tuy, Our Lady insists on this point again, in two ways. First of all, by this grave and terrible warning, which seems to us like an echo of the first part of the Secret with its terrifying vision of hell: “So numerous are the souls which the justice of God condemns for sins committed against Me that I come to ask for reparation. Sacrifice yourself for this intention and pray.”
Prayer and sacrifice offered in reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary to snatch souls from hell – this is a theme which we find constantly in the letters of Sister Lucia of this epoch. Let us remark also that the spectacular trinitarian theophany [at Tuy on June 13, 1929] took place while she was devoting herself, with generosity, to this work of reparation. Fulfilling to the letter the requests of the Sacred Heart to Saint Margaret Mary, each week during the night of Thursday to Friday, between eleven and twelve in the evening, she would make a holy hour of adoration and reparation. Prostrate in the chapel there, or on her knees with her arms in the form of a cross, she would repeat untiringly the two beautiful prayers of reparation taught by the Angel at the Cabeço.
This demonstrates how exact is the continuity between the Message of Fatima and that of Paray-le-Monial. Fatima is the continuation, the complement, the fulfilment of Paray-le-Monial, for in the great design of divine Mercy the most Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary are indissolubly linked. So They must be, as well, in our own love and in the acts of reparation that we offer Them.
Yet, in the messages of Pontevedra and Tuy, by an admirable mystery of love and a unique predilection for His Mother, it seems as though the Sacred Heart of Jesus Itself willed to be effaced, or at least to be approached only through the sweet mediation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. It is as if Jesus said to us: “The acts of reparation to be made for all the offenses and crimes which insult the sanctity of My Father, the perfect worship which must be rendered unto Him, I Myself as eternal High Priest accomplish in My Sacrifice of the Cross, which is renewed at every moment. The offenses, the outrages which wound My Heart, which mock Me in the Sacrament of My Love – to make reparation for them it suffices for you to offer Me the superabundant merits of the Heart of My most holy Mother, and join Her in Her sorrowful compassion. But the injuries, the blasphemies which sadden Her Maternal Heart so cruelly – it is for you, Her children, to make reparation for them by consoling Her, and by your prayers and sacrifices obtaining the conversion of the poor people who have had the misfortune of offending Her gravely. For they have merited by this unpardonable crime, by this sin against the Holy Ghost, the condemnation of eternal fire. For very many are the souls that My justice condemns for sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of My Mother!”
This is why, according to the Message of Fatima, the work which is proper to us, the work most within our grasp, is reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. “You, at least, try to console Me!…”
God is so insistent about this reparation that He has placed it at the beginning and end of the whole great plan revealed at Tuy. First of all, at the beginning, for at the same time as the act of consecration, God asks the Pope and the bishops for “a solemn and public act of reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary,” undoubtedly for all the profanations and blasphemies committed against Her in Bolshevik Russia by so many fanatical atheists, but also for the communist revolution which is itself an abominable crime, since it wrongfully exercises a satanic power over an ancient country of Christendom, which by right belongs to the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
Reparation figures also at the end of God’s great design, which in fact promises “to end the persecution in Russia,” if the Pope and the bishops consecrate it to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, “and if His Holiness promises, through the end of this persecution, to approve and recommend the practice of the devotion of reparation” on the first Saturdays of the month. It is an admirable exchange of promises by which God wishes to draw the Vicar of Christ to resolutely commit the whole Church to this reparatory devotion which He so greatly desires to see practiced everywhere.
(From The Whole Truth about Fatima, Vol. II, pp. 497-500.)