LETTER OF FR. DIRECTOR OF THE MI NO.12
Dear Knights of the Immaculata!
After a long interruption you receive again a
“Director’s
letter”. This 12th letter invites you to reflect
seriously about
your resolutions for the year 2019. It is certainly the will of
Our Lady, that
you may be more and more HER faithful instrument.
The years pass and the battle continues. Let no
idle
deception enter your heart: the battle will not stop, but increase
towards the
end.
Remember, that the Feast of the MI is the 8
December, the
Immaculate Conception, on which all knights can receive a plenary
indulgence.
Please renew with all your heart the act of consecration on this
great day.
PLEASE DIFFUSE THIS LETTER AMONGST YOUR FRIENDS
AND ACQUAINTANCES!
With my priestly blessings
Yours thankfully
Fr. Karl Stehlin
Father
Director’s Letter No. 12
Dear
Knights of the Immaculata!
With joy
and gratitude I would like to inform you that our new Superior
General has
allowed and blessed the establishment of the International
Headquarters of the
M.I. in Warsaw. He has also written a word of recommendation for
the "M.I.
Handbook", which has already been published in English, French
and Spanish
and will soon be available in German. It is a summary of all the
concerns of the
M.I.: above all, its essence and its justification, usefulness
and topicality.
A special chapter also explains the relationship of the M.I. to
other Marian
movements, as misunderstandings and mistrust repeatedly arise
with them.
Probably the most important section deals with the concrete
existence of the
M.I.: the enrolment into the M.I. and especially the
perseverance of the Knights.
It is always easy to start something, but extremely difficult to
continue and
preserve something. Every association stands or falls upon the
question of how
to keep its members on their toes and keep their first zeal or
even deepen
their initial zeal. This is surely also the big question for
every Catholic and
especially for every Knight: how can I remain faithful and
become even more
faithful?
The first answer
comes from the outside: it is the responsibility of the M.I.
direction to
provide the Knights constantly with weapons and ammunition for
the combat of
souls, and to motivate them in various ways to become ever
better instruments
in the hands of the Immaculata. The whole structure of the M.I.
has been
designed to produce the apostolic materials and to hand them
over to the Knights
with an appropriate instruction manual: hence the regular
magazines, letters,
leaflets, the M.I. corners, etc.
Another answer
must come from inside the Knight himself: what is the use of all
these efforts
if the Knight himself ignores them? If he does not take what is
offered to him
and neglects to consider it? Then we should not be surprised by
the sudden
realisation that he belongs to the sleeping knights, to the
Knights in name
only, who become unfaithful to their promise to do something for
the Immaculata
and for the salvation of souls at least once a day.
How
important it is, therefore, that we pray for fidelity and
generosity, but also
that we keep contemplating the nature of the Knight, which is so
ably summarized
in the consecration prayer.
Let us try
to understand this a little better:
Mary, the
Mediatrix of all graces is the foundation of the M.I.: a
privilege which teaches
us that all the graces of conversion and sanctification earned
by our Lord
through his suffering and death on the cross are entrusted to
Mary so that she
can distribute them to people of good will "whenever she wants,
to whomever
she wants, howsoever she wants, as much as she wants" (St.
Bernard). This
mediation of graces takes place in two directions: first they
flow down from
the Sacred Heart of Jesus through the hands of the Immaculata.
God's light and
grace touches us, converts and sanctifies us. We have to respond
to this
creative and redeeming work of God: our whole existence consists
in returning
to God. Now, our return to God must take place in the same way
in which God
came to us, through Mary. This has been expressed since
Christian antiquity by
the famous axiom: "through Mary to Jesus". Even Our Lady in
Fatima
confirms this with the simple words: "My Immaculate Heart will
be your
refuge and the way that leads you to God".
God does
not force man, but he wants our free consent to his salvific
work on us. Therefore,
Our Lady can realize her mission as Mediatrix in us only if we
also want this
clearly, if we accept her by an act of will, by a conscious and
decisive
"yes". The Mediatrix will unfold all her loving activity within
us to
the extent that we give ourselves to her through an act of
surrender, the
consecration of ourselves.
Let us specify
more precisely what we give to Our Lady in our act of
consecration. We have
seen that in our spiritual life there are two great realities:
our relationship
with God and our relationship with our neighbour. This results
in two different
acts of consecration that complement each other:
a.) First
we give ourselves to Mary so that she may become our mother and
mistress and that
we may become her children and slaves. This is the important and
fundamental
act of consecration, which basically already expresses our total
surrender to
Mary, but which is concretely limited to our own sanctification,
our personal
return to God through Mary. This is how Providence, by inspiring
Saint Louis
Maria Grignion de Montfort, wanted to explain total devotion to
Mary which is
wonderfully presented to us in the "Golden Book on True Devotion
to Mary".
b.) Then we
give ourselves to Mary so that she may take our lives in the
world into her
hands, namely the tasks that we have to fulfil. She should now
be the main
cause (always subordinated to God, of course) of all our actions
and our
relationship with others, and she should regard us as
"instruments in her
immaculate hands". The act of consecration of St. Maximilian
Kolbe begins
with a brief summary of the consecration of St. Grignion de
Montfort. But the
main thing is that we ask Mary to possess all our abilities in
order to make
them channels through which she can perform miracles of
conversion and
sanctification in souls. This enables her to "crush the head of
the
serpent", to "overcome all heresies all over the world" and thus
to establish more and more "the dominion of the Sacred Heart of
Our
Lord".
And this is
exactly what I would like to propose to you as the Yearly
Resolution for 2019:
that our consecration to the Immaculata - as her instruments -
should penetrate
more and more all areas of our lives, so that what we give her
through prayer
may also be put into practice in daily life.
This means,
first of all, to pray, often contemplating the act of
consecration, to savour
every sentence, every word in it, so to speak, in order to grasp
it as deeply
as possible. Whole spiritual worlds are opened behind the words
"Mary who
loves us so much", "to whom God has entrusted the whole order of
mercy", "instrument", etc.
Our letters during this year should lead us above all into these
spiritual
depths.
But then
comes the really important and difficult one: the implementation
of our consecration
in everyday life. This requires a single fundamental attitude:
generosity! If
one is usually petty and miserly, if one is constantly concerned
only with
one's own advantage, then one cannot follow the call of Christ
the King, then
every desire to love God and fulfil his will is nipped in the
bud. Therefore,
first of all, we must all try to be generous in our daily lives:
generously
accept a humiliation, generously endure the mistakes and
imperfections of
others, generously distribute the Miraculous Medal and flyers,
generously pray
the Rosary to its end, generously give something for the
Immaculate Conception.
Don't just do something sparingly, do it generously!
We all need
to pray for this generosity in the manifestation of our
consecration to the
Immaculata, by laying all Knights at the feet of the Christ
Child and His
Mother, so that the bright light of Holy Christmas may fill all
of us with
graces, and that these may flow through our knighthood into the
hearts of poor
sinners.
With my
blessing
Father Karl
Stehlin
Buccaramanga, on the
25th of November
2018
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