From May to June, from Heart to Heart

John B. Manos

2 minutes ago

If you, dear reader, are like many, myself included: You’re tired.

Not the kind of tired that sleep fixes. The kind of tired that comes from watching the Church you love fracture into competing versions of itself and constant confusion, from reading statements that sound nothing like the Gospel, from wondering whether the people in charge even remember what the faith is supposed to be.

If you’re honest, you’re not just tired. You’re not sure what it means. Are they just going to wither away into the confusion?

And here’s what nobody wants to say out loud: Mary warned us about this.

Not vaguely. Not poetically. At Fatima, at Akita, at dozens of other shrines the Church has examined and found authentic — Our Lady named the symptoms. Pride of intellect. Defiance of God’s will. Accepting compromise with the world. A world that has forgotten how to love. She told us exactly what would happen when the faithful lost their way. And then she gave us something to do about it.

Not a policy paper. Not a theological treatise. Two things. The rosary. The Blessed Sacrament.

The Heart of the Matter

May is the month of the Blessed Mother. And when May ends, many Catholics let her go — put the rosary away, move on, live their lives until October rolls around and someone remembers to look at their rosary.

But Mary doesn’t let go that easily.

Because her heart, ahem, the Immaculate Heart, is not an endpoint. It’s a conduit. It points to something larger, deeper, more dangerous than any human institution: the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Fr. Hardon gave five lectures at the shrine of Fatima and spent nine days there hearing confessions, each night going past midnight, and he put it this way:

“The heart in biblical language, as we know from the Sacred Heart devotion, stands for the will. In other words, the greatest, deepest, most inward acts, the consent of the will, are we ourselves doing them with our will? The heart is the seat of love.”

The Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Sacred Heart of Jesus are not two separate devotions sitting on opposite shelves of Catholic piety. They are the same reality viewed from two angles. Mary’s heart is the human heart that loved God perfectly. Jesus’ heart is the divine heart that loved us perfectly. Between them runs a single current: love, expressed through the will, offered as reparation.

And that word, reparation, is the key.

Fatima Is About Reparation

Fr. Hardon didn’t mince words:

“That’s all Fatima is about. Well, that’s plenty. Fatima is all about reparation.”

The Five First Saturdays devotion, you know, the one Our Lady asked for at Fatima, is a communion of reparation. You receive the Eucharist to make amends for the sins that blaspheme God’s name, for the indifference that lets the world rot, for the silence of those who should be speaking.

And the Nine First Fridays devotion, the one Jesus asked for through St. Margaret Mary, is also a communion of reparation. You receive to make amends. To do more. To stand in the gap.

Two devotions. Two centuries apart. Both converging on the same altar. Both asking the same thing: will you offer yourself?

The standard Fatima prayer says it plainly: “O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we ask for mercy from your divine Son.”

Through Mary’s heart to Jesus’ heart. That’s the bridge. That’s what the May-to-June transition is really about. It’s not a calendar accident. It’s theological plumbing.

What Mary Gave Us

Here’s the thing about Mary’s warnings at Fatima and Akita: they were not meant to frighten us into paralysis. They were meant to arm us.

She didn’t say, “Pray harder and hope for the best.” She gave us specific weapons:

The rosary. Not a decorative devotion. A weapon. Forty decades of the Gospel, repeated until the Holy Spirit does His work in the one praying. Mary knew what she was doing when she gave us this because she knew that repetition is how conviction takes root in hearts that have been shaken by decades of confusion.

The Blessed Sacrament. Not a symbol. Not a ceremony. The living, glorified Body of Christ, present, real, and offered to you by Our Lord. Fr. Hardon called the Nine First Fridays devotion what it is: “a communion of reparation.” And behind it, he said, “the assumption being that somebody who has got into the habit of receiving Communion on nine first Fridays will have cultivated the habit of frequent Holy Communion. It is frequent Holy Communion that promises us the grace of final perseverance.”

Final perseverance. The one thing every Catholic needs more than anything else. Not luck. Not good intentions. Not a favorable bishop. Final perseverance. And Mary told us how to get it.

The Courage to Stay Convinced

Fr. Hardon observed over forty years of teaching Jesuit priests. He saw what happened to the faithful and what happened to the confused. His conclusion was stark:

“The only courageous people in the world are convinced people. Everyone else is a coward.”

Convinced of what? Convinced that the trials of our lives, and the trials of the Church, are too much for us to cope with alone. Convinced that Mary’s warnings were not paranoia but prophecy. Convinced that the rosary and the Eucharist are not relics of a simpler time but the very weapons she gave us for this one.

You don’t have to have an answer for every confusing statement from the pulpit. You don’t have to understand every maneuver from the hierarchy. You just have to stay convinced.

Say it and mean it: “My Jesus, I love You.”

Mean it. Mean it. And you are on your road to Christ’s promise of high perfection.

So What Do We Do Now?

This is June — the month of the Sacred Heart. And if you’ve spent May with Mary, you’re already halfway there. Her heart points to His. The rosary leads to the Eucharist. Reparation to Mary leads to reparation to Jesus.

Here’s what to do:

Keep saying the rosary daily. Every day. Not because it’s May anymore. Because Mary said so, and she knows what the world is doing to your faith.
Receive Communion on the First Fridays and Saturdays. If you can, make it a reparation and offer it for the confusion, the scandal, the silence. Let it count for something.
Keep going to the Blessed Sacrament. Not just at Mass. Before it. In adoration. In silence. That’s where the convinced are made.
Read Fr. Hardon. Specifically, the mini course we’ve prepared for June. You discover new things about the Promises of the Sacred Heart. They’re not quaint sentiments. They’re a map.

The confusion will not end because we wish it away. But we are not abandoned in it. We have been given weapons. We have been given promises. We have been given a Mother whose heart points directly to the Heart of her Son.