For the Rosary Crusade: "Behold your Mother" by Rev. Fr. Calmel

A little before the launching of a Rosary crusade the by the General Chapter of the Society of Saint Pius X, there appeared a collection of Marian meditations by Fr. Calmel O.P., under the title Behold your Mother. It contains powerful encouragements with the recitation of the rosary for the freedom of the Tridentine mass, the restoration of the Social Reign of Our Lord and for the triumph of Immaculate Heart of Mary. Here are some pages extracted from this beautiful homage of a son of St. Dominic to the Blessed Virgin Mary.



“It is especially when the fervor of the Christian people flags, when scandals and sins multiply or when Christian civilization is on the point of ruin, it is primarily in these times of extreme peril, whether for the Church or for Christian nations that the Popes command us to have recourse to the Rosary. Let us remember for example St. Pius V at the time of the Ottoman invasion, Pius XI during the Spanish Revolution and on the eve of the of the Second World War and Pius XII when a third of the Church became the Church of silence. This confidence that the Popes of Holy Church put in the Rosary for the triumph over the forces of Hell at the times they were fighting most furiously can be explained because the Rosary, being a holy meditation, puts us on the road to conversion; being a supplication through the mediation of the Immaculate it is a pure supplication; finally if it is to implore the salvation and renewal of a Christian temporal order, it is implored in the sense God wants it, because it is addressed to the Virgin of the Annunciation and of Calvary, who knows perfectly the value and meaning of the temporal order”. (pp. 34-35)



“What matters in addition to lucidity in the world, what matters even more, for we are the brothers of our brothers, is compassion; a compassion without complicity or giddiness, and yet which meets our brothers at the most sorrowful point of their distress. For in the end, in this world which offends God horribly by its manner of seeing and its manner of living, by its refusal of the light and its institutions of pride and atheism, many men are surely culpable, and it is with full deliberation that they have chosen the side of Satan and become hardened. But how many others are only sad victims. Certainly it is not true that they are innocent. They had an hour, a decisive hour, when they could have still held fast. But it is also true that they are victims as much as they are culpable, even if they are culpable of allowing themselves to become victims. It is because they were pushed to the edge by the generalized scandals, by the diabolic organization of the city that they came to transgress the holiest laws. They endure as much and even more that they have not chosen and it is with an abundance of suffering that they must then pay for their weakness before evil. (…)



“The Rosary is a prayer of compassion because it is addressed to the Sorrowful Virgin who suffered beyond measure at the foot of the cross for the redemption of humanity; the Rosary is a prayer of victory because it has recourse to the Glorious Virgin who crushed the head of the serpent at the very moment of her Immaculate Conception, then by the Fiat of the Annunciation, the consent she gave at Calvary and the royal Assumption into the glory of Heaven. (pp. 58-59, 61)



“In the Church of Jesus, prey to modernism even among her leaders at every level of the hierarchy, the suffering of souls, the burning of scandal attains an overwhelming intensity; this drama without precedent; but the grace of the Son of God and Redeemer is more profound than this drama. And the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which obtains for us every grace, can never be interrupted. In the most beleaguered souls, those closest to succumbing, the Virgin Mary intervenes night and day to mysteriously resolve this drama, to mysteriously break the chains that the demons thought were unbreakable. Solve vincla reis. (pp. 120-121)



R.-Th. Calmel, O.P., Voici votre Mère (Behold your Mother), Nouvelles Editions Latines, 155 p. (12 €)