CONSECRATION OF CANADA TO THE
BLESSED VIRGIN MARY, MOTHER OF THE CHURCH,
IN TIME OF PANDEMIC - Friday, May 1st at 3pm
All diocesan and eparchial Bishops in Canada and the USA are inviting pastors to consecrate their specific parish and our country to Mary, Mother of the Church on Friday, 1 May 2020, seeking her maternal protection during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Our Archbishop is inviting our parish families to join in. To facilitate this we will be streaming Holy Cross Parish Consecration service at 3 pm on Friday 1 May 2020, on our web page and Facebook page (it will be available to view online on demand after 3 pm). Join in the consecration of our parish and country Canada (have your rosary handy as we will be praying a decade of the rosary after the Apostle’s creed, this will be followed by the prayer of consecration and intercessions.)
What does consecrating our Parish and Canada to the Blessed Virgin Mary mean?
Having been baptized and answering the call of our faith, before the Father of all mercies in the name of Christ and in the Holy Spirit, we place ourselves, our loved ones, and our country under the protective mantle of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of Jesus our Saviour, the Mother of God, the Mother of the Church, and our spiritual Mother.
As a pledge in faith, we entrust ourselves to the very woman who, through her free and pure consent at the Annunciation, singularly collaborated in the plan that God should become Incarnate and present in our world as one like us in all things but sin.
The consecration of our parish and Canada to Our Lady will enrich our faith, allow a more abundant outpouring of God’s spiritual and temporal gifts on us, and enable us even more to fulfill our calling and mission. Ultimately, consecration to Mary, which springs from a more fervent, more committed, and more sustained life of prayer and devotion in which the Blessed Mother plays a unique and loving role, points and leads to a renewed spirit and understanding of family, Church, and the need for societal engagement.
Contemplated in the episodes of the Gospels and in the reality which she already possesses in the City of God, the Blessed Virgin Mary offers a calm vision and a reassuring word to modern man, torn as he often is between anguish and hope, defeated by the sense of his own limitations and assailed by limitless aspirations, troubled in his mind and divided in his heart, uncertain before the riddle of death, oppressed by loneliness while yearning for fellowship, a prey to boredom and disgust. She shows forth the victory of hope over anguish, of fellowship over solitude, of peace over anxiety, of joy and beauty over boredom and disgust, of eternal visions over earthly ones, of life over death. (Blessed Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation Marialis Cultus, 57).