December 25, 1947prev home next
The gifts of Christmas promised to me by Mary Most Holy.
1. The crushing of my dignity.
2. A more vivid likeness to the poor Jesus.
3. I was brought a little work to read on the Apparition of the Virgin Queen of Revelation, and I finally know something in this connection. At another time I’ll make my notes on the information it contained.344
4. The maternal gift of my Mother, Mary Most Holy....
5. The secret gift.
Which of these was the great gift I was promised? Some will think it was the last one, the one that is too lofty and personal for me to describe it and regale the curious with it. But I say it is the first one... and Mary Most Holy approves.
And, with the gifts, a pain: an offense I feel is being caused Mary’s Divine Motherhood, a negation of the Conception through the action of the Holy Spirit, of her inviolateness before and after the birth of Jesus in Mary’s virginal womb, a mockery of the chastity of the two virginal and chaste Spouses, and a negation of the ecstasy which was Jesus’ birth, free from all the forms of distress accompanying women’s childbearing and the birth of children....
My fever rose to thirty-nine from the pain of these things.... And if only they were expressed by atheists! But it was an assiduously practicing Catholic woman who said them, elderly, raised in an extremely Christian family and at a school run by sisters.... I tried to introduce the luminous truth in the midst of so much black mire, out of love for the truth and Mary Most Holy, and also because the Rosas, whose faith was in very bad shape, were present.... But I ended up ceasing to talk because every word of mine was met by a bolder and more sacrilegious derisive retort....
And this was my Christmas 1947 - perhaps the last. But I prefer dying to hearing Mary, Mother and Virgin, being insulted in the second of her most beautiful mysteries.
344 On December 31, 1947.