Pastor’s Corner

Dear Sacred Heart Family,

October is the month of Our Lady and her Rosary. Why should we consider praying, rediscovering or finding out about the Rosary?  Let’s take a look.

Our Lady is our Mother, and how much she loves to help us.  A powerful testimony of this is provided by Fr. Gabriel Amorth, the former exorcist for the Diocese of Rome.  “During an exorcism,” Father Amorth remembers, “Satan told me, through the possessed person, ‘Every Hail Mary of the Rosary is a blow to the head for me; if Christians knew the power of the Rosary, it would be the end of me!’”

What challenging and difficult times we are facing. However Sister Lucia, the third visionary of Fatima, shared what Our Lady taught her about the increased power of meditating on the life of Jesus in the Rosary. Sister shared: “The Most Holy Virgin in these last times in which we live has given a new efficacy to the recitation of the Rosary to such an extent that there is no problem, no matter how difficult it is, whether temporal or above all spiritual, in the personal life of each one of us, of our families…that cannot be solved by the Rosary. There is no problem, I tell you, no matter how difficult it is, that we cannot resolve by the prayer of the Holy Rosary.”

This Sunday, October 7th, is normally the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. It was begun as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory, to commemorate the defeat of the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Lepanto, when terrorists threatened to overtake Europe. If you visit the Newseum in Washington, the museum of journalism, Lepanto is there! In their historical collection of news publications, two journals from the 16th century report on the victory of western forces there. This Feast of Our Lady is the Church recognizing how powerful our Mother in heaven is: the power of love, the victory of hope against terror.

Once again, let us turn to her with all our needs, and heed the call of so many shepherds in our history who point to our weapon against the devil and his despair:  the Rosary. David defeated his Goliath with five smooth stones: take up your beads and defeat the Goliaths in your life as well, with the victory of Our Lord, placed in your hands by our kind Blessed Mother.

In Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart,

Fr. Bjorn Lundberg