Queen of Peace offers novena to consecrate our building efforts to Mary’s Immaculate Heart

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

As you may know, this year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of our Blessed Mother’s prophetic apparitions in Fatima. On the anniversary date of her last apparition, on October 13, Archbishop Aquila will consecrate the Archdiocese of Denver to Mary’s Immaculate Heart. We at Queen of Peace, as a member of the Archdiocese of Denver family, will join in this great opportunity to dedicate our lives to Christ through Mary. For us, this consecration is especially significant, because we will also entrust our new parish center building project to her Immaculate Heart.

What does it mean that the archdiocese will be consecrated to Mary? Really, we are consecrating ourselves to Jesus through Mary. We are making a “serious commitment on our part to respond faithfully to God’s grace at work in our lives” (Denver Catholic, Sept 9-22). Pope St. John Paul II said, “Consecrating ourselves to Mary means accepting her help to offer ourselves and the whole of mankind to him who is holy, infinitely holy; it means accepting her help—by having recourse to her motherly heart, which beneath the cross was opened to love for every human being, for the whole world—in order to offer the world, the individual human being, mankind as a whole, and all the nations to him who is infinitely holy” (May 13, 1982).

The act of consecration to Mary “establishes a relationship of love with her in which we dedicate to her all that we have and are. This consecration is practiced essentially by a life of grace, of purity, of prayer, of penance that is joined to the fulfillment of all the duties of a Christian, and of reparation for our sins and the sins of the world” (Pope St. John Paul II, Sept. 26, 1986).

Our Lady said in Fatima that many souls are going to hell because no one is offering sacrifices for them. She comes to call on us to pray and make sacrifices for these souls. On her third apparition at Fatima on July 13, 1917, she toldthe three little shepherds: “God wishes to establish the devotion to her Immaculate Heart in the world in order to save souls from hell and bring about world peace.” This is a call for all of us at Queen of Peace. We live in a secularized world full of loneliness, separation, and division, where many don’t know the love of God. Mary wants to teach us to relate with God, to open ourselves to Him and His love, and to receive His forgiveness so that we may forgive and serve others. She wants us to bring Christ to all who don’t know Him.

This call is what our new parish center is all about. We are building a new parish center for the salvation of souls. A new parish center will allow us to serve better, and to do our ministries well - to form the youth, to help the homeless, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick, to welcome the stranger, to help marriages in crisis, and more. These works of charity are works of love. Through these, everyone will receive and experience Christ’s love. This fall, we’ll begin a capital campaign to raise money for our new parish center. We are all going to make sacrifices to make it happen, but this is part of the mission. Mary has asked us to sacrifice and to offer our sacrifices to bring souls to heaven. Love is sacrifice, therefore Mary has called us to God’s sacrificial love that saves souls. In this project, we are building for love.

The first thing to do in this great project is to pray. On October 5, we will begin a novena to prepare ourselves for the consecration of the archdiocese and of our building project. We will meet every weekday leading up to the consecration on October 13, we will meet in the church at 7pm for a short meditation on the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin in Fatima. Each day, the topic will be different. We will then celebrate Mass and pray the rosary. Then, on Friday, October 13, we will have a special Mass, pray the rosary, then livestream the archbishop’s consecration at the cathedral.

In Christ,

Father Felix P. Medina-Algaba

Fr FelixSeptember 23, 2017