Our Morning Offering – 13 May – The 102nd Anniversary of the Apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima
Act of Entrustment to Our Lady of Fatima
By Pope Francis
Blessed Virgin Mary of Fatima,
with renewed gratitude for your motherly presence
we join in the voice of all generations that call you blessed.
We celebrate in you the great works of God,
who never tires of lowering Himself
in mercy over humanity,
afflicted by evil and wounded by sin,
to heal and to save it.
Accept with the benevolence of a Mother
this act of entrustment that we make in faith today,
before this your image, beloved to us.
We are certain that each one of us is precious in your eyes
and that nothing in our hearts has estranged you.
May that we allow your sweet gaze
to reach us and the perpetual warmth of your smile.
Guard our life with your embrace,
bless and strengthen every desire for good,
give new life and nourishment to faith,
sustain and enlighten hope,
awaken and animate charity,
guide us all on the path to holiness.
Teach us your own special love for the little and the poor,
for the excluded and the suffering,
for sinners and the wounded of heart,
gather all people under your protection
and give us all to your beloved Son, our Lord Jesus.
Amen.
*Act of entrustment to Mary, Virgin of Fátima, at the conclusion of Mass on the occasion of the Marian Day (Saint Peter’s Square, 13 October 2013)
When she was 30 Julian suffered from a severe illness. Whilst apparently on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense visions of Jesus Christ, which ended by the time she recovered from her illness on 13 May 1373. Julian wrote about her visions immediately after they had happened (although the text may not have been finished for some years), entitled Revelations of Divine Love. Twenty to thirty years later, perhaps in the early 1390s, Julian began to write a theological exploration of the meaning of the visions, known as The Long Text. This work seems to have gone through many revisions before it was finished, perhaps in the first or even second decade of the fifteenth century. Until her death in about 1416, Julian stayed in her simple room. Like most anchorites, she prayed, fasted, did penance, studied, sewed clothing for the poor and advised the village people.
Revelations is a celebrated work in Catholicism because of the clarity and depth of Julian’s visions of God. Julian of Norwich is now recognised as one of England’s most important mystics.
The title of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament was first given to Mary by St Peter Julian Eymard in May 1868, while speaking to his novices. A few years later he described what her statue should look like: “The Blessed Virgin holds the Infant in her arms and He holds a chalice in one hand and a Host in the other.” He exhorted them to invoke Mary: “Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament, pray for us who have recourse to thee!”
Not wanting to neglect the boys, he would also found a “young craftsman” institute for them in 1858. He would later go on to establish a residential school to train young women who were in danger of starvation or falling into prostitution because they had no support.
This was what Agostino needed however and he would go on to found the Institute of Sisters of the Immaculata on 15 October 1876. Agostino would induct the first of the nuns a week later, going on to act as their spiritual director. He would oversee the early growth of the order beyond Genoa and eventually beyond Italy.
An observer of his funeral noted, “Immediately after his death the people canonised him, as it were, having had the same veneration for his body as for those of the saints … they even cut off pieces of his robe, which several have had enshrined in silver and they treat them as relics.”
AnaStpaul 
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