Introduction

1. Predestined soul, here is a secret that the Most High has taught me, and that I have been unable to find in any book, old or new. I confide it to you by the Holy Spirit, on the following conditions:

1. That you will share it only with those who deserve it by their prayers, almsgiving, mortifications, persecutions endured, and zeal for the salvation of souls and detachment from the world;

2. That you will use it to become holy and heavenly; for this secret only becomes great in proportion as a soul makes use of it. Take care not to remain idle, without effort; for my secret would become poison to you and be your condemnation...

3. On the condition that you thank God every day of your life for the grace He has given you in teaching you a secret that you did not deserve to know.

And as you make use of it in the ordinary actions of your life, you will come to know its value and excellence, which at first you will grasp only imperfectly, because of the multitude and gravity of your sins and your secret attachments to yourself.

2. Before going further, driven by an eager and natural desire to know the truth, say devoutly, on your knees, the Ave maris Stella and the Veni Creator, to ask God for the grace to understand and savor this divine mystery...

Because of the little time I have to write and the little you have to read, I shall say everything in brief...

I. The Necessity of a True Devotion to Mary

A. The Grace of God Is Absolutely Necessary

3. Soul, living image of God and redeemed by the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ, the will of God for you is that you become holy like Him in this life, and glorious like Him in the next. The acquisition of God's holiness is your certain vocation; and it is to this that all your thoughts, words, and actions, your sufferings and all the movements of your life must tend; or else you resist God by not doing that for which He created you and now preserves you. Oh, what an admirable work! Dust changed into light, filth into purity, sin into holiness, creature into Creator, and man into God! O admirable work! I repeat it, but a work that is difficult in itself and impossible to nature alone; only God, by a grace -- and an abundant and extraordinary grace -- can accomplish it; and the creation of the entire universe is not so great a masterpiece as this...

4. Soul, how will you do it? What means will you choose to ascend where God calls you? The means of salvation and holiness are known to all, are set down in the Gospel, are explained by the saints, and are necessary for all who wish to be saved and to attain perfection; such as: humility of heart, continual prayer, universal mortification, abandonment to divine Providence, and conformity to the will of God.

5. To practice all these means of salvation and holiness, the grace and help of God is absolutely necessary, and this grace is given to all, more or less abundantly; no one doubts this. I say: more or less abundantly; for God, though infinitely good, does not give His grace equally strong to all, although He gives it sufficiently to all. The soul faithful to a great grace accomplishes a great work, and with a small grace accomplishes a small work. The value and excellence of the grace given by God and followed by the soul determines the value and excellence of our actions. These principles are beyond dispute.

B. To Find the Grace of God, One Must Find Mary

6. Everything, then, comes down to finding an easy means of obtaining from God the grace necessary to become holy; and this is what I wish to teach you. And I say that to find the grace of God, one must find Mary. Because:

7. 1. It is Mary alone who found grace before God, both for herself and for every person in particular. The patriarchs and the prophets, all the saints of the Old Law could not find this grace.
8. 2. It is she who gave being and life to the Author of all grace, and for this reason she is called Mother of grace, Mater gratiae.
9. 3. God the Father, from whom every perfect gift and every grace descends as from its essential source, in giving her His Son, gave her all His graces; so that, as St. Bernard says, the will of God was given to her in Him and with Him.
10. 4. God has chosen her to be the treasuress, the stewardess, and the distributrix of all His graces; so that all His graces and gifts pass through her hands; and, according to the power she has received, as St. Bernardine teaches, she gives to whom she wills, as she wills, when she wills, and as much as she wills, the graces of the Eternal Father, the virtues of Jesus Christ, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
11. 5. As in the natural order a child must have a father and a mother, so in the order of grace a true child of the Church must have God for father and Mary for mother; and if anyone boasts of having God for father while having no tender love of a true child for Mary, that one is a deceiver who has only the devil for father...
12. 6. Since Mary formed the Head of the predestined, who is Jesus Christ, it is also for her to form the members of that Head, who are true Christians: for a mother does not form the head without the members, nor the members without the head. Whoever, then, wishes to be a member of Jesus Christ, full of grace and truth, must be formed in Mary by means of the grace of Jesus Christ, which resides in her in fullness, to be communicated in fullness to the true members of Jesus Christ and to His true children.
13. 7. The Holy Spirit, having espoused Mary, and having produced in her, and by her, and from her, Jesus Christ, that masterpiece, the Incarnate Word, since He has never repudiated her, continues to produce every day in her and by her, in a mysterious but real manner, the predestined.
14. 8. Mary has received from God a special dominion over souls, to nourish them and make them grow in God. St. Augustine even says that in this world the predestined are all enclosed in the womb of Mary, and that they do not come into the world until this good Mother brings them forth to eternal life. Consequently, just as an infant draws all its nourishment from its mother, who provides it in proportion to its weakness, so too the predestined draw all their spiritual nourishment and all their strength from Mary.
15. 9. It is to Mary that God the Father said: In Jacob inhabita: My Daughter, dwell in Jacob, that is, in my predestined, who are prefigured by Jacob. It is to Mary that God the Son said: In Israel haereditare: My dear Mother, take your inheritance in Israel, that is, in the predestined. Finally, it is to Mary that the Holy Spirit said: In electis meis mitte radices: My faithful Spouse, put down roots in my elect. Whoever, therefore, is chosen and predestined has the Blessed Virgin dwelling in him, that is, in his soul, and he allows her to plant there the roots of a profound humility, an ardent charity, and all the virtues...
16. 10. Mary is called by St. Augustine, and truly is, the living mold of God, forma Dei; that is, it is in her alone that God made man was formed to the life, without lacking any feature of the Divinity; and it is also in her alone that man can be formed in God to the life, as far as human nature is capable, by the grace of Jesus Christ.

A sculptor can make a figure or a portrait to the life in two ways: 1) by using his skill, his strength, his knowledge, and the quality of his tools to carve this figure from hard and shapeless material; 2) he can cast it in a mold. The first way is long and difficult and subject to many accidents: a single ill-placed stroke of the chisel or hammer can ruin the whole work. The second way is swift, easy, and gentle, almost without labor and cost, provided that the mold is perfect and represents the figure to the life; provided that the material he uses is sufficiently malleable, offering no resistance to his hand.

17. Mary is the great mold of God, made by the Holy Spirit to form to the life a God-Man by the hypostatic union, and to form a man-God by grace. No feature of the Divinity is lacking in this mold; whoever is cast into it and allows himself to be handled receives there all the features of Jesus Christ, true God, in a gentle manner proportioned to human weakness; without great agonies and labors; in a sure manner, without fear of illusion, for the devil has never had and never will have access to Mary, who is holy and immaculate, without the shadow of the slightest stain of sin.

18. Oh, dear soul, what a difference there is between a soul formed in Jesus Christ by the ordinary ways of those who, like sculptors, trust in their own know-how and lean on their own skill, and a soul that is truly pliable, truly detached, truly molten, and which, with no reliance on itself, casts itself into Mary and lets itself be shaped there by the working of the Holy Spirit! How many stains, how many defects, how much darkness, how many illusions, how much that is merely natural, how much that is merely human there is in the first soul; and how pure, how divine, and how like Jesus Christ is the second!

19. There is not, and there never will be, a creature in whom God is greater, outside of Himself and within Himself, than in the divine Mary -- not excepting the blessed, nor the cherubim, nor the highest seraphim, even in Paradise itself... Mary is God's paradise and His ineffable world, into which the Son of God entered to work His wonders, to guard it, and to take His delight in it. He made one world for man the wayfarer -- it is this one; He made another world for man in blessedness -- it is Paradise; but He made yet another for Himself, and He gave it the name of Mary; a world unknown to almost all mortals here below and incomprehensible to all the angels and the blessed in heaven above, who, in their wonder at seeing God so exalted and so far beyond them all, so hidden and so set apart in His world, the divine Mary, cry out day and night: Holy, Holy, Holy.

20. Happy and a thousand times happy is the soul here below to whom the Holy Spirit reveals the secret of Mary, so that it may know her; and to whom He opens this enclosed garden, so that it may enter; and this sealed fountain, so that it may draw from it and drink deep draughts of the living waters of grace! This soul will find none but God alone, without any creature, in this lovable creature; yet God at the same time infinitely holy and exalted, infinitely condescending and proportioned to its weakness. Since God is everywhere, He can be found everywhere, even in hell; but there is no place where the creature can find Him nearer and more proportioned to its weakness than in Mary, since it was for this very purpose that He descended into her. Everywhere else He is the Bread of the strong and of the angels; but in Mary He is the Bread of children...

21. Let no one imagine, then, with certain false illuminists, that Mary, being a creature, is an obstacle to union with the Creator: it is no longer Mary who lives, it is Jesus Christ alone, it is God alone who lives in her. Her transformation in God surpasses that of St. Paul and the other saints more than the heavens surpass the earth in height. Mary was made for God alone; and far from a soul being held back by her, on the contrary she casts it into God and unites it to Him with all the more perfection as the soul unites itself more closely to her. Mary is the admirable echo of God, who answers only: God, when one cries out: Mary, and who glorifies none but God when, with St. Elizabeth, she is called blessed. If the false illuminists, who were so miserably led astray by the devil even in prayer, had known how to find Mary, and through Mary, Jesus, and through Jesus, God, they would not have suffered such terrible falls. When one has once found Mary, and through Mary, Jesus, and through Jesus, God the Father, one has found every good, say the holy souls: Inventa, etc. Whoever says "every" excludes nothing: every grace and every friendship with God; every safety against the enemies of God; every truth against falsehood; every ease and every victory against the difficulties of salvation; every sweetness and every joy in the bitternesses of life.

22. This does not mean that one who has found Mary through a true devotion is free from crosses and sufferings; far from it: such a person is more beset by them than anyone else, because Mary, being the mother of the living, gives all her children pieces of the Tree of Life, which is the Cross of Jesus Christ. But while she fashions good crosses for them, she gives them the grace to carry them patiently and even joyfully; so that the crosses she gives to those who belong to her are rather confections -- crosses preserved in sweetness -- than bitter crosses; or, if they taste for a time the bitterness of the chalice that one must necessarily drink to be a friend of God, the consolation and joy that this good Mother brings after the sorrow inspire them infinitely to carry crosses even heavier and more bitter.

C. A True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Is Indispensable

23. The difficulty, then, is to know how to find the divine Mary truly, in order to find every grace in abundance. God, being absolute Master, can communicate by Himself what He ordinarily communicates only through Mary; and one cannot deny, without rashness, that He sometimes does so. However, according to the order that divine Wisdom has established, He ordinarily communicates Himself to men only through Mary in the order of grace, as St. Thomas says. To ascend to Him and unite oneself to Him, one must use the same means He used to descend to us, to become man, and to communicate His graces to us; and that means is a true devotion to the Blessed Virgin.