Man of Sorrows

Volume XXVII, Number 16
August 15th, 2023

Dear friends, welcome. Hey-ho, let's go.

National Rosary Novena Begins

A crucial 54-Day Rosary Novena for America begins today, August 15th, Feast of the Assumption. It's ends on October 7th, Feast of the Holy Rosary.

It's an initiative promoted by a national coalition of organizations, including the Marian Fathers at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy, Father Heilman's U.S. Grace Force, and many other groups.

You don't need to sign up anywhere. Just begin offering your daily Rosary for our beleaguered country over the next 54 days. (It's also good chance to build a powerful spiritual habit if you don't already pray the Rosary daily.)

If you need a little help, you can stream the most popular Rosary recording in human history here (still available on CD for us oldtimers).

Uncle Max is 129 Years Old

Yesterday was the feast of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, commemorating his martyrdom in Auschwitz. "Uncle Max" is my personal hero, the founder of the Militia Immaculata, and the model for everything we've done at the Mary Foundation to touch tens of millions of lives over the past thirty-two years.

If you're not familiar with his way cool Red Crown White Crown childhood story, I included it after my signature.

Uncle Max will be 130 years old in January 2024, and I still celebrate his birthday because he is alive, active, and as sharp as ever. Here is a lovely 16-minute video about Kolbe and total consecration by my friends at the Militia Immaculata.

Kolbe's Militia Immaculata

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A Man of Sorrows

To preserve the privacy of those involved, I cannot give you details, but I had a difficult call last week with a longtime benefactor who related truly serious family issues. I have been praying and fasting with extra fervor for them ever since.

My heart breaks. For her. For him. For everyone involved. There is still plenty of hope, but I could not get it out of my mind that serious problems with no obvious short term solutions are likely plaguing a great number of the tens of thousands of readers who receive this message.

The only solution is courage—to face our troubles with hope and perseverance. That's it.

Hang tough. Smile. Hope. Begin again.

Since walking across our nation carrying the True Cross, I am reluctantly accepting that God destined me from birth to be a man of sorrows. And that nothing can extinguish the supernatural gift of hope.

Hope.

Yes, my heart will keep breaking until my last breath—or until the divine intervention we secured through Operation True Cross takes place.

The final lines in all three of my novels make a reference to a "beautiful woman" (a metaphor for Our Lady) and a "man of sorrows" (a metaphor for Christ Crucified).

I did not know then that I was writing about my own life too.

In our country and even in many of our homes, despite all our material blessings and the real love we share, the darkness surrounds us. It gets worse every year. Practicing Catholics in our current atmosphere of diabolical oppression must constantly avoid discouragement—and worse, resentment or despair.

We must persevere, remembering always that the grace to do so is a gift. It depends less on us and our strong will and more on God to provide the grace. This is good news. Perseverance is a gift from heaven.

It also came to me that we must take care of our own mental and physical health, even as we suffer. Pay attention to the basic union between body and soul—get enough sleep, avoid unnecessary stress, reduce the screens, get outside, eat well, exercise. You already know this—I'm just offering a friendly reminder.

We live in the most glorious age of crosses. We live in the era of the crucifixion of the Mystical Body of Christ. It's an honor.

I am coming to believe that the fate of our nation and our loved ones depends on all of us persevering in suffering—in our homes, our relationships, and our responsibilities.

God will take extraordinarily good care of the rest. The Red Sea will part.

Quotation

A good friend sent me the following quote from Saint Maximilian this morning, and I suspect Uncle Max was speaking to you and me.

"I want to hope that, with the help of the Immaculata, you may be able to accomplish what you started and persevere in your place until a glorious death. Try to imagine how sweet the moment of death will be to a person, who, at the supreme moment, can say he has offered very, very much in sacrifice to the Immaculata. When in trouble, pray. Pray much, and you will obtain the precious grace of perseverance."
- Saint Maximilian Kolbe

Please Pray with Me

Let us begin, with many thousands of others around the world, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...

O Sacred Heart of Jesus,
I am discouraged and confused.
I do not understand what is going on.
I cannot form the words to express
the vague numbness in my thoughts
or the echoing suffering in my soul.

Oh, Jesus, how I thank you today
because I do not need to understand.
You and Your Father understand all these things!
That is enough for me.
I want to live inside your Sacred Heart,
my true home here on earth and my eternal home.

Therefore I beg you, today, this very minute,
to accept the perfected pleadings
of our beloved brother Maximilian,
and those whispered entreaties
of your Immaculate Mother on my behalf.
Listen to them, not to me.

You took Our Lady into heaven.
She stands beside you,
her arm wrapped under yours,
as you both gaze upon me.

Please bring me clarity to know what to do next.
Bring order to my thoughts so I can do your will
today and tomorrow and the next day.
Accept my gift of the sufferings of my soul,
so that instead of seeking to avoid this suffering,
I can embrace it as you did on the Holy Cross.
Now, and until the hour of my death. Amen.

And Amen. Thanks for praying with me and everyone else.

Please forgive me for not doing a better job of writing today. You guys are the best!

Over the next few weeks we will be releasing an all-new "tool for evangelization," so keep your eye on your inbox. Countless souls will be helped if you do what you always do. Keep praying the Daily Prayers to Save America! Keep smiling. Hope.

With the Immaculata,

Bud Macfarlane, MI
Founder

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A Red Crown and a White Crown

Adapted from my March 2011 CatholiCity Message

Saint Maximilian Kolbe was an innovator as an evangelist and a theologian. He gave most of his stuff away free-of-charge. At one point before World War II, there were over eight hundred Franciscan friars in Neipokalanov (City of the Immaculata) churning out millions of newspapers, pamphlets, and books on the world's best printing presses in the world's largest monastery, before or since.

Not content with evangelizing just Poland, Maximilian personally set up beachheads in India and Japan as well. Exceedingly holy, for these achievements alone he might have been canonized.

Concentration camp witnesses say that the happiest days of his life were those spent at Auschwitz, where, although starving, he gave away his food and encouraged everyone—all despite enduring regular beatings by guards because he was a Catholic priest.

Locked in a dungeon to starve to death with others, camp officials decided to murder him and his comrades with injections of carbolic acid, in part to stop the skeletal, indomitable Kolbe from leading his fellow inmates in hymns and prayers.

Few people know this, but when he was a little boy, then Raymond Kolbe (Maximilian was his religious name) had a visitation from the Blessed Mother during which she offered him a choice between a red crown of martyrdom or a white crown of chastity. Raymond chose both, according to his mother (who related the event after his death).

Every local area of Poland has its own flag. Investigators after World War II discovered, based on camp records, that the place where Kolbe's cremated remains were most likely dumped was on a plot of land whose flag depicted a red and a white crown!

Theologians will ponder Kolbe's mystical writings on Immaculate Mary and the Holy Trinity for decades to come. Oddly, considering that his body was reduced to ash, there still exist first-class relics of Saint Maximilian. I know this because in 1992 I wrote to the good friars at Neipokalanow and described how we were inspired by our beloved Uncle Max to give away free stuff by the millions using the latest technology.

Their reply included a treasure of three certified beard hairs! These relics were secured by a Franciscan barber in Rome who gave Kolbe a haircut when he was a seminarian—the friar had received a providential intuition that he had just trimmed the beard of a saint.

We touch his priceless relic to many Mary Foundation materials, including the Operation True Cross crucifix featured at the bottom of this message.

From early on, Saint Maximilian was animated by one overarching goal—that every person in the world consecrate themselves completely to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, or the Immaculata, as he fondly addressed her.

In 1917, as a seminarian, he founded the Militia Immaculata to achieve this goal. Today there are millions of members in virtually every country on the planet. Many of our readers have already consecrated themselves to the Immaculate Heart of Mary through the Sacred Heart of Jesus, but if you have not, we believe that the patron saint of innovation, Raymond Maximilian Maria Kolbe, still wants you to join our ranks.

This prayer card and medal provide a way make the total consecration quickly while receiving a Miraculous Medal blessed by a priest, touched to the True Cross, sprinkled with Lourdes water, and touched to Maximilian's beard hair and other first-class relics.

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