In this episode, Fr. Teresa Gray talks about her own conversion to the Catholic faith and how it has shaped her life. She shares her experience with St. Louis-Marie de Montfort's book, "True Devotion to Mary" and shares her own personal story of how she made the decision to consecrate her life to Christ.
00:00:00.000One of the things that perhaps many of you don't know is that my conversion happened through St. Louis de Montfort's book, True Devotion to Mary.
00:00:08.460Our Lady gave me the means to approach her son in a way I never thought possible.
00:00:13.940And I'm going to be talking with a good lady today who is promoting that very consecration,
00:00:20.220has done so at 31 parishes, bringing 2,500 people into this amazing practice with which Pope St. John Paul II called essential for anyone who wants to give them fully to the work of Christ and redemption.
00:01:00.460Let's begin, as we always do, with the sign of the cross.
00:01:02.740In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
00:01:08.240So, first of all, true devotion to Mary is a subject near and dear to my own heart, and I know to yours as well.
00:01:15.320So, let's tell everyone, what is true devotion to Mary, and why is it so important?
00:01:22.440Well, first of all is, I too, like you, had a conversion during the St. Louis-Marie de Montfort consecration several years ago.
00:01:33.380And the reason that that went into my heart was because I never really had thought about what would open in my soul if I should give myself totally to our Blessed Mother.
00:01:49.740A lot of people have a little bit of a hang-up saying, you know, why can't we just go straight to Jesus?
00:01:55.280And so, in the study of St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, it was a beautiful thing to understand that it is our Blessed Mother's Immaculate Heart that really opens our heart even to a greater aspiration to be united with the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
00:02:13.360And so, that took seed in my heart, and it took several years for me really to ponder on this, to understand how important it was for others to potentially do that consecration, to understand Our Lady's part in conversion, in holiness.
00:02:33.840So, for your own personal journey, how did this, I don't know if you want to tell us part of that, maybe just a snippet of us, to bring us to some understanding of how much of an effect it had on your life?
00:02:48.640When I was a little girl, and I say this only because often parents look at their children and they wonder if their children can truly grasp on to the understanding of how Jesus is so important into their lives and Our Blessed Mother.
00:03:05.100And when I was a little girl, and when I was a little girl, I was about in the third grade, the Good Sisters of Charity, where I went to school in St. Andrews in Fort Worth, Texas, happened to show our class a film of St. Bernadette, Our Lady of Lourdes, and then they showed us a film on Our Lady of Fatima.
00:03:23.920To that time, I had never heard of Our Lady of Fatima.
00:03:28.640Well, I had very devout, pious parents who came from really the roots of not much.
00:03:38.360We were Hispanic growing up in San Antonio, and we didn't have much, but we moved to Fort Worth, and I happened to go to this school where there were no Hispanics, and the Good Sisters showed us this film, and it really opened my eyes.
00:03:51.580I said to myself, oh, Jesus, I want to be perfect.
00:03:55.540I want to be perfect like Lucia, Jacinta, and Francisco.
00:04:25.340And, of course, it didn't take long as the years rolled out that by the time I was like 13 or 14 that I lost that desire to be holy.
00:04:35.000And I got caught up really with that whole teenage world, and I would say for about five years, I probably, you know, could have, I was at the brink of maybe, I could have kind of lost my soul in a way because I became attached to the world.
00:04:50.960And I was very blessed to meet a man that, you know, I fell in love with who is still my husband.
00:04:57.660We've been married 50 years, and we have nine children, and in that birth of that first child really sent my heart in a different direction.
00:05:07.640It was to give more to my child that was more in a formation basis.
00:05:16.720I always went to Mass, but like many Catholics, you know, I was just filling up a pew sometimes.
00:05:21.980But when I had my first baby and took her to her baptism, then I realized I had a great responsibility.
00:05:30.480And I continued to realize what Our Lady of Fatima had taught.
00:05:40.280It just kind of birthed back into me about the rosary.
00:05:44.020Now, John Henry, I'm going to say this to you.
00:05:46.040I mean, there was a point in my time when I was 12 years old that I think I shared with you at one time that really has stayed with me for most of my life.
00:06:00.360And I say this with humility and great respect for the church that often, and its formation for a soul, that often we are gifted with things or aspirations in our days that send us forward to Christ.
00:06:22.780And it was at one time, and I think about it a lot, during the Cuban crisis, that I was very frightened by that whole event.
00:06:34.460I was 12 years old, and the Cuban crisis was eminent in our world, that there was a great pending of this nuclear war that could happen.
00:06:48.700And again, as I said, I came from a large family.
00:06:51.300I had a family, my parents had 13 children, and we lived in a little bitty house.
00:06:56.240And the one thing my parents did was they would gather us during that time to pray the rosary.
00:07:45.520But I'm sharing it with you because this was part of my journey, that during that dream, I did have a sense that there was a great celebration in a very large city.
00:07:57.420And in this celebration, people were holding their hands up to the sky.
00:08:07.540And there were people even from the windows of the building, the same, holding their hands up, joyful.
00:08:15.400And I could sense it was a great celebration.
00:08:19.060And I happened to, I was not down there with these people.
00:08:23.300I was able to see to the side a beautiful lady.
00:08:28.660And this lady was, had her hands held out, and she was pouring just her, her grace is what I believe, because they were petals of flowers on.
00:08:40.040They seemed to be showering the world.
00:08:59.720But then later on in years, I became at peace to say, I believe it was Our Lady of Grace.
00:09:06.660And Our Lady of Grace was showering her with her graces.
00:09:09.620So that has been kind of an inner motivation for me to understand why were the people joyous?
00:09:18.980And why has she come to shower them with her graces and make that joy?
00:09:23.960And as I have moved forward in life, I have found that she has drawn me closer and closer to her immaculate heart to understand the grace that she truly wants to give us from the sacred heart of Jesus.
00:09:41.720If we but ask for those graces, and that grace is going to provide us the intention of our hearts, that desire to know and love and serve God.
00:09:57.120And I believe that it is with, it is that small smidgen of grace that we can begin with.
00:10:02.680That desire is that really births the future for our conversions and our love for Jesus, to give everything to him through her.
00:10:15.220Now, I share that with you only because everyone has an experience in their life.
00:10:20.900I believe God provides that to draw them to his sacred heart.
00:10:26.100We just need sometimes to be still, to pray, to give him the confidence, to just ask for Mary to put that grace in our hearts, to know him better.
00:10:39.120And that's why today it's been a lifetime of prayer, mainly in adoration.
00:10:48.020In 1994, I went to Mexico for the celebration in December of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
00:10:58.500And there again, I was stirred with a great love for the church, for Our Lady, and it was a great experience.
00:11:09.420I came back and I'm like, wow, you know, this was good.
00:12:28.400So we prayed about it for two years, a very holy, good priest.
00:12:34.680And so finally, thanks be to God, we got in 1998 on the Feast of the Epiphany, the doors of our adoration chapel were open and they remain open today.
00:12:46.200And the most wonderful gift that I received, a blessing, is being able to go at night and pray.
00:14:21.100So really indwelling on that and meditating on that message caused me to believe that that was the pathway to the sanctification of the souls, the sanctification of the families, a pathway for the conversion of the world.
00:14:42.240And our lady today is continuing to say, through everyone that understands the Fatima message, bring them to me, let me convert them with grace, and let me take them to Jesus.
00:15:02.080And again, this is why we're doing this work.
00:15:04.660Our claim ministries started from a group of ladies in Cincinnati, Ohio, called Radio Rosary.
00:15:12.300Back in the very early 80s, these few ladies were praying the rosary, and they decided, just about when Mother Angelica was going to do it as well, they decided to air the rosary on the radio across the nation.
00:15:26.900And by donations of, you know, a few dollars here and a few dollars there, they were able to buy airtime in many radio stations to air the rosary.
00:15:37.780Well, in time, Reese, in the past seven, eight years, they really couldn't continue.
00:15:45.240And so they, some, a lady that I knew happened to say, Teresa, I have just the thing for you.
00:15:53.680And this lady, always, a very holy lady, always had work for me to do.
00:15:59.340And I thought, oh, my goodness, she's going to get me into something else.
00:16:04.580So we went to a meeting to somebody's house.
00:16:07.600And there, they presented what they had been doing, providing the rosary on the radio, but they were down to only one radio station in Fairfield, Ohio.
00:16:17.720And now they were asking for somebody to take it over, this ministry they had, and see what they could do with it.
00:16:25.360So I gathered a few people together, and we decided to take over their effort and see what would come of it.
00:16:31.680And so what has come of it is a reorganization of Radio Rosary into Kalei Ministries, because we felt not only do we want to promote the rosary, we wanted to promote the Fatima message to consecration, our consecration to Fatima.
00:16:50.280We are promoting the Fatima consecration.
00:16:53.480You're about to launch a big effort in that.
00:16:55.180When is that starting, and how do people get in touch with that?
00:16:57.320Right now, what we have done is, back in October, the pandemic caused us to rethink how we were going to promote consecration, since we had been doing them parish to parish in the Archdiocese of Covington and the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, with the blessing of Bishop Roger Foyce and the blessing of Archbishop Schnur.
00:17:17.960And these consecrations that we were doing parish to parish were taking three months to prepare each one of them from beginning to end.
00:17:29.960And the pandemic kind of put a halt to all that.
00:17:33.320So we had been discussing for a few years, and this really led us to discuss it and discern about it, if we should maybe take the consecration into a more, an approach by where it would be more digital, it would be online, and more accessible to more people.
00:17:57.780We contracted Ken Yasinski out of Canada to produce 35 videos for the preparation of consecration, based on the writings of Sister Lucia in her book, Calls.
00:18:13.320And I had read the book several times and found that in the book, Sister Lucia truly expounded on the message, the true message, the authentic messages of Fatima.
00:18:26.340And again, that was a message, a call to holiness.
00:18:30.460I am praying, to be honest with you, and hoping, John Henry, that your audience will think seriously and pray about doing the Fatima Consecration that we are going to put online under FatimaConsecration.org, where they can register.
00:18:56.940It is a pure work of love for Our Lady, and do the consecration starting September 4th for the preparation, which will end October 7th on the Feast of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary.
00:19:11.720All the instructions will be given before they start the preparation.
00:19:18.880Again, I'm praying everybody that listens will do it as an act of faith and an act of love for Our Lady.
00:19:27.560If you're not today understanding consecration, if you don't even understand yourself, what is it that consecration will do for not only yourself or the world?
00:19:42.480So I ask you to do this, just pray and ask for the seed of desire, that Mary will plant a seed of desire for you to do this.
00:19:55.640And it doesn't even have to be the Fatima Consecration.
00:19:58.860I love the St. Louis-Marie de Montfort Consecration.
00:20:11.560And they will bring you closer to the heart of Christ through the heart of Mary.
00:20:19.620It also is important to understand that what grieves Our Lady the most today, and I can't really not go away from this interview without saying it, is the sin of abortion.
00:20:38.460And I believe the Fatima message and our need to squelch that sin of abortion go hand in hand.
00:20:47.180So many people are working tirelessly to reverse, not reverse, to do away with the laws of Roe versus Wade that started here in America.
00:21:01.900Really, abortion became, it opened its roots here greatly and has spread because, as we know, there were, Our Lady had asked for Russia to be converted, and Russia spread her sins throughout the world, all that.
00:21:18.680But abortion is the one thing that we need to consider that we must stop offending God with.
00:21:24.140And I believe that in doing the consecration, people can be converted, we can gain graces for the world.
00:21:35.420Our Lady also asked Lucia Fatima, who wrote the book calls, that the four practices in reparation to the Immaculate Heart be done.
00:21:45.700And that was confession, and that was confession, receiving Holy Communion, praying the rosary, and keeping her company for 15 minutes.
00:21:53.440All these things are things that are part of the consecration.
00:21:57.600Just before we end off, I want to give people a little bit of a taste of what is this book calls, because that forms really the sort of central part of the reflections in making this consecration.
00:22:10.460Tell us a little bit about the book calls and Sister Lucia's work on it.
00:22:15.180So this is the book calls, and Clay Ministries, what we did is we contacted the postulator and the keeper of the messages in Fatima for authorization to do a consecration based on Lucia's meditations on the messages of Fatima.
00:22:37.160So if you've done the St. Louis-Marie de Montfort consecration, you know that there's 33 days preparation, and then there's 33 days to morning glory by Father Michael Gately.
00:22:49.140Well, it's just so happened that this book has 33 chapters.
00:22:52.900So we took each chapter, Ken and Janelia Sinski have taken these chapters, meditated on them, and then they give us the golden nugget of each chapter in a video, which is about eight minutes long.
00:23:11.000So this consecration that you register for is an online video consecration, watching 35, I say 35, because one is an introduction and one is the consecration.
00:23:23.020But in between are the 33 meditations on the book calls, taking the core message of each chapter and putting it into a video.
00:23:35.340So, again, each video is only about eight minutes long.
00:23:39.280So, you know, our goal was, you know, in today's world, young people don't want to give a lot of time to something, and they want it to get right to the heart of the message.
00:23:51.880We're not going to take much of your time, but listen to this message, and we hope that it takes seed and will be a cause of their joy to bring them forward to our Lord Jesus Christ.
00:24:03.020So that's what Our Lady wants, is to really attach ourselves to His sacred heart.
00:24:08.500Yes, and I must say, too, Ken is quite a well-known, at least in some parts in Canada, speaker, a Catholic speaker, especially attractive to young people.
00:24:19.380So I think this is a good opportunity for a lot of parents to encourage their, you know, teens and kids in their 20s to go for it.
00:24:29.160I would encourage young people, really young kids, to go for it as well.
00:24:33.020One more time, when can people already sign up to begin?
00:25:41.240But if somebody has knowledge of technical abilities to convert these videos into multi-languages, please contact us.
00:25:53.160Because we do hope to take this a little bit internationally in order that other people in other lands can be ignited by her immaculate heart.
00:26:03.360Teresa Gay, thank you for being with us on this episode.
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