Mary's 'little book...'

January 21, 1984 [Sanctuary of Castlemonte]

"I accept the homage from you, who have come up to my Sanctuary here, to give thanks to your heavenly Mother for the book.
How many difficulties 'my book' has encountered, but how much good has it already done in every part of the world, translated now into so many languages!
It has been the instrument for carrying to the hearts and souls of so many beloved children the voice of the heavenly Mother, the manifestation of my maternal plan, my invitation to receive you all within the refuge of my Immaculate Heart.
How should this book be read?
With the simplicity of a child who is listening to his mother. He doesn't ask why she speaks, or how she speaks, or where her words are going to lead him. He loves her and he listens to her. He does what she says. And then the child is happy, because he feels that in this way he is guided and illumined by his mother. Led by her and informed by her words, each day he continues to grow in life.
So should it be for you. Read it with simplicity, without minding about such problems as how I speak, why I speak, where I am speaking. My only concern is that you live everything I have told you. Then your hearts will be inflamed with love, your souls will be illumined by my light, and I will transform you interiorly to lead you to do each day what pleases the Heart of Jesus.
If you are consecrated to me, I take you just as you are, with your limitations, your defects and sins, your frailty, but then each day I transform you to bring you to be in accordance with the plan which God has entrusted to my Immaculate Heart.
What do I say in this book of mine?
I trace out a simple and beautiful road, but a difficult one, oh how difficult! How necessary it is to travel it, if you wish to live the consecration.
I teach you how to live; I form you in a practical way to live with me.
I tell you the things which I have most on my heart, because they are the very things which Jesus has told you in the Gospel, which today should be lived with the simplicity of the little ones, with the ardor of martyrs, and with the fidelity of courageous witnesses: it should be lived to the letter!
Accordingly I am calling you to prayer, to penitence, to mortification, to the practice of virtue, to trust, to hope, to the exercise of an ever more perfect charity.
This is what I want to tell you. Don't be delayed, therefore, by the predictions I give you in an effort to make you comprehend the times in which you are living.
Like a mother, I am telling you the dangers through which you are going, the imminent threats, the extent of the evils that could happen to you, only because the evils can yet be avoided by you, the dangers can be evaded, the plan of God's justice always can be changed by the force of His merciful love. Also when I predict chastisements to you, remember that everything, at any moment, may be changed by the force of your prayer and your reparative penance.
Do not say therefore: how much of what you predicted to us has not come true! Instead, give thanks with me to the heavenly Father because at the response of your prayer and consecration, your suffering, and on account of the immense suffering of so many of my poor children, again He alters the period of justice, to permit that of the great mercy to come to flower."
--Our Lady Speaks to Her Beloved Priests (1987), #282, pp. 411-13