[Question:]{.underline} May one offer prayers for specific intentions, although one has made the Total Consecration to Our Lady according to the method of St. Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort?
[Answer:]{.underline} The total consecration to Jesus through Mary is just what it says: - a total offering of all that we are and have, both interior and exterior, including merits and prayers: ” I deliver and consecrate to thee (ie. Mary), as thy slave, my body and soul, my goods, both interior and exterior, and even the value of all my good actions, past, present and future; leaving to you the entire and full right of disposing of me…” (Formula of consecration)
Consequently, the consecrated soul has nothing of its own. Here lies the totality of the consecration: “you abandon your own intentions and operations, although good and known, to lose yourself, so to speak, in the intentions of the Blessed Virgin, although they are unknown. Thus you enter by participation into the sublimity of her intentions, which are so pure.” (True Devotion, p. 162)). The totality of the consecration consequently means that we cannot have any specific intentions of our own. Living by Mary, our intentions are entirely lost in hers: “In order that the soul may let itself be led by Mary’s spirit, it must first of all renounce its own spirit and its own proper lights and wills, before it does anything. For example; it should do so before its prayer…because the darkness of our own spirit and the malice of our own will and operation, if we follow them, however, good they may appear to us, will put an obstacle to the spirit of Mary” (Ib. p. 184-185).
A distinction must, therefore, be made in what is meant by “specific” intentions. If by this I mean something that is specific to me, as distinct from Mary, then it is precluded and forbidden by the total consecration. If it means that I am asking for a special grace that it is Mary’s will to obtain for me because is God’s will to bestow it, then it is perfectly permissible.
Consequently souls that are consecrated to Mary can certainly pray for their own friends and relatives, for the state of their own soul, for their priests and those who are in need of prayers, for the Church and for vocations, but all of these “specific” intentions must be understood as an extension of Mary’s intentions.
Inasmuch as we do not know Our Lady’s intentions, then the condition under which any such prayer must be uttered by the one who is totally consecrated, is “in so far as it is Our Lady’s desire and will”. In this way, the practice of the true devotion obtains for us the grace of perfect detachment from our own will, manifest even in our prayers, the gaining of merits and intentions behind our good works. This is the condition for union with our Lady. Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, puts it this way: “That union is a life, and just like the common life of the body, it demands the regular beating of the heart, the steady movement of the lungs, the stimulus of periodic nourishment. These are the impulses of prayer, ejaculation, act, practice, thought and other reminders, which warm the renew the soul and preserve in it the spirit of consecration.” (The De Montfort Way. p. 24)
The totally consecrated soul is consequently not at all indifferent to the specific needs of his soul and others, but to the contrary filled with a burning desire to pray for them, to the extent that this is the will, intention and desire of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Answered by Father Peter Scott, SSPX.