About the Author

This introduction is by a priest, a priest who lives in the Immaculate Heart of Mary and not only that but She has taken him with Her into the very Heart of Jesus. There are many others here in the Heart of Jesus as well. It is a safe place, a holy place, a happy place to be. But let me tell you how this happened for me, the priest.

I was the youngest in a family of 12. We lived on a farm out in western Victoria, here in Australia. My mother’s parents were Irish, my fathers were Scottish and Irish. My father bought a large number of sheep but the rain never came and they died one by one. The farm had to be sold and the family moved to a country town. My mother told me later that never for a moment did she take her eyes off the Sacred Heart and Mother Mary. World War 11 had broken out. The future was bleak for a large family, yet it was such a happy family. A large picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus occupied the living room and an Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung on the opposite wall.

Family Life

The family Rosary resounded every evening around the same living room. Our parents knew where all their hopes lay. Even when two of the older boys went off to the war and the family moved to the city there was a daily echo of prayer in the lives of each member of the family. It was a hope charged with happiness and when my sister contracted polio, it was a novena to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary that brought her home cured, which in the early 1940s was extraordinary. Our family never looked at the future with apprehension. Whatever cross came our way we were all ready for it. The Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary were in love with us as indeed were we with Them. My father went blind with glaucoma and never a word of complaint, four members of the family contracted tuberculosis and had to go to a sanatorium for 12 months where death was a daily event. I was one of the four and here was I hoping to be a priest. Jesus and Mary kept me company in my lonely room in the sanatorium.

St Gertrude took over my education in the faith as I became acquainted with her deeply theological prayers that stayed with me to my old age. The new treatment that saved me from death came back years later to affect my eye sight but I nevertheless made it into religious life. After a 12 month very healthy Novitiate I discovered I had Lupus erythematosis.

So followed seven years of walking up and down dark passages to avoid the ultraviolet rays and a lot of sickness so that I couldn’t study. Who was there in the passageway to keep me company? Who was it that kept picking me up in depression that accompanies the lupus? Who was it that year by year pulled me through my exams when in human terms there was no hope? Who was it that kept me believing in the priesthood and the glory of celebrating the Mass when the sisters were telling me to prepare for death and who inspired the Bishop to offer to ordain me if I could get through the ceremony and say one Mass?

I’ll tell you who it was it was the one who promised us that Her Immaculate Heart would triumph in the end. In all this pain and suffering I fell so much in love with Jesus and Mary that in all my abundance I swapped hearts with Jesus and offered myself to be a little victim to His Merciful Love like St Therese.

The Reality of His Eucharistic Presence

I used frequently to look into the chapel and tell him I loved Him. The reality of His Eucharistic presence kept me coming back in a mad delight to be near Him and what if he didn’t drag me one night into the chapel to come over me like an overcoat giving me a kind of love letter in all my difficulties.

So I was ordained a priest of God and I said ever after that the best preparation for the priesthood is suffering and the exercise of blind trust in Jesus and Mary. Oh the joy of celebrating that first Mass and the roughly 20,000 Masses since that day. I was allowed to go to a mission to pass on my love for Jesus and Mary to the aboriginal people of the Kimberley.

In all my adventures there what with being in two crashing aeroplanes, twice falling off cliffs, once caught in a firestorm, swept away in a flash flood, caught in quicksand hanging onto a barbed wire fence, discovering a deadly poison snake around my feet while speaking to my brother on the phone, struck by lightning in a terrible storm, losing much of my eyesight in a 900 km drive through the bush, and who was always there? It was those who have promised to be with us on the road to the triumph.

Each time I walked away bruised and shaken but full of stories of one rescue after another from the only ones who are truly able to rescue us. I discovered praise and thanks that I should give to Jesus and Mary for every hard situation to so release His power  that on my return to my community down  South I found myself able, through the prayer of praise for each situation, no matter how bad, and thanks for my beloved Lord’s perfect plan for us, that I was able to help many, many people in telling them how to deal with problems not looking at them and endlessly analysing them but looking past the problem at Jesus and Mary to praise them for it all and thanking them for their perfect plan since nothing happens by chance.

There are ways to go and to handle things if we are close to Jesus if we tell him in the holy Eucharist what our problems are with that praise and thanks. I have seen so many people find peace and joy again. So I wrote a brochure on it to reach more people. The peace that it brings is a marvellous foundation for entering into the

“ Divine Will of God”

which is at the top of the list of all the gifts that the most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary have made available to us through a little lady in Italy that they took into their ultimate confidence. She is the Venerable Luisa Piccarreta. This gift is the most transformative, the most salvific, the most effective weapon in all our modern world. It is exciting. It is too wonderful for words. I couldn’t live without it.

Divine Will – Praise and Thank You

While we are busy praising Him for our problems, and everyone has problems, we are actually exercising the greatest trust and indeed are happily on the road to the triumph to which our Mother  keeps inviting us. It will be discovered in the Divine Will.

Can you imagine my surprise when I made a rhetorical question to Jesus in the holy Eucharist as to how I could save the most souls. He replied to me. I heard Him say, quietly and strongly,

“you have my Passion”.

Then He and Mother Mary helped me to compose a collection of those salvation moments of His Passion and later told me to say them every day in the Divine Will and then that they were saving

“multitudes”.

We are dealing here with the Triumph indeed of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

“I lift up my eyes to the mountain;

from where it shall come my help?

My help shall come from the Lord

who made heaven and earth.” Psalm 120.