“Mary ever Virgin, Mother of God our Savior, I entrust myself to your loving intercession and care because you are my Mother and I am your dear child, full of trouble, conflict, error, confusion and prone to sin.
My whole life must change, but because I can do nothing to change it by my own powers, I entrust it with all my needs and cares to you. Present me with pure hands to your Divine Son. Pray that I may gladly accept all that is needed to strip me of myself and become His true disciple, forgetting myself and loving His kingdom, His truth, and all whom He came to save by His Holy Cross. Amen.”
— Thomas Merton
“One afternoon I went to pray the Holy Rosary that the Holy Father was leading. He was in front of us on his knees. With the Holy Father’s back to me, I entered into prayer. In the middle of the prayer, I became distracted looking at the pope, and time began to fade away. I began to imagine the young priest, the seminarian, the poet, the worker, the child from Wadowice in exactly the same posture as he was now, praying Hail Mary after Hail Mary. His witness struck me. I felt this man, chosen to guide the Church, was the summation of a path trod together with his Mother in heaven, a path that began in his childhood. And I suddenly realized the weight of the words spoken by the Mother of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego, “Do not be afraid. Am I not your mother?” I grasped the presence of Mary in the pope’s life. His witness did not get lost in memory. From that time onward I have prayed the fifteen mysteries of the Rosary every day. – ”
— Excerpts from The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope, Austen Ivreigh, p.275
