A Marian Year for the Emmanuel Community

An invite from Laurent Landete, the Moderator of the Emmanuel Community:

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Back from Rome, where we have just experienced an exceptional Pentecost with the Holy Father, I would like to announce important news to you. After consulting the councils, I have decided to suggest to the whole Community throughout the world a year where we immerse ourselves in our Marian roots.

Our founder very quickly had the intuition that we had been born of the Virgin Mary. Indeed, we are bound to Her in a very vital way. The prayer of consecration to Jesus through Mary by St. Louis Grignon de Montfort quickly became one of the fundamental pillars of the spiritual life in Emmanuel, and especially of the Fraternity of Jesus. To consecrate our life to Mary, to dedicate to her our bodies, our souls, our goods, our past, our present, our future, all of our actions, to choose her for our Mother and Queen, is not without consequences. These words that we address to her every day are of unprecedented scope and intensity and go beyond the intentions of the ‘poor types’ that we are.

It seems to me that the time has come to reconsider together this essential element of our charism in order to better transmit it to future generations. This Year will begin on September 8, 2017 and will conclude on August 15, 2018.

So what is planned? Very simply. During each of the Marian feasts of the liturgical year, we will meditate step by step the meaning of one of the words of the consecration to Mary.

I would like to set this journey within two major ecclesial events: first, the centenary of the Virgin Mary’s apparitions at Fatima and the seventieth anniversary of those at Ile Bouchard. The Mother of God has intervened in these difficult times in history to remind us of the demands of the Gospel, as well as the proximity of her Son.

The work-places and the battles of the Church in this world are gigantic. The Community is called to take its share, humbly, by listening to the signs of the times. “This is the hour of perseverance and of the faith of the saints,” says the Book of the Apocalypse. The successive renewals of the Church always correspond to the needs of men. We are thus called, like Mary, to ‘to recollect within ourselves’ the “passion” of our time.’

The challenges are so numerous – we remind you of a few of them:
1. To witness to the necessity of personal prayer and of union with God.
2. To take the initiative regarding a renewal of the communion of the states of life, for the sake of evangelization.
3. To accompany couples who choose to be faithful to one another.
4. To educate young people who face the time bomb of gender theory and the plague of pornography.
5. To speak a comprehensible language to wounded families, so that they know that they are loved by God and by us.
6. To be involved in the ecological, human and integral conversion of our world.

These struggles are however doomed to failure if we conduct them without the intercession of the Mother of mankind. Together with Her, we can fearlessly leave our ‘Upper Rooms’ to go out to the world awaiting us.

As you know, during the month of July 2018, we will elect a new International Council and a new Moderator. It seemed to me to be essential to prepare this election by putting us, starting from the month of September, under the mantle of the Virgin, so that she keeps us in hope, faith and unity. This ‘Emmanuel Marian Year’ will thus be opened by your servant and concluded by my successor, a few weeks after his election.

I am profoundly pleased to entrust to Our Lady’s prayers the preparation of this event, the election itself, the passing of responsibility and the future mission of the person who will be head the Community. We will listen to the One who tirelessly tells us: “Do whatever He tells you!”

I would also like to inform you that the high point of this year will be Saturday, December 9, 2017: In your name – with Father Henri-Marie Mottin, Head of Ordained Ministers, we will consecrate the Community to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. As Pierre Goursat said, “I understood that there was only one heart, that of Jesus and Mary, a sole heart!”

The solemn act will take place at Ile Bouchard. Of course not every one of you will be able to be present, but we will ensure – thanks to the media and social networks – that this step brings together the different countries and regions of the world.

Like the apostles, seized by the Spirit, ‘who makes all things new’, let us keep Mary by our side. With Saint John Paul II, who led us on this path of trust in the One who is ‘Mother, more than Queen’, let us repeat with faith: “We are all yours, Mary.”

Laurent Landete