I was looking for something else. In fact, all those pages of the Bulletin of the Province of Our Lady of Candelaria of the Augustinian Recollects, published in Colombia, dealt with a Missionary Exhibition organized in Bogotá in 1924, which was the reason this copy had ended up in my hands.
Ezekiel Moreno was sometimes mentioned, but it didn’t seem strange to me: he had been a great missionary and a prominent figure among the Augustinian Recollects and the Colombian Church itself. Moreover, his canonization process, initiated in 1909, was about to complete its first phase; and in fact, the following year, Pope Pius XI would admit it for examination in Rome.
And in this context, without any explanation and to my surprise, I see that a page dedicated to reproducing a “Facsimile of an autograph prayer of the Servant of God Fr. Ezekiel Moreno” is inserted. Quite a discovery, because I hadn’t even considered it among the publications about the saint in recent decades.
It is a splendid prayer: dense, though concise, and extremely ardent; a prayer that touches the most vibrant chords of Ezekiel’s soul: Jesus and his Heart; a prayer from heart to Heart.
This is the most fitting prayer, today and always, to recite daily during the month of June, traditionally dedicated to honoring the Sacred Heart of Jesus. And here we leave it, so that other hearts may also speak to the Heart with the same words of a saint:
My Jesus! Forgive now the one you know.
Bind him to Your Heart and never let him go.
May he give You all the glory possible in every moment,
and may not a single inspiration come from him
that is not for You.
Give him a heart like yours;
a heart that feels what You feel;
that wants what You want,
and loves what You love,
but with the greatest possible intensity,
so that this love moves him
to do great things for Your glory.
I ask all this through your divine and most sweet Heart,
which deserves everything, and therefore
I hope that you will hear me and grant it.
Amen.
