By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Writer
The recently freed French-Colombian hostage Ingrid Betancourt said Jesus kept his promise to her when she was released in June after she consecrated herself to the Sacred Heart.
According to the Catholic Herald, Betancourt said that while she was still in captivity earlier this year, she was listening to Radio Maria, an international Catholic radio station, and discovered that June is the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart.
Betancourt recalled: “So I said this prayer: ‘My Jesus, I have never asked anything of you, because I am so ashamed of your greatness, I am simply too ashamed to ask but now I am going to ask you for something very specific.
“I do not know exactly what it means to consecrate oneself to the Sacred Heart but if you tell me, during the month of June, I will be all yours.”
On June 27, Mrs. Bentancourt’s rescuers arrived and her six-year long captivity was over.
“I thought ‘there we go, he’s on time.’ The fact of the matter is that Jesus kept his word. I experienced a miracle.”
Betancourt has been very open about how her Catholic faith kept her going throughout the long ordeal in the Colombian jungle. In an interview with the French magazine, Pelerin, she said her first gesture upon being rescued was to make the sign of the cross.
“Why? Because without Him at my side I would never have managed to survive the pain,” she said.
“Being a hostage places you in a situation of constant humiliation. Faced with this you can take one of two possible paths. Either you allow yourself to become ugly and bitter, filled with hate and vindictiveness, or you follow the other path, that is shown by Jesus.”
She said this insight was what preserved her from being consumed by hate for her captors and anger at her predicament.
“He [Jesus] said ‘bless your enemies.’ Each time I read the Bible I felt those words were directed at me as though Jesus were standing in front of me, He knew what to say to me,” she said.
“Of course I realized that when your enemy is awful it is hard to live out those words faithfully and therefore I felt like saying the exact opposite. When I said these words, however, it was like magic. I felt a kind of relief. The hatred simply vanished. I feel that a transformation took place within me and I owe that change to being able to listen to what God wanted for me.”
While in prison, the Bible became her constant companion. “At the start of my captivity I said to myself ‘you are going to be here for months and months so you might as well read the Bible’ which I had not done previously.
“Opening it, it fell open on the epistles of St. Paul on the passage which I can recite more or less from memory: ‘You may ask for what you will but the Holy Spirit will ask better as He knows what you truly need.’ When I read that I exclaimed: ‘My God, I know what I want, to be free!’
“Re-reading the epistle six years later I understood at last what it meant and thought ‘lucky the Holy Spirit has interceded for me, because I do not know what I need!’”
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St. Margaret Mary Alacoque predicted that the book written by her spiritual director about devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus would disappear for two centuries but would eventually come to light. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Jesus by Father J. Croiset is available in our store at http://womenofgrace.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=72
