In 1712, St. Louis-Marie de Montfort wrote what many consider the greatest single book of Marian spirituality ever composed — a manual for consecrating yourself entirely to Jesus through Mary. Three centuries later, “True Devotion to Mary” is still the text behind the 33-day consecration prayed by millions. Now available as an illustrated audiobook.
IN the 18th Century, a French missionary priest named Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort finished a manuscript so unassuming that it sat in a chest for more than a century after his death, discovered only by accident in 1842. What it contained would go on to shape the Marian devotion of popes, saints, and millions of ordinary Catholics who never read a word of French: a method he called, without softening the term, “holy slavery” to Jesus through Mary.
That manuscript is True Devotion to Mary, and three centuries later it’s still doing exactly what Montfort wrote it to do.
A means, not an end
The first thing Montfort insists on, and the point most likely to be missed by anyone encountering the title cold, is that devotion to Mary is never the destination. It’s the route. He states it plainly: this consecration exists to bind a soul more completely to Jesus Christ, not to substitute Mary for Christ. Mary is the “way” by which Christ formed Himself once, at the Incarnation, and the way He chooses to form Himself again in every soul that consecrates itself to Him through her.
That distinction matters, because it’s the difference between the devotion Montfort describes and a sentimental piety he has no patience for. His Mary is not a figure of comfort added on top of the spiritual life. She’s the means by which a soul actually gets to Christ faster, more securely, and more completely than it would alone.
What “total consecration” actually asks
Montfort’s method asks for something specific: a total gift of self — one’s body, soul, goods, and the value of every good work — placed in Mary’s hands to be used for Christ’s purposes rather than one’s own. He calls this “holy slavery” deliberately, contrasting it with the reluctant service of a hired servant. A slave belongs entirely to the master; nothing is held back, negotiated, or reserved for personal use.
To prepare a soul for that kind of gift, Montfort didn’t leave it to sentiment. He built a structure: a 33-day preparation, still prayed today by Catholics around the world, moving through three phases. The first stretch is spent emptying oneself of “the spirit of the world” through specific prayers — the Veni Creator, the Ave Maris Stella, the Magnificat. The following weeks turn toward knowledge of Mary and then of Christ through her, building toward a formal Act of Consecration made after Confession and Communion, ideally before the Blessed Sacrament.
This is the part of Montfort’s work that has outgrown the book itself. Most Catholics who make the 33-day consecration today encounter it through a parish program, a Rosary group, or an app — not by first reading True Devotion cover to cover. The prayer has become bigger, in a sense, than its source text. But the source text is where the theology behind it actually gets argued out, chapter by chapter, and it rewards the readers who go back to it.
Why Rome kept endorsing it
True Devotion to Mary has drawn recommendation after recommendation from popes, bishops, and spiritual theologians since its rediscovery — Pope St. John Paul II credited Montfort’s writing directly as an influence on his own Marian spirituality, and took his papal motto, Totus Tuus, “totally yours,” straight from Montfort’s Act of Consecration. That’s not incidental praise. It’s a pope building his pontificate’s motto on a sentence from this specific book.
Reading and listening to it now
For a text this dense and this old, hearing it read aloud changes how it lands. New Insights Multimedia’s audiobook edition of True Devotion to Mary — narrated by Fr. Ryan Murphy and illustrated throughout with Marian art — is built for exactly that: praying through Montfort’s argument during a drive, a walk, or the 33 days of consecration themselves, rather than only encountering it as a page of dense eighteenth-century prose.
Montfort wrote this book to hand souls to Christ through Mary faster and more securely than they could man
age alone. Three hundred years on, that’s still the only thing it’s trying to do
Listen to the illustrated audiobook edition of True Devotion to Mary, narrated by Fr. Ryan Murphy, available now through New Insights Multimedia.
