The Sacred Heart of the New Encyclical

When the beloved disciple reclined his head upon the breast of the Savior (John 13:23), he heard the beats of divine charity and felt the heat of God’s love. Among the twelve apostles it was John alone who stood beside the Blessed Mother at the foot of the cross to witness and absorb the pain of Jesus’ Passion (John 19:25-27). It was the same John who would later testify, quite simply, that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This beloved disciple contemplated the mysteries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. While many after him who loved Christ pondered and revered this blessed Heart, it was not until sixteen centuries later that devotion to the Sacred Heart passed from a private to a public devotion in the Church. That is when the Lord revealed the wonders of his Heart to a young and often sickly religious sister named Margaret Mary Alacoque.

With his new encyclical, Dilexit nos, Pope Francis calls us to recommit ourselves to Jesus’ Sacred Heart, so that the Lord’s love “can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey towards a just, solidary, and fraternal world” (§220). The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the heart of the encyclical and, indeed, the heart of everything. With appreciation for the pope’s call to renew devotion to this source and symbol of divine love, I present here a substantive overview of the history of the worldwide emergence of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart beginning in the seventeenth century, elucidations of the promised fruits of this devotion, and a brief treatment of the theology of the Sacred Heart.

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Renewal of Devotion

Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690) was a nun of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary in the French village of Paray-le-Monial. Prior to Margaret Mary, a devotion to the Sacred Heart had been developing from an earlier devotion to Christ’s Holy Wounds. Devotees of the Sacred Heart included such saints as Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), Bonaventure (d. 1274), Mechtilde of Helfta (d. 1298), and Gertrude the Great (d. 1302). What was different with Margaret Mary is that through the course of three divine revelations she received, the Lord commissioned her to open this devotion to the entire Church.

The First Revelation: Becoming the Beloved

On December 27, 1673, on the Feast of John the Apostle, Sister Margaret Mary received the first of three revelations of the Lord’s Sacred Heart. Her religious superior ordered her to write an account of her experience, which begins:

Once being before the Blessed Sacrament, I felt wholly filled with this Divine Presence, and so powerfully moved by it that I forgot myself and the place which I was. . . . [I] yielded my heart to the power of his love [and] he made me rest for a long time on his divine breast, where he uncovered to me the wonders of his love and the inexplicable secrets of his Sacred Heart, which he had hitherto kept hidden from me [but] now he opened to me for the first time.[1]

Jesus placed Margaret Mary into the position of the beloved disciple, reclining her head as John’s once did upon the breast of the Savior. Reposed and attentive, she both felt and heard what was in the Sacred Heart. This is the message of Jesus to her in the first revelation:

My Divine Heart is so passionately in love with men that it can no longer contain within itself the flames of its ardent charity. It must pour them out by thy means, and manifest itself to them to enrich them with its precious treasures, which contain all the graces of which they have need to be saved from perdition. I have chosen thee as an abyss of unworthiness and ignorance to accomplish so great a design, so that all may be done by Me.[2]

By this first revelation the Lord makes known that divine love can no longer be hidden in the Heart of Jesus. Here, Jesus is the Friend, the love of the Father, who makes the tender effort to save his children. It is precisely Margaret Mary’s “unworthiness and ignorance” that will serve this good end, for her humbleness will not obscure the unsolicited graciousness of Christ’s charity.

When Margaret Mary offered her own heart to Jesus, he responded by sharing a spark of his ardent divine love with her. The fervor of that love remained with her in the form of an invisible wound in her side, in which thereafter, on the first Friday of each month, she experienced intense heat and pain. In prayer and in passion, Margaret Mary remained a student of the secrets of the Lord’s Heart for six months before a second revelation.

Second Revelation: The Scourge of Ingratitude

In the summer of 1674, likely on the first Friday in June during the Octave of Corpus Christi, Margaret Mary received the Lord’s second revelation. Jesus’ appearance was now different from the first. In the words of the saint:

He was brilliant with glory; his five wounds shone like five suns. Flames darted forth from all parts of his sacred humanity, but especially from his adorable breast, which resembled a furnace, and which, opening, displayed to me his loving and amiable Heart, the living source of these flames.

In adoration, Margaret Mary gazed upon the wonders of Christ’s pure love, which shines in inestimable excess against the ingratitude of those for whom it is given. By direct address, the Lord declared the severity of the world’s ingratitude for his sacrifice:

This is much more painful to me than all I suffered in my Passion. If men rendered me some return of love, I should esteem little all I have done for them, and should wish, if such could be, to suffer it over again; but they meet my eager love with coldness and rebuffs. Do you, at least, console and rejoice me, by supplying as much as you can for their ingratitude.[3]

The character of the renewed devotion to the Sacred Heart is hereby disclosed: it is a means for making amends for the world’s crimes of callousness, offered as consolation for Jesus’ aching Heart. To adore the Sacred Heart is to participate in making reparations for the scandal of ingratitude.

The devotion that the Lord calls for begins to take definite shape in this revelation as he directs Margaret Mary to two distinct disciplines: first, to receive Holy Communion every first Friday of the month, and second, to keep a holy hour, preferably before the Blessed Sacrament, between 11:00pm and midnight every Thursday, so as to keep watch with him as expiation for the desertion of the disciples during his agony in Gethsemane.

As Margaret Mary herself heeded this devotion and drew nearer to the Lord’s love in his Passion, she also began to experience her own share in his suffering as religious authorities doubted her and caused her to doubt her own experiences of Christ’s grace. It was not until a young Jesuit priest received her testimony and counseled her that she was assured of the veracity of Christ’s message to her. This young priest, Fr. Claude de la Colombiere, would later become the man to bring the devotion of the Sacred Heart to the world.

Third Revelation: For the Life of the Church

The third and final revelation to St. Margaret Mary occurred on June 16, 1675, during the Octave of the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament. With this revelation, the Lord moved from granting Margaret Mary personal favors to investing her with a public mission for the good of the Church.

Revealing his Heart again to the saint, the Lord offered these words:

Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love. In return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for me in this sacrament of love. . . . It is for this reason I ask thee that the first Friday after the Octave of the Blessed Sacrament be appropriated to a special feast, to honor my Heart by communicating on that day, and making reparation for the indignity that it has received. And I promise that my Heart shall dilate to pour out abundantly the influences of its love on all that will render it this honor or procure its being rendered.[4]

The ultimate end of this devotion is, thus, to warm the Church with Christ’s divine love. Through this young religious sister––meek and humble of heart––the Lord sought to drive out what is old and stale in the Church with the fire of love pouring forth from his Own Heart.

Sister Margaret Mary entrusted this revelation to Fr. Colombiere. After careful consideration, he confirmed for her the divine inspiration of this grace, which led the nun to lie prostrate in joy and consecrate herself to the Sacred Heart. Fr. Colombiere joined her in this act of consecration so that, in these two––a religious sister and priest––the first fruits of the new devotion ripened.

From this first act of devotion, the threefold practice of devotion to the Sacred Heart began to emerge in the Church through Fr. Colombiere’s dissemination: receiving communion on the first Friday of the month, keeping a holy hour of adoration to watch with Christ, and the institution of the Feast of the Sacred Heart.

The Fruits of Devotion to the Sacred Heart

The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus produces, in the end, one ultimate, marvelous fruit: a heart like Jesus’ own. Indeed, near the end of the Litany of the Sacred Heart, we pray, “Jesus, gentle and humble of heart, touch our hearts and make them like your own.” Gentleness and humility shape and form the heart of the one who follows Jesus in penitence and adoration. The gift bestowed to those devoted to the Sacred Heart is not merely to receive something, but indeed to become like the one you love.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is charity incarnate. It is divine charity made flesh, and through that flesh charity courses as the lifeblood of the world. To draw nearer to the Sacred Heart is to pass into the chambers of charity, to move with its flow, to become animated with its life. As St. John Eudes writes: “Devotion to the Sacred Heart, being the beautiful flower of charity, must produce the same fruits of virtue. It is not a devotion of feeling or words, but of actions; not only of prayers, but of conformity with the virtues of the divine Heart.”[5]

St. Margaret Mary Alacoque taught her sisters similarly, leading them to adopt the habit of humility in yielding before the love of God, and the posture of meekness (or gentleness) to remain steadfast in their reliance on the love of Jesus’ Heart. “If you wish to be a disciple and daughter of the Sacred Heart,” St. Margaret Mary instructs, “you must submit to its holy teaching and become like it, meek and humble, meek in bearing little annoyances, the peculiarities and troublesome ways of your neighbor, without being vexed by the little contradictions you meet with from him, but instead, doing for him all the good services you can, for in that you will find the means of pleasing the Sacred Heart.”[6] In this way, the act of devotion itself leads the devotee to share in the very love they adore. The guarantee of the fruit of this formation is the words of Christ himself, who revealed to St. Margaret Mary twelve promises for those who dedicate themselves to his Sacred Heart.

The twelve promises of the Sacred Heart are Jesus’ pledge to make the devotion and charity of those who adore his Heart truly fruitful. To adore his Heart is an act of faith, trusting, in part, that his promises are true. Those of us who begin to devote ourselves to his Heart cannot taste this fruit beforehand; rather, it is only through the devotion itself that these fruits become available. Jesus asks for trust and dedication, and he rewards those who trust in him with a steady share in his own charity.

In contemplating these twelve promises, it is possible to discern at least four degrees of conformity to Christ’s own love as pledged to those who adore his Heart. This progression reaches down to our own creaturely weakness (both in sin and in affliction), moves forward in steps of strengthening, grows toward sanctification, and ultimately arrives at the gift of abiding in union. The twelve promises are laid out below in four sets of three in order to highlight this progression.

The Gift of Healing

The three promises of healing that the Lord makes to St. Margaret Mary and to all who devote themselves to his Sacred Heart are, like all his promises, personal and direct:

· I will comfort them in all their afflictions.
· Sinners shall find in my Heart the source and the infinite ocean of mercy.
· I promise you in the excessive mercy of my Heart that my all-powerful love will to all those who shall receive communion on the First Friday in nine consecutive months the grace of final penance; they shall not die in my disgrace nor without receiving their sacraments; my Divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.

The comfort for afflictions is assurance for consolation through the trials of life, for the perils of finitude and even the cost of sacrifices. Following St. Paul, the one devoted to the Sacred Heart may come to proclaim that “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 2:10). Moreover, whenever that weakness is due to sin, sinners may be assured of the healing love of Christ’s mercy, which gushes forth from the Sacred Heart to which we cling. Finally, that reliance on Christ’s mercy will not fail but, in return for adhering to the First Fridays devotion, the Lord Jesus offers his own Heart as safety and security for his friends in the hour of their death, upon the last temptation. The Sacred Heart thus heals afflictions, heals the breaches of sin, and heals the final rupture of death.

The Gift of Strengthening

From his Sacred Heart, the Lord not only wishes to restore health to his friends but also desires to build them up in strength, making them capable of his service in this world. And so the Lord promises these three ways of healing to those devoted to his Sacred Heart:

· I will give them all of the graces necessary for their state of life.
· I will bestow a large blessing upon all their undertakings.
· I will give to priests the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.

In recognition of the diversity of gifts within his one Body (see 1 Cor 12:12-27), the Lord pledges to equip those he calls with everything needed for their missions, according to their state of life. The blessings he gives will be “large,” more than sufficient for the activities of charity to which they are called, so that those so blessed will become filled with his bounty for the discharge of their duties. In particular, priests, who are called in a special way to the devotion to the Sacred Heart, will find success in their ministry of preaching and healing, so that even those who are most opposed to the love of God will find, through the power channeled through these priests, the very love they most desperately need.

The Gift of Sanctifying

The fruits of the Sacred Heart do not end with what devotees become capable of doing, but indeed move on to what the devotees themselves become. The Lord thus promises the friends of his Heart that we shall come to share more and more in the vibrancy and joy that he alone offers:

· I will be their strength during life and above all during death.
· Tepid souls shall grow fervent.
· Fervent souls shall quickly mount to higher perfection.

Those devoted to this Sacred Heart not only dispense strength, but become strong themselves. Drinking from the source of charity, devotees become sources of charity for others, in life and during death. The fervor of their charity is increased, welling up from the Sacred Heart and filling them with this life. Moreover, that fervor is not an end in itself, but becomes again the energy for greater and greater conformity to the one Lord, who is the source and summit of all charity.

The Gift of Abiding

The end of God’s act of creation by his Word, redemption through the Word made flesh, and sanctification through the Spirt poured out on all, is to rest in the love of God and to become a resting place for that love. In the language of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “the ultimate end of the whole divine economy is the entry of God’s creatures into the perfect unity of the Blessed Trinity. But even now we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity” (§260). From his Sacred Heart, Jesus promises nothing less than this ultimate fruit: the gift of abiding with God, in God, by the love of God. It begins even now:

· I will establish peace in their houses.
· I will bless every place where a picture of my Heart shall be set up and honored.
· Those who shall promote this devotion shall have their names written in my Heart, never to be blotted out.

The first two promises seem so domestic, so mundane even. But the love that flows from the Sacred Heart makes even the places where we dwell now into antechambers of heaven. The homes where the Sacred Heart is adored become filled with the peace of Christ, the same peace that he gives his friends (“not as the world gives”), the peace that will fill all in the fullness of time (see John 14:27 and Revelation 21:1-27). This peace stretches to every place where the image of the Sacred Heart is enthroned, marking these spaces as realms of the kingdom of the Prince of Peace. Finally, for those who make a dwelling place for the love of God here, the Lord will keep their names written in his own Heart, giving them an everlasting dwelling place with him, who abides in the Father and with whom the Father abides (see John 17:21-24).

The heart that adores the Sacred Heart becomes what the Sacred Heart is: a dwelling place for divine love.

The Theology of the Sacred Heart

In the early parts of his encyclical, Pope Francis asks, “What do we mean by ‘the heart’?” This is a non-trivial question, especially when it comes to the revelations to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque and the universal devotion that emerged from those revelations. Along with Pope Francis’ question, we might ask: why the Heart? Why does beholding Jesus’ Heart matter? And what does our decision in response to his Heart mean? These are three crucial questions about the Sacred Heart of Jesus which may only be answered theologically.

The Heart

Animals do not have “hearts” in the way that human beings do. Yes, animals have a physical organ that pumps blood through the body, as do human beings, but what we mean by the human “heart” is not reducible to this physiological reality. When we speak of the human heart, we mean and have always meant the whole of a person’s attitudes, the core of a person’s existence, the seat of the ultimate meaning of a specific person.

The Lord revealed his human heart to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. That heart is the Sacred Heart. It is not the mere heart-muscle of a body organ, but rather the whole being, the entire reality of Christ. In revealing his Heart, Jesus reveals who he is, most deeply: He is the suffering love that has been poured out for the life of the world. His Heart is the total commitment of himself, the full dedication of his life in one complete direction. In giving his Heart, he gives the whole of himself.

What gives unity to Jesus’ Heart is, as Karl Rahner puts it, “not merely the human love of Christ (as the actualization of a capacity of his human nature), but the divine-human love, that is the divine love of the eternal Word himself, which . . . is incarnate in the human love of Christ.”[7] This is the seat of divine love in the world, divine love that has been communicated through human love and is the fundamental motivation, the genuine decision of Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. In and through his heart, divine love has been translated into human life, human action, human flesh and blood and sacrifice. His physical heart is flesh full of blood. That singular heart is a singular image of the Incarnation: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us . . . for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 1:14; 3:16).

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is not reducible to the flesh and blood of this physical heart, but that physical heart is nonetheless the symbol of the Sacred Heart. His flesh is the site of the Word’s dwelling in creation; his blood is divine love coursing through human flesh; his Heart is the union of flesh and blood––the sign of the union of humanity and divinity––and what God has joined no one may separate (see Matt 19:6).

Beholding

The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has always been and always will be proper to the Church’s faith, yet this devotion was proposed and became explicit in a particular time and in response to particular maladies. In 1928, Pope Pius XI explained one of the specific reasons why, in the wisdom of divine Providence, the Sacred Heart was revealed and proposed for universal veneration in the Church:

When the Jansenist heresy, the most crafty of them all, hostile to love and piety towards God, was creeping in and preaching that God was not to be loved as a father but rather to be feared as an implacable judge; then the most benign Jesus showed his own most Sacred Heart to the nations lifted up as a standard of peace and charity portending no doubtful victory in combat (Miserentissimus Redemptor §2).

The Jansenists taught that only a predestined number would be saved and that, outside that number, there was no hope of salvation. Relatedly, they held to a rigid interpretation of Augustine’s teaching on grace, arguing that human freedom played no part in redemption. In giving his Sacred Heart for the world to behold, Jesus presented the central disposition of his life, death, and Resurrection, which is to make manifest the love of God for the life of the world. This love is what directs his Heart and, as such, becomes the Heart of the world.

In addition to responding to the errors of the Jansenists, the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus increased in the lead up to the industrial revolution, the horrors of the World Wars, and the rapid technological advancements of humanity into the digital age. The closeness of human relations was strained or even fractured in these times. The coldness that human beings had for the suffering of Christ was manifested yet again in the coldness of human beings toward one another’s suffering. The revelation of the Sacred Heart was and is given for the warming of hearts in the Church, and from the Church to the world.

The Decision

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is revealed to the world as a gift, but also as a proposal––that is, the Sacred Heart provokes a decision. The gift is in apprehending and adoring the Heart by which the divine-human love of Jesus was given for the world. The proposal is the invitation to accept and love this Heart. The decision is what we do in response.

To behold the Sacred Heart that bears the suffering for the life of the world is not a matter of turning back the clock to adore Jesus only as he was in Gethsemane and Golgatha when he bore the ingratitude and sinfulness of the world. Rather, beholding that Heart is encountering him in his hard-wrought love now––encountering the one who “having suffered” is now risen. He has entered into his glory, but only as the one who suffered, died, and was buried. The Risen One is the Crucified One. Contemplating and drawing near to his suffering is the path to beholding him in his glory.

Our response to the Sacred Heart of Jesus matters:

For if the first and foremost thing in Consecration is this, that the creature’s love should be given in return for the love of the Creator, another thing follows from this at once, namely that the same uncreated Love, if so be it has been neglected by forgetfulness or violated by offense, some sort of compensation must be rendered for the injury, and this debt is commonly called by the name reparation (MR §6).

It matters very much, in other words, that we respond to God’s offer, that some part of humanity receives and responds to the love of God in Christ, that some sinners on behalf of the many willfully accept Christ’s sacrificial offering. The grace, the love is God’s in Christ, and yet what consoles the Lord are deeds done in his grace and love. Those who undertake the devotion to the Sacred Heart––accepting and offering themselves to the suffering love of the Savior––become emissaries of and sharers in the reconciliation of the one Body of Christ.

St. Augustine expresses the mystery of sharing in Christ’s redeeming work in his commentary on Psalm 86: “Christ suffered whatever it behooved him to suffer; now nothing is wanting of the measure of the sufferings. Therefore, the sufferings were fulfilled, but in the head; there were yet remaining the sufferings of Christ in his body” (quoted in MR §14). Christ’s sufferings are not repeated; instead, when his disciples contemplate, hold to, and offer themselves in union with his sufferings––the sufferings undergone once for all––what is happening is that the members of Christ’s one body are being united to Christ the Head in what he alone suffered. United to him in suffering is the means and path for being united to him in glory. In the end, there is only one Christ: him in us and us in him (see John 17).

The theology of the Sacred Heart is a theology of grace and of freedom. It is a theology of grace because it deals with the incarnate love of God in the flesh and blood, the life and death, the passion and Resurrection of the Only Begotten Son. It is a theology of freedom because, first, it deals with the eternal freedom of God to love this sin-sick world in his Son, and, second, it deals with human freedom that responds to this offer. The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a matter of grace, of freedom, and ultimately of communion in the suffering and glory of the Body of Christ.

EDITORIAL NOTE: Portions of this essay first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor in a five-part series on the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.