The Sacred and Eucharistic Heart of Jesus



This past Friday the Church celebrated the feast of the Sacred Heart. In the previous century devotion to the Sacred Heart was extremely prominent and popular. Prior to the 1960’s many Catholic homes had a print of the Sacred Heart, and likewise virtually every church had a statue or image of the Sacred Heart. Fortuitously, both St Patrick’s and St Brigid’s feature prominent and well-preserved statues of the Sacred Heart.

Sadly, many other Catholic churches are not so fortunate. In the great iconoclasm of the Post-Vatican II era, many churches threw out their statues of the Sacred Heart (or relegated them to the broom closet) since devotional expressions of the faith were viewed as passé. This scornful attitude towards the Sacred Heart devotion was never the will of the Second Vatican Council. Indeed in 1965 (the year Vatican II concluded) Pope Paul VI himself wrote in his Apostolic Letter Investigabiles Divitas Christi: "This, therefore, seems to us to be the most suitable ideal: that devotion to the Sacred Heart - which, we are grieved to say, has suffered somewhat in the estimation of some persons, - now flourish anew daily more and more.  Let it be esteemed by all as an authentic, excellent and sure form of true piety, which in our times, especially because of the norms laid down in the Second Vatican Council, must be rendered to Christ Jesus, 'the king and centre of all hearts, who is the head of the body the Church... the beginning, the first born from the dead, that in all things he may have first place.'"

For the younger generations (including my own) devotion to the Sacred Heart might seem strange or unclear. For one thing, those unfamiliar with the devotion might find the iconography peculiar: why would Jesus’ heart be visible outside of his clothes? Devotion to the Sacred Heart is a good example of the poetic device of synecdoche – where a part is used to represent the whole. For example, farmers might talk about how many ‘head’ of cattle they have, or we might lend someone a ‘hand’, or we can speak about someone being the ‘brains’ of the operation. In each case we don’t have to imagine decapitated heads and dismembered hands and brains because we understand they come with a whole body! When we speak about loving someone with all our heart, we also understand intuitively that the heart represents the core of ourselves and therefore stands in the place of the whole self. We honour the Sacred Heart of Jesus because it offers us a concrete sign of the love of God. Within the beating human heart of Jesus Christ is contained the infinite and inexhaustible love of God. Our adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a way of honouring God himself by acknowledging His merciful love for us.

At the Last Supper John’s Gospel describes in two verses the beloved apostle reclining on the breast of Jesus (John 13:23, 25). It is an incredibly intimate description and a detail that is emphasised for effect. A few verses later Jesus will declare his new commandment: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, so you also must love one another.” (John 13:34). John the beloved, would go on to write in his first Epistle these timeless words: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” (1John 4:7-11)

John is able to write so profoundly about the love of God because his own head had rested so close to the Sacred Heart of Jesus at the Last Supper. For John the beloved, the love of God was no mere intellectual or theological abstraction; he was intimately acquainted with the beating heart of Jesus which he would personally witness being pierced by a lance on Good Friday.

If we can find here a biblical foundation for devotion to the Sacred Heart then this devotion has been augmented and crystalised throughout centuries of the Church’s sacred tradition and private revelation. The Cisterician monks were among the monastic orders that from the 1100’s cultivated a devotion to the Sacred Heart. Yet the great apostle of the Sacred Heart was St Margaret Mary Alacoque, the French visitation nun and mystic, who promoted devotion to the Sacred Heart throughout the whole Catholic world. On 17th December 1673, on the Feast of St. John the Apostle, St Margaret Mary was before the Blessed Sacrament. She entered into an ecstasy in which Jesus allowed her “to rest for a long time on His Divine Heart,” after the manner of St John the Apostle at the Last Supper. Jesus revealed to St Margaret Mary His Sacred Heart aflame with love for the world. In her testimony Jesus said: “My Divine Heart is so passionate of love for humanity and in particularly for you that it is not able to contain itself in the flames of this ardent love.” She then saw Jesus taking her heart, and placing it in His “like a small particle consumed in the burning furnace.” Jesus instructed her to spread devotion to His Sacred Heart specifically on the First Fridays of each month. In spite of many obstacles and sufferings, the saint was able to promote this devotion. In 1856, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the Feast of the Sacred Heart for the entire Church and in 1875 exhorted the faithful to consecrate themselves to the Sacred Heart.

As we might intuit from the description above devotion to the Sacred Heart is intimately linked to the Church’s devotion to the Eucharist. Indeed, the Feast of the Sacred Heart originally crowned the eighth day of the Octave of Corpus Christi which was traditionally celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday (in commemoration of the Last Supper). In recent years various Eucharistic miracles further cement this correlation between the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist, as forensic pathology testing has revealed that multiple samples taken from Eucharistic miracles have been identified as the living heart muscle tissue.

In this month of the Sacred Heart we should each renew our devotion to the heart of our merciful Saviour who died for love of us. Let us consider the sobering words Jesus said to St Margaret Mary: “Behold the Heart which has so deeply loved men, it has spared nothing even exhausted and consumed itself to show them my love and in return all I receive from the majority of them is ingratitude.” In a world of spiritual indifference, prideful arrogance and ingratitude let us be counted among those faithful souls who can console our Lord by honouring His Sacred Heart in a special way this month of June.

Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!