SHEPHERD'S VOICE JUNE 2023 - THE MOST SACRED HEART OF JESUS: FOUNT OF INFINITE LOVE and MERCY

Every year the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Friday in the octave following the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord (Corpus Christi). This year it falls on June 16. For us in the Archdiocese of Delhi this is the principal feast because our Cathedral is dedicated to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

As we enter our Cathedral compound the words that greet us first are those high on the façade of the Cathedral: SACARATISSIMO CORDI JESU , which mean ‘To the Most Sacred Heat of Jesus’. Our forefathers put these words there because the heart of Jesus is the symbol and fount of God’s infinite love and mercy towards sinful humanity – a truth that can never be denied and which calls everyone to drink at the wellsprings of love which is the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

What is the origin of the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, so widespread in the Catholic Church? Its origin is in our Christian faith itself which we receive as a gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of our Baptism. Our Baptism calls us to a personal relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ who loved us and loved us unto the end (cf. John 13:1).

The infinite love and mercy of God manifested in the paschal mystery of Christ are central themes in our Christian faith, but the widespread devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus happens in the 17 th century followed by the institution of the feast. It was a time of Christian revival and the emergence of a movement in the Lutheran Church that has been termed ‘Pietism’. The pietistic movement stressed a personal experience of Christ and a personal relationship with the Lord based on the Bible as against impersonal intellectualism as well as ignorance of the Bible and shallowness of faith. This movement quickly influenced all of Protestantism and is also considered as one of the most important causes for various Christian denominations to come together in the ‘ecumenical movement’ for the unity of all Christians.

There is no doubt that the Catholic Church, after the 16 th century Protestant Reformation, was in need of revival of the Christian faith in terms of a personal experience of salvation in Christ and a holiness of life based on the Bible. It was at this time that the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus emerges at the centre stage and its popularity is attributed to the apparitions of Our Lord Jesus Christ to the mystic nun Margaret Mary Alacoque (now a canonised saint) of the Visitation Order at Paray-le-Monial in France in the 17 th century.

Margaret Mary Alacoque was a very devout young girl who began to practise austerity and penance from the age of nine after her First Holy Communion. Although she had made a vow to the Blessed Virgin Mary to consecrate herself to religious life after she was miraculously cured of rheumatic fever, she was never really serious about that vow and went about socializing in view of getting a suitable husband and settling down in life. However, one night, after returning from a ball for Carnival dressed in her finery, she experienced a vision of Christ, scourged and bloody. He reproached her for her forgetfulness of him; yet he also reassured her by demonstrating that his heart was filled with love for her, because of the childhood promise she had made to his Blessed Mother. As a result, she determined to fulfil her vow and entered the Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial on 25 May 1671 when she was only 24 years of age. In the convent she had to undergo many trials in order to prove the genuineness of her vocation, and finally was admitted to profession on 6 November 1672. She has been described as a humble, simple, frank, and above all patient in her relationship with others in the community.

In the monastery Margaret received several private revelations of Our Lord, the first one being on 27 December 1673 and the final one 18 months later. Our Lord revealed to her his Sacred Heart burning with love for humanity and asked her to popularize the devotion to his Sacred Heart the form of which would be a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament every Thursday night to remember his Passion and Death and participating in the Holy Mass and receiving Holy Communion every first Friday of the month. Jesus disclosed to her the wonders of his love, telling her that he desired to make them known to all humankind and to diffuse the treasures of his goodness to very human person, and that he had chosen her for this mission.

She writes in her short work, La Devotion au Sacr é-Coeur de Jesus (The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus):

And He [Christ] showed me that it was His great desire of being loved by men (sic) and of withdrawing them from the path of ruin that made Him want to manifest His Heart to me, with all the treasures of love, of mercy, of grace, of sanctification and salvation which it contains, in order that those who desire to render Him and procure Him all the honour and love possible might themselves be abundantly enriched with those divine treasures of which His heart is the source.”

It was only in 1683 that Margaret’s superiors and ecclesiastical authorities were finally convinced of the authenticity of the visions - a decade after she received them. Margaret died on 17 October 1690. She was beatified by Pope Leo XII in 1864 and canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920. Her feast is celebrated on 16 October.

In his encyclical letter Miserentissimus Redemptor(1928), Pope Pius XI affirmed the Catholic Church’s position regarding the credibility of the visions received by Margaret Mary Alacoque. The Holy Father affirms that Jesus “manifested Himself” to Maragaret Mary Alacoque and “promised her that all those who rendered this honour to His Heart would be endowed with an abundance of heavenly graces”.

Why is the devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus coupled with the devotion to Divine Mercy so dear to us?

It is dear to us because the symbol of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus speaks to us both of our unworthiness before God which makes us humble, as well of the infinite love and mercv of God in Jesus Christ our Saviour which makes us joyful. It calls us to repent for our sins and plunge into the ocean of mercy symbolized by the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. This mercy of God forgives us all our sins and wipes away all our guilt. When we behold the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we know we are loved and affirmed by God as we are and we need not be burdened by our past and the baggage we carry in our life. Christ has taken that baggage upon himself and given us freedom. If that is so, we can also relate to others from the Heart of Christ .

Throughout his ministry Christ our Lord went about proclaiming this Good News of God’s Kingdom, calling everyone to come back to God our Father with childlike trust and receive through his Son “grace upon grace” (John 1:16). Gazing at the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus we walk with him once again in his life and ministry. We hear his words of truth, receive his healing and forgiving touch, experience his compassion, become enveloped in his love, follow him in discipleship, accompany him in joy on the way of the cross, stand with him on Calvary and of course encounter him as our Risen Lord in the Breaking of the Bread. He pours his Spirit on us and sends us to the ends of the earth as witnesses of his Love until he comes again.

The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is nothing else but the Gospel itself. The devotion is entirely evangelical from all points of view as it draws us into the mystery of personal relationship with Jesus Christ our loving Lord and Saviour who tells Margaret Mary Alacoque: “Behold the heart which has so loved men(sic)that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love; and 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.”

There is another historical context as to why the Lord appeared to Margaret Mary Alacoque and specifically requested her to popularize the devotion to his Most Sacred Heart in the Church and have a ‘feast’ instituted for the same.

A theological theory popularised by the theologian Cornelius Otto Jansen (1585-1638) and called ‘Jansenism’ had suddenly become vogue in the Catholic Church. It down-played human freedom and emphasized the supremacy of God’s will and the efficaciousness of God’s grace to such an extent that it spoke of God’s predestination of some for heaven and others for hell, irrespective of merits. Jansenist theology argued that God gives some people the graces necessary for salvation and withholds them from others. The result of this idea would be that some people are going to hell, and there’s literally nothing they can do about it. They are not saved – not because they refuse God’s offer of grace – but simply because God doesn’t want to save them. This theory was leaning towards some tenets of the theology propagated by the Protestant Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin during the 16 th century Protestant Reformation.

Jansenism refused absolution to penitents who demonstrated ‘imperfect contrition’ (i.e., avoiding sin out of ‘fear of hell’ and not ‘true love of God’) and warned such penitents against receiving Holy Communion to avoid scandal of ‘unworthy reception’. In short, Jansenism portrayed God as a severe and implacable judge who punishes, therefore to be feared rather than a loving father who welcomes and forgives the sinner, therefore to be loved.

Jansenism was condemned as a heresyby Pope Innocent X in 1653 and in 1856 Pope Pius IX instituted the Feast (now ‘solemnity’) of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus on the Friday after Corpus Christi. Pope Pius XI in the above-mentioned encyclical says: “the feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was instituted at a time when men were oppressed by the sad and gloomy severity of Jansenism, which had made their hearts grow cold, and shut them out from the love of God and the hope of salvation”.

Let us pray: O Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, filled with Infinite Love; broken by our ingratitude and pierced by our sins; yet loving us still; accept the consecration we make to Thee of all that we are and all that we have. Take every faculty of our souls and bodies, only day by day draw us nearer and nearer to Thy Sacred Heart; and there as we shall hear the lesson, teach us Thy Holy Way.

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