The Sacred Heart: The Antidote to a World That Has Forgotten How to Love
An essay drawn from the teachings of Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
What Is In the Old Testament, men dared to say of the Lord: “What does God know? He judges us as through a mist. The clouds are His covering, and He does not consider our affairs, for He walks about the poles of heaven.”
That was the ancient complaint: a distant God, detached and uninterested.
What Could Be But the Incarnation changed everything. God no longer walks about the poles of heaven. He lies on a manger bed of straw. He suffers with us. He bleeds with us. He dies with us.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus is not a sentimental devotion. It is not a pious decoration. It is the supreme revelation of what love actually is. And, in a world that has confused love with feeling, consent, and self-expression, that revelation is an emergency.
Pope Pius XII declared that devotion to the Sacred Heart “belongs to the very substance of the Catholic religion.” This is not one piety among many. It is the synthesis of the Catholic faith.
I. What the World Thinks Love Is (and Why It’s Wrong)
What Is The modern world has given us a definition of love so hollow it cannot sustain a marriage, let alone a soul. Love, we are told, is a feeling. It is consent. It is the free expression of desire without limits. If it feels true, it is true.
This is not love. This is self-reference dressed up in romantic clothing.
What Could Be The Catholic understanding begins where the world’s ends: love is not something we produce but something we receive. Love is defined by its object, not by its subject.
“The essence of love is to give,” Fr. John A. Hardon taught. Within the Trinity, each Divine Person from all eternity gives totally of the divine nature. God did not create because He was lonely. He created because He is love, and love wants to share what it has.
The modern world starts with the self and asks, “What do I feel?” The Catholic faith starts with God and asks, “What has He done?”
II. The Sacred Heart as the Supreme Revelation of Love
What Is There is no devotion in the Catholic Church more urgently recommended than devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus — yet most people treat it as optional sentiment.
What Could Be This is because it is, as the popes have told us, a synthesis of the entire Catholic faith.
Fr. Hardon gives us the definition:
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to the love of God, symbolized in the physical heart of Jesus who is the Son of God.
This definition contains three depths:
- The love that is in God. From all eternity, the Trinity exists in an eternal exchange of total self-giving.
- The love that is from God. Everything that exists outside of God exists only because He loves it into being.
- The love that is God. “God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son.” The Word became flesh and remains incarnate forever.
Love is testified in three ways: by words, by works, and by suffering. The highest proof is suffering for the one loved. That is exactly what God did when He became man.
At the birth of Christ, all of God’s other attributes were deliberately hidden, His power, wisdom, majesty, so that His love would shine more clearly. He became a helpless child. He took the form of a slave. He was born like an outcast among witless beasts.
This was not accident. It was divine strategy. God hid everything else so that the one thing you could not miss was His love.
III. The Twelve Promises — Love That Acts
What Is The modern world offers broken homes, hardened hearts, and the terror of dying alone.
What Could Be The Sacred Heart did not reveal itself to Saint Margaret Mary as private consolation. It revealed itself as a covenant with twelve conditional promises from Christ to all who devote themselves to His Heart.
These are God’s actual promises to act in our lives:
- “I will establish peace in their homes.” In a nation with the highest family breakdown in history, Christ promises real peace, if our wills are first conformed to His.
- “I will be the secure refuge during life, and above all, in death.” Not a feeling. An objective reality: Christ is within us as a constant bulwark.
- “Sinners will find in My Heart the source and the infinite ocean of mercy.” These sinners are us. A single act of selfless love wipes out a lifetime of sin.
- “My Divine Heart shall be their safe refuge.” The final grace: we will not die without the sacraments we need.
The condition for all twelve is the same: provided we love. Christ’s almighty power is held back until and insofar as we love Him.
IV. The Eucharist: Where the Sacred Heart Comes Down to Earth
What Is Many Catholics treat the Eucharist as a ritual and adoration as an optional extra. Many more don’t even realize that is Jesus there in person.
What Could Be The Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist.
Infinite love, who is God, became man out of love for us and then gave us Himself, body, blood, soul, and divinity, to be our food. Love wants intimacy. Love wants to dwell within the one it loves.
In the Blessed Sacrament, Christ is not only present. He is sensitive. He feels. The mystics tell us He wants us to tell Him how we feel and He will tell us how He feels.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to the Holy Eucharist. It is infinite love become incarnate and living in our midst.
V. What We Owe in Return
What Is Most spiritual lives are built on sand, comprised of feelings, good intentions, and occasional bursts of piety.
What Could Be God’s love for us in the Incarnation is the pattern for how we are to love Him in return.
The master idea is kenosis, that is, God emptying Himself for us. We must empty ourselves in return.
The one basic quality of our responsive love is humble love. Saint Benedict teaches that humility covers twelve steps and describes them as a clear, practical ladder of interior dispositions and external actions.
Our whole life should become a prayer. The Apostleship of Prayer teaches us to offer our day as a triple daily sacrifice of praise, reparation, and impetration.
Closing
What Is We live in a world that has forgotten how to love.
What Could Be The Sacred Heart is the way to love, the model, the road.
Love is not a feeling. It is a sacrifice. Love is not self-expression. It is self-emptying. Love is not defined by what it takes. It is defined by what it gives.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not an option. It is an obligation of the spiritual life. It belongs to the very substance of the Catholic religion.
As Fr. Hardon summed it up in an Ignition retreat: “The heart of all spirituality is sacrifice, and a spiritual life not built on sacrifice is building on sand.”
Lord Jesus, You revealed Your Sacred Heart to Your servant Saint Margaret Mary and gave us these twelve promises as Your covenant of love, provided we love. Give us the strength to fulfill the condition: that we may love You with our whole heart, and You may love us with Your whole divine heart, in this valley of tears and in heaven for all eternity.
Amen.
If you’d like more, and to be in awe of the reality of the Sacred Heart, please check out the mini-course prepared from Fr. Hardon’s many retreats:
This article, The Sacred Heart: The Antidote to a World That Has Forgotten How to Love is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/the-sacred-heart-the-antidote-to-a-world-that-has-forgotten-how-to-love/
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