Foundations — Lessons on the Sacred Heart
Foundations: What Is the Sacred Heart Devotion?
The synthesis of Catholic faith & devotion
There is no devotion in the Catholic Church that has been more often and more urgently recommended to the faithful than devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This is not surprising once we realize that devotion to the Heart of Jesus is, as the popes have been telling us, a synthesis of the Catholic faith.
My purpose in this conference is to do only one thing: try to explain as clearly as possible what this devotion means. As we know (and we cannot know too well) that the love of anyone or of anything depends on prior knowledge. Our love and putting into practice what we know may fall short of our knowledge. But we shall be only, humanly speaking, as devoted to the heart of Christ as we understand what this devotion is all about.
Once we understand, and in the degree of our understanding, we shall not be surprised at statements of so many of the modern popes, especially of Pope Pius the Twelfth, who declared , and this bears remembering, that devotion to the Sacred Heart is an obligation for all Catholics and a special duty of priests and religious: to both cultivate in their own lives and to propagate in the lives of others.
Pope Pius warned that there are some who, quote, “join the very essence of this devotion with other forms of piety which the Church approves and encourages but does not command. They put this devotion on an equal footing with other forms of piety. They look upon this devotion as some kind of additive that one is free to use according to his own good pleasure,” end quote. The Vicar of Christ: not so, the Pope declared. Devotion to the Heart of Jesus belongs to the very substance of the Catholic religion.
The Pope’s Warning
Pope Pius XII warned that some Catholics treat devotion to the Sacred Heart as optional , that is “some kind of additive that one is free to use according to his own good pleasure.” The Vicar of Christ was clear: devotion to the Sacred Heart is not optional. It belongs to the very substance of the Catholic religion.
June 1 — What Is the Sacred Heart?
A Descriptive 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.
There are then, in the light of this definition, three parts that deserve to be separately and, I hope, not unclearly explained. My hope is that this necessarily theological analysis will help us put the devotion into better practice, because it desperately needs to be better practiced among priests, religious, and the laity in the Catholic Church today.
First then: what is the focus or the object of devotion to the Heart of Jesus? It is the love of God. Saying this, we immediately ask ourselves and have to answer: what do we mean by the love of God? We, or the Church, more accurately, means three things. It means the love that is in God, the love that is from God, and the love that is God.
The Three Levels of God’s Love
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to three things:
- The love that is in God — from all eternity, constituting the divinity itself.
- The love that is from God — creation, providence, every breath you’ve ever taken.
- The love that is God — Jesus Christ, the love that became flesh.
This love, therefore, means that love that was in God from all eternity, which indeed constitutes the divinity. Even the expression “from all eternity” seems to date it. Well, God has no dates. God was from always. This God, who always not was, but always is, is a loving community: a Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There has always been in God a plurality of persons, so that each person had two others to love.
You see immediately that in order to love, even God, within the bosom of His own Trinity, had to have others with whom He would share. Each person perfectly shared and shares the fullness of His divine nature with the other two. And this everlasting sharing of what each possesses is God.
Thus, the first perspective of what our faith tells us we mean by the love of God: the love that is in God in virtue of His being God, as John defines Him.
June 2 — The Love That Is FROM God
The Love That Is From God
It secondly means the love that is from God. This love had a beginning, that is, not a beginning in God, but a beginning in the effects which God produced outside of Himself. By which we comprise all the things that God has done for His creatures outside of Himself in the works of creation and His divine providence that He has so lavishly been pouring out.
That’s not quite correct, because the world itself is part of that outpouring. Our very being, the very flesh with which we breathe and the mind with which we think, is uniquely and exclusively the product of God’s love. Anything exists outside of God only because God loves it: and loves it first by bringing it out of nothing into being — and that’s quite some love. And then, having given it existence, He continues to pour out His goodness on the creatures of His own hands.
That’s the second perspective of this one focus towards which the devotion to the Heart of Jesus is directed: the love that is from God.
We could begin to open, not just a book, but all the libraries of Catholic literature, to reveal the ways in which God has been and continues loving us. But still, the second way in which the Sacred Heart symbolizes God, not only as a love, but as loving: God, the loving God, to manifest His love, became one of us.
June 3 — The Love That IS God
The Love That Is God
It finally means the love that is God. The love that is God in the person of Jesus Christ. Saint John, having defined “God is love,” tells us that God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son into the world. It is God who became flesh, and for our purpose, it is love that became flesh to dwell among us — on this third level, which, as we shall see, is necessarily the most prominent feature of devotion to the Sacred Heart, namely the love that is God who became man out of love for us.
This loving God who became one of us loves us. And He loves us as God because He is God. He also loves us as man, and He loves us both in spirit and, as the Church keeps reminding us, also in body. God wanted to love the mankind He created not only as God but in kind. God had to have a body to embrace us human beings.
So then, all of this is what we mean by the love of God to which we are devoted when we are devoted to the Heart of Jesus. The love that is God from all eternity, that became man, that we might love Him in return.
Love, we know, is testified in three principal ways: in what we say, in what we do, and in how much we exert ourselves and suffer for the person whom we love. But where words merely lead us to believe that we are loved, we hope the person means what he or she is saying. And works, or what a person does, prove love in action — more expressive and certain than words. But the highest and infallible evidence of love is when a person not only tells us he loves us or does something for us, but exerts himself for us and in fact suffers to prove that he cares.
The Highest Evidence of Love
Words say we’re loved. Works prove it. But the highest evidence is when someone not only says they love you or does something for you, but suffers for you. That’s what God did when He became man.
Then we want to, almost in spite of ourselves, love that person in return.
That’s what God did when He became man.
June 4 — Devotion: Our Response to God’s Love
Devotion Is Love Matching Love
So now we come to the second level of our analysis of what this devotion is all about. If its object or focus is God’s love for us, its expression, hence the word devotion, is what we do in response to what God has been doing for us. You might, if you wish, draw a line putting the words, say, on paper: “Devotion to the Sacred Heart.” Draw a line between “devotion” and “Sacred Heart.” The Sacred Heart side is God’s side, that’s His love. The devotion is our side, meaning, it’s what we do about it.
Our response, therefore, to God’s love is our devotion.
And the devotion is just that, as we speak of anybody being devoted. Devotion is more than care. It’s more than concern. It is more than attention. Devotion is a whole soul giving of oneself to another.
And it might be well to indulge in just a moment’s etymology. In the center of the word devotion is the syllable vot, which is simply from the Latin votum, of which the English equivalent is “vow.” When I am devoted to someone, I vow myself to that someone. It means, therefore, that we are dedicated to whom? To God. And why? Because, shall we use the word, He has been so dedicated to us. You might say it is devotion meeting devotion. Or, for our purpose, it is love matching love.
June 5 — The Master Idea: Kenosis
God Emptying Himself for Us
If the Incarnation, then, is the great proof, get that: the greatest, of God’s love for us, we ask then: what should be our devoted love in return? God’s love for us in the Incarnation is meant to be a pattern of how we are to love Him in a way that corresponds to His goodness in becoming man.
What we want to bring out in this meditation is: what lesson, what specific lesson, does God want to teach us, not only that we should love Him, but in how we are to love Him? The method, or the pattern, or the model, of how God loved us in the Incarnation is the focus of our question: how should we then love Him in return? What is the design in the pattern? What’s the theme? What’s the master idea in God’s love shown in the Incarnation?
The master idea is God’s emptying Himself for us. The Incarnation is God emptying Himself for us. If we are to love God correspondingly, we are to empty ourselves for love of Him. The biblical word is kenosis. He emptied Himself, insofar as it is possible for God, without ceasing to be God, to hide His divinity. God did it in becoming man.
The one basic quality of our responsive love of God, in imitation of His love for us in becoming man, is the practice of humility, or, as we may better call it, the practice of humble love. Love has many qualities. It must have this one; otherwise it is not born of God. It must be humble.
That’s what the Incarnation is: it is the humility of God.
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.., Ignatian Retreats on Sacrifice and Love
Interstitial: The Problem Nobody Names
You’ve heard the phrase “Sacred Heart devotion” a thousand times. You’ve probably even said it. But if you’re honest, if you’re willing to be honest right now, you have no idea what it actually means or why it would change anything about your Tuesday.
Especially now. When the headlines make faith feel like a contact sport. When the people who are supposed to be guiding you seem to be arguing with each other about which way is north. When the internet tells you that the only way to stay sane is to pick a side and fight.
That’s not ignorance. That’s fatigue. The gap between knowing the words and feeling the weight behind them. Between “I believe God loves me” and actually knowing it in your bones when the doctor calls, when the marriage strains, when the silence in your own chest gets too loud to ignore.
What follows is not another thing to argue about. It’s an explanation of what happens when divine love decides to stop being abstract and starts having lips, eyes, and hands.
Between knowing the words and feeling the weight behind them.
