The Twelve Promises — Lessons on the Sacred Heart

When to read this: When you’re feeling uncertain about your state of life, or when someone needs to hear that Christ’s love isn’t abstract but specific — grace for your exact situation, peace in your home, mercy for your sins.

The Twelve Promises of the Sacred Heart

God’s conditional promises to all who devote themselves to His Heart

The Twelve Promises of the Sacred Heart were revealed to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, the Visitation nun, whose spiritual director (Blessed Claude de la Colombière of the Society of Jesus) attested to the authenticity of her mystical experiences. There were many more revelations than the twelve we commonly associate with the Sacred Heart, but these twelve synthesize all the others.

You might say the Twelve Promises are an expansion of the Eight Beatitudes, the promise from Christ, but provided we fulfill the condition. These are the twelve conditional promises of the Sacred Heart.

Each promise begins with the same word: “I.” It is Christ Himself who speaks. And each promise carries the same proviso: provided we love.

The Condition

Each of Christ’s twelve promises carries one condition: provided we love. That’s it. Not perfection. Not a long list of rules. Love. The created will produced hell. If we love God, He will love us. But that if… the if depends on us.

June 10 — Promises One and Two: Grace for Your State of Life, Peace in Your Home

First Promise: “I will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.”

God wants every person to have a state of life: a stable, constant, lifelong, dedicated, consecrated way of life. And it is part of God’s eternal providence. Because He wants us to have a state of life, it is part of His providence to provide all the light we need for the mind, and all the strength we need for the will, otherwise known as actual graces, in order that, having entered on a state of life, we might live that state of life faithfully until the end.

Every state of life: the priesthood, the religious life, marriage… requires, if a person is to live that state of life according to the will of God, much, much constant help from God’s grace. The first promise is the assurance that God will give us, provided we are devoted to His Sacred Heart, all the graces necessary. Necessary for what? Necessary to remain in their state of life. Necessary to remain faithful in their state of life. Necessary to become holy in their state of life.

Second Promise: “I will establish peace in their homes.”

When this promise was first made, no doubt it was very necessary for people to realize there is such a thing as peaceful home life. But today, in the shambles that a godless philosophy has made of the homes of domestic families, of the homes of religious families, we are living in a country which has the highest breakdown of family life in the world.

But note the promise of the Sacred Heart: “I will establish peace in their homes.” Peace, evidently, between the members of the family. What Our Lord is telling us in this promise is a promise He gives of providing peace between people. But there can be no peace between or among people unless there is first peace within people, and there can be no peace within people unless their wills are conformed to the will of God.

We shall be in as much peace with other people as we are ourselves conformed to the will of Jesus Christ. “If you love Me,” says Christ, “keep My commandments.”

June 11 — Promises Three and Four: Comfort in Affliction, Refuge in Death

Third Promise: “I will comfort them in all their afflictions.”

What is the underlying premise of this promise? It is that anyone devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus should expect trials, difficulties. We call them problems. In a word, the cross. “If you wish to be My disciples,” says the Master, “you must carry your cross daily.” He carried His; we are to carry ours.

What Jesus is promising is what He promised in the Beatitudes: “Blessed are they who mourn, they shall be comforted.” The English word “comfort” or “comforted” does not bring out the full revealed meaning of what Jesus is telling us. We shall be made fortes, that is, strong. We shall be provided fortitude, strength, and first strength of mind, deep conviction of faith.

The only courageous people in the world are convinced people. Everyone else is a coward. Convinced of what? Convinced, in what faith this takes, that the trials of our lives are too much for us to cope with alone.

The same God who sends the affliction … get that proviso, provided … I ask Him for the help. He will give me the grace I need, not to get rid of the tribulation, but to become stronger. The main reason that Christ sends us tribulations is that by trusting in Him, in His divine Heart, we might become stronger through the trial that, with His grace, we overcome.

Fourth Promise: “I will be the secure refuge during life, and above all, in death.”

Refuge means many things, but here it means assurance, hope, trust — not merely a subjective emotion, but the objective, real, actual belief that there is more to life than what we see with the eyes of the body, or even with our naked minds can understand. Jesus Christ is not only with us, He is within us as the constant bulwark during life.

And I have assisted enough people entering eternity — how we need this secure refuge before we leave this world and make that last step into the world to come.

June 12 — Promises Five and Six: Blessing on Undertakings, Ocean of Mercy

Fifth Promise: “I will bestow a large blessing on all their undertakings.”

Jesus Christ is the Master of the Universe. He is the Lord of history. There is no chance, nothing trivial, nothing ever merely happens as far as He is concerned. And consequently, provided we love Him, and that’s what the Sacred Heart is all about, provided we love Him, He assures us of His extraordinary grace in all our enterprises.

I prefix extra because it is extraordinary grace. I would like to have, as a priest, apostolates out of all proportion beyond the capacity or the gifts or the talents of the individual engaged in the undertaking. God will work miracles, no other word counts, He will work miracles through us, many, no doubt most of which, in His wisdom, He keeps hidden from our eyes to keep us humble.

I have watched people over the years. My fortieth year in the priesthood. I have taught over five hundred of my own Jesuit priests. By now I can look back and almost make a checklist of those who succeeded in their undertakings and those who dismally failed. All I can tell you is there is no proportion … zero … no proportion between a person’s natural talents and ability and the sometimes phenomenal achievements that all of us make. The key is not natural talent. The key is a deep, supernatural, prayerful love of Jesus Christ.

Sixth Promise: “Sinners will find in My Heart the source and the infinite ocean of mercy.”

These sinners, about whom the Sacred Heart is speaking, are no strangers in some distant land. Bad grammar, but good theology — these sinners are us. A single act of the selfless love of Jesus Christ … that is all it takes. A lifetime of estrangement from God, of resisting His will, of committing all the crimes in the criminal code — a single act of the selfless love of Jesus Christ. That is the sixth promise. It wipes out a lifetime of sin.

This promise was given in a time when the virus of Jansenism had infected the Catholic Church, the heresy that Christ died only for the predestined. That is a lie. That is straight, undiluted Calvinism, except in this case taught by a Catholic bishop. This sixth promise is the heart of devotion to the Sacred Heart. Christ died for all mankind. Whoever is finally not saved will be lost, not because God chose that some people go to heaven and others go to hell. Some will be lost because they refuse to repent, and the heart of repentance is trust in the love of God, in His divine mercy.

June 13 — Promises Seven and Eight: From Tepidity to Fervor, The Quick Road to Perfection

Seventh Promise: “Tepid souls shall grow fervent.”

How the Lord hates tepidity! “I would,” Christ told Saint John, speaking prophetically for all ages, “that you are hot or cold, but because you are tepid — this is Christ speaking — I will vomit you from My mouth.”

No matter how tepid we may be, the key is: be converted from your tepidity by doing what? Beg for Christ’s mercy. Trust in the love of His Sacred Heart, that your past life will be wiped out and you can start all over again. And how this needs to be said, especially to those who are specially called to sanctity — Christ’s priests and religious.

The secret is a sincere, honest, interior surrender. Surrender of what? There is only one real surrender we have to make in life: of self. To whom? To God. I’ve seen it … no years-long process, at least in the cases I’ve given over the years, a drifter, a loafer in a moment, provided the graces are responded to … a changed man, a changed woman.

Eighth Promise: “Fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.”

Once more, the key word is the adverb “quickly.” A single — I repeat — a single act of the selfless love of Jesus Christ, who we believe is God, is enough to make us saints. The key is that we have enough faith in mind and fervor of will to mean it.

I have dealt with by now thousands of souls, I have seen it happen in a moment. Say it and mean it: “My Jesus, I love You.” But mean it — mean it. And you are on your road to Christ’s promise of high perfection.

One of the most sobering features in the history of sanctity is the number — the predominant number — of young people who have become saints. In my own Society of Jesus: Stanislaus Kostka, a youngster; Aloysius Gonzaga; John Berchmans; and the Church’s universal patron of the missions, St. Francis Xavier, who died at the ripe old age of forty-six. The key is not how long we live. The key is how ready we are to plunge, jump in, and give ourselves entirely for the blessing.

June 14 — Promises Nine and Ten: Images in Our Homes, Priests Touching Hardened Hearts

Ninth Promise: “I will bless every place where an image of My Heart shall be set up and honored.”

I would not be here today except for a widowed mother who had a great devotion to the Sacred Heart. My first rational, conscious experience is of a picture of the Sacred Heart over my bed in my third year. We are not talking the language of infantile piety. I respect my intelligence too much to be talking some cheap language about holy pictures. I know enough theology to know that in God’s ordinary providence, He does not confer His interior graces to the soul except through what we call external graces that we can see, touch, feel in the external order.

Images of the Sacred Heart are divinely ordained means of channeling internal graces for the mind to know, for the will to be able to do what Jesus Christ wants us to do.

But notice the ending of that promise: where an image of His Heart is not only set up but honored. I recommend some equivalent of a shrine to the Sacred Heart in every home. All I know is that my mother and I had one, so that the image will be both set up and every time you pass it, it will be honored.

Tenth Promise: “I will give priests the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.”

Amen. In preaching to priests, in giving them conferences and teaching them, I tell them: Fathers, cultivate devotion to the Sacred Heart, and you will have extraordinary influence over souls. No question about it, especially the most difficult souls.

One story after another crosses my path of miraculous conversion of sinners to the ministration of priests whose own devotion to the Sacred Heart was simple but strong. If you have some great sinner to convert, let me give you a suggestion: find a priest who has a tender, childlike devotion to the Heart of Jesus, and leave the rest up to the Savior.

June 15 — Promises Eleven and Twelve: Names Written in His Heart, Grace of Final Perseverance

Eleventh Promise: “Those who promote this devotion shall have their names written in My Heart, never to be blotted out.”

This needs saying. If we are to practice devotion to the Heart of Jesus, we are also to promote it. If you really love someone, you want to share what you have that is precious. What is more precious to share with others than our own deep love?

Why the Sacred Heart? Because, as Margaret Mary’s spiritual director put it in one simple sentence: “Devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to Jesus present in the Holy Eucharist.” Period. Is that not neat? Because you see, God, having become man, God has a heart, and His Heart is alive and in our midst, dwelling, as we believe, in the Holy Eucharist.

The more we do to promote devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, which is the living, pulsating Heart of the Son of God dwelling in our midst, the more this Christ will not only bless us, but through us, everyone whose life we touch.

Twelfth Promise: “I promise you, in the excessive mercy of My Heart, that My all-powerful love will grant to all those who communicate on the first Friday in nine successive months the grace of final perseverance. They shall not die in My disgrace without receiving their sacraments. My Divine Heart shall be their safe refuge.”

The Church has approved the twelfth promise in canonizing Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. We make these Nine First Fridays, and we should continue remaking them, especially as communions of reparation. And Christ assures us: no matter what we may have done, please God, we will not be estranged from God. The Sacred Heart assures us we will not die without our sacraments. What are they? The sacraments we need to die in God’s friendship.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is the most powerful lifetime prayer for begging for the most important grace we need, the last grace in our lives: the grace of dying in the friendship of God.

The Arc

The promises begin with grace for your present state of life and end with grace for your final moment of death. They trace the full arc of the Christian life — from the first grace to the last. Read them as a map, not a checklist.

June 16 — Reflection: The Heart of All Twelve Promises

The twelve promises are not a checklist of devotional rewards. They are a portrait of what a life surrendered to the Sacred Heart looks like — from the first grace given us in our state of life to the last grace we receive at the moment of death.

They begin with grace for the present and end with grace for the future. They promise peace in the home, strength in affliction, mercy for sinners, fervor for the tepid, perfection for the devoted, blessing on our work, and a secure refuge in death.

And the condition for all twelve is the same: provided we love.

“I love those who love Me,” says God in Proverbs. That is a terrifying statement. Some years ago, when I submitted a manuscript for diocesan censorship, and I had this statement — minus the quotation marks — in one of the paragraphs, the censor said: approve for publication, but drop that sentence. It’s untrue.

Dear Father, go to your Bible. Proverbs, chapter 8, verse 17.

It is an awful statement. It is also a most consoling statement. What is God, whose name is Love, telling us? Your love for Me, says God, is the condition of My love for you. You don’t theologically analyze that statement. You gulp and live it.

The created will produced hell. If we love God, He will love us. But that if — I repeat — you don’t explain this, the if depends on us.

— Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. — What is Biblical Spirituality? | Biblical Spirituality Retreat

Interstitial: Promises Are Words. Words Don’t Stay.

Twelve promises. That’s a lot. More than most people get from God in a lifetime. And they’re beautiful: peace in the home, mercy for sinners, the grace of final perseverance. But here’s the thing about promises. They’re still just words until something backs them up.

You can believe a promise and still lie awake at 3am wondering if it’s real. Believing God will keep His word is different from knowing He’s here, sitting in your kitchen while the house is quiet, while the diagnosis is pending, while you’re trying to figure out how to love someone who makes it impossible.

What follows is not a theological argument. It’s the answer to a simple question: if God made all those promises, how does He actually stay close enough to keep them?

Believing God will keep His word is different from knowing He’s here.