The Sacred Heart of Jesus: Love, Mercy, and Healing
The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is primarily associated with the seventeenth-century nun, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and with the Jesuits who subsequently promoted the devotion. But this feast also has medieval roots in connection with the Dominicans. In the thirteenth century, St. Albert the Great encouraged meditation upon the pierced heart of Christ as a sign of God’s love and upon the blood and water that poured from His side, which signify the sacraments that flow from the Cross. In the following century, Dominican mystics often centered their contemplation upon the image of the Sacred Heart. Bl. Henry Suso spoke of it as a “magnet of love” drawing all human hearts to Christ. St. Catherine of Siena experienced a mystical exchange of hearts with Jesus, and she described Christ’s heart as a “furnace of divine love.” Based on this tradition, in the fifteenth century the Order of Preachers began celebrating a Feast of the Wounds of Christ on the date that the universal Church would come to celebrate as the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart (third Friday after Pentecost) centuries later.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart arose in both medieval and early modern Europe as a timely response to flawed spiritualities. St. Dominic originally founded the Order to preach to the Cathars, a Gnostic sect that saw the material world, including our bodies, as fundamentally evil, a prison for the spirit. In opposition to the Cathars’ rejection of the Incarnation of Christ and the sacraments, Dominicans affirmed the goodness of creation and reiterated the physicality of Christianity—Jesus is truly God made flesh, with a real human heart. God continues to relate with us through material things, especially the sacraments.
In the seventeenth century, the revelations St. Margaret Mary received were a remedy to the distortions of her time. Outside the Church, philosophers turned to rationalism, giving priority to the mind and abstract ideas as the center of reality. Meanwhile, the heresy of Jansenism spread like a poison through the Church. Jansenists portrayed God as a remote and cold judge, humans as depraved, and salvation reserved for a select few, which led many to a strict, fear-based practice of religion. In response, God chose St. Margaret Mary to spread the message that God has a heart—literally and figuratively. Devotion to the Sacred Heart moves us from heady theological speculation to a tender heart-to-heart encounter with Christ, who reveals the extent of God’s love and mercy through His sacrifice on the Cross.
In our own time, Pope Francis and Pope Leo XIV have asserted how devotion to the Sacred Heart is still relevant in the face of contemporary mutations of Gnosticism and Jansenism. Secular culture has become disembodied in various ways. People are reduced to statistics, productivity data, and algorithms, while the longings and sufferings of individuals and communities are ignored. We are taught that one’s inner thoughts, feelings, and desires are the “real me,” and the body is incidental, inconvenient, or even a problem to be overcome. In our digital age, we can live in a virtual reality, losing touch with embodied life in all its beauty and messiness, becoming obsessed with projecting a perfect self-image on social media. Polarization and tribalism lead to a culture where only those who perfectly adhere to my ideology and moral standards are accepted; all others are ignored or canceled.
Considering these contemporary societal ills, the Sacred Heart of Jesus calls us back to reality. We are embodied souls—the physical, intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and relational dimensions of humanity all matter. Christianity is more than a philosophy or set of rules and practices. It is an encounter with a God who entered history, who knows by lived experience what it’s like to be human, and who is still tangibly present to us. In the heart of Christ, burning with love for all people, our own hearts are enkindled. We are moved to have compassion for others and take actions to bring healing to our world. The message of the Sacred Heart is good news we need to contemplate and preach today.
Fr. James Peter Trares, OP