Immaculate Heart of Mary

The Immaculate Heart of Mary is a Roman Catholic devotion to the interior life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, her joys and sorrows, her virtues and hidden perfections, and above all her virginal love for God, her maternal love for Jesus, and her compassionate love for all people. It is not the biography of a separate historical individual, but a title and spiritual focus concerning Mary of Nazareth, the mother of Jesus, as presented in the New Testament and in later Christian tradition. The Gospels portray Mary as a Jewish woman of Galilee, betrothed and then married to Joseph, who conceived Jesus by the Holy Spirit. Precise years and places of her birth and death are not established by contemporary historical documents; Christian tradition situates her life in the first century in Galilee and Judea. Passages such as Luke 2:19 and 2:51, in which Mary treasures and ponders events in her heart, and Simeon's prophecy that a sword would pierce her soul (Luke 2:35), have long been read as pointing to her interior life and her share in the Passion.

Devotion to Mary's heart developed gradually in the medieval and early modern West, in parallel with devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The seventeenth-century French priest Saint John Eudes (1601-1680) is widely regarded as the principal promoter of a distinct liturgical cult of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. He wrote treatises, composed offices and Masses, and founded religious families dedicated to this spirituality. In the following centuries the devotion was taken up by other saints and by the papacy. Pope Pius VII and later pontiffs granted indulgences and local feasts. In 1942, during the Second World War, Pope Pius XII consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In 1944 he extended a feast of the Immaculate Heart to the universal Latin Church, assigning it to 22 August. After the liturgical reform of 1969, the memorial was transferred to the Saturday immediately following the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, so that the two Hearts are celebrated on consecutive days; 22 August became the memorial of the Queenship of Mary.

A major modern impetus came from the apparitions reported at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. According to the accounts of Lucia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, the Virgin Mary asked for devotion to her Immaculate Heart, the consecration of Russia, and the practice of the First Saturdays of reparation, warning of war and persecution if her requests were neglected. Subsequent papal acts, including consecrations or acts of entrustment by Pius XII, Paul VI, John Paul II (notably in 1984), and later popes, have been understood by many Catholics in relation to those requests. The children of Fatima were later beatified and canonized; the devotion itself, however, is directed to Mary, who in Catholic doctrine was never subject to the ordinary processes of beatification and canonization because of her unique role as Mother of God.

In art the Immaculate Heart is often shown as a heart burning with love, encircled by roses or a wreath of flowers, pierced by a sword, and sometimes surrounded by thorns or radiating light, frequently paired with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Theologically the heart is called immaculate in connection with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (defined by Pius IX in 1854), Mary's freedom from original sin, and her sinless cooperation with the redemption. Catholic teaching insists that this devotion is veneration of Mary's love and holiness, not adoration, which is due to God alone. Numerous religious congregations, parishes, cathedrals, and schools, especially the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and similarly named institutes, have taken the title. Because the subject is a Marian title and liturgical devotion rather than a canonized person with a civil registry, fields such as a verified year of birth or death, a documented burial place, and a list of exclusive patronages cannot be filled from reliable historical sources without conjecture; tradition and liturgy, not archival biography, are the proper context for understanding the Immaculate Heart of Mary.