Sacred Heart

The Sacred Heart is a Catholic devotion to the physical heart of Jesus Christ as the symbol of his divine and human love for humanity, not a historical person with a birth, death, or burial. Its remote roots lie in New Testament accounts of Christ’s wounded side and in early Christian meditation on the Passion. A more explicit cult of the Heart of Jesus took shape in Western monastic mysticism of the High Middle Ages, especially among Benedictine and Cistercian women. Saints Gertrude of Helfta and Mechtilde of Hackeborn, writing in the late thirteenth century in Saxony, described visions in which Christ invited contemplation of his Heart as a furnace of charity and a refuge for sinners. These texts remained largely within cloistered and mystical circles for several centuries.

In the seventeenth century the devotion acquired a public, liturgical character in France. Saint John Eudes (1601–1680), founder of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, promoted joint veneration of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, composed offices and Masses in their honor, and saw a feast of the Sacred Heart celebrated in some French dioceses during his lifetime. The form of the devotion that became standard in the modern Church is closely tied to the reported visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690), a Visitation nun at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy. Between December 1673 and June 1675 she described apparitions in which Christ showed his Heart, burning with love, encircled by thorns, wounded, and surmounted by a cross, and asked for a feast on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, for Holy Communion on the first Friday of each month, and for a Holy Hour of reparation.

Papal recognition followed gradually. In 1765 Pope Clement XIII approved a Mass and Office of the Sacred Heart for Poland and for the Archconfraternity of the Sacred Heart in Rome. Pope Pius IX extended the feast to the universal Church in 1856. Later popes gave the devotion a strong magisterial foundation: Leo XIII consecrated the human race to the Sacred Heart in the encyclical Annum sacrum (1899); Pius XI treated reparation in Miserentissimus Redemptor (1928); Pius XII set out the biblical and theological grounds of the cult in Haurietis aquas (1956). The familiar image of Christ displaying a flaming, thorn-crowned heart became one of the most widespread Catholic iconographic types from the eighteenth century onward.

Associated practices include the Nine First Fridays, the Holy Hour, the Litany of the Sacred Heart (approved in 1891), and the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart in homes, popularized in the early twentieth century by Father Mateo Crawley-Boevey. Numerous religious institutes, among them the Priests of the Sacred Heart and the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, take their name from the devotion. In the Roman Rite the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is kept on the Friday following the second Sunday after Pentecost (the Friday after Corpus Christi), with the memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the following day. The devotion remains a major expression of Catholic piety centered on Christ’s love, reparation, and mercy.