The Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus 2025

Lo, how the savage crew / Of our proud sins hath rent / The heart of our all-gracious God, / That heart so innocent.

The soldier’s quivering lance / Our guilt it was that drave, / Our wicked deeds that to its point / Such cruel sharpness gave.

O wounded heart, whence sprang / The Church, the Saviour’s bride; / Thou door of our salvation’s ark / Set in its mystic side.

The Adoration of the Five Wounds of Jesus, depicted in a prayerbook made for Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg by the Flemish artist Simon Bening, ca. 1525-30.

Thou holy fount, whence flows / The sacred sevenfold flood, / Where we our filthy robes may cleanse / In the Lamb’s saving blood:

By sorrowful relapse, / thee will we rend no more; / But like the flames, those types of love, / Strive heavenward to soar.

Father and Son supreme / And Spirit, hear our cry; / Whose is the kingdom, praise and power, / Through all eternity. Amen.

(The hymn for Vespers of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus; English translation by Fr Edward Caswall (1814-78))

En, ut superba críminum / Et saeva nostrórum cohors / Cor sauciávit ínnocens / Merentis haud tale Dei!

Vibrantis hastam mílitis / Peccáta nostra dírigunt, / Ferrumque dirae cúspidis / Mortále crimen acuit. 

Ex Corde scisso Ecclesia, / Christo jugáta, náscitur: / Hoc ostium arcae in látere est / Genti ad salútem pósitum.

Ex hoc perennis gratia, / Ceu septiformis fluvius, / Stolas ut illic sórdidas / Lavémus Agni in sánguine.

Turpe est redíre ad crímina, / Quae Cor beátum lácerent: / Sed æmulémur córdibus / Flammas amóris índices.

Jesu, tibi sit gloria, / Qui Corde fundis gratiam, / Cum Patre, et almo Spíritu, / In sempiterna saecula. Amen.

A Rubrical Note for the End of This Month

This year, the feast of Ss Peter and Paul falls on the Sunday after the feast of the Sacred Heart (June 27). A priest friend has put forth the question, What does one do about the external solemnity of the Sacred Heart, which would be celebrated on that day? The short answer, according to the rubrics of both the 1960 Missal and of the prior editions, is, Omit it.

The Allegory of the Holy Eucharist, 1750, by Miguel Cabrera. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) 

An “external solemnity” is not the translation of a feast. It is a pastoral provision which may be made, but is not obligatory, in cases where a reasonable number of the faithful are unable to attend a feast on the day itself. The Mass of the feast is repeated, but the Office is not changed to match it; the rubrics of the 1962 Missal (numbers 356-361) describe it as “celebratio … festi absque Officio – the celebration of the feast without the Office.” Whereas on the feast day itself, a church may celebrate as many Masses of the feast as are possible, desired, or necessary, only two may be said of the feast on its external solemnity (number 360), and only one of them may be sung.

Further, it should be noted that according to this rubric, there are only two feasts to which an external solemnity is automatically granted, those of the Sacred Heart and the Holy Rosary; the former may be repeated on the following Sunday, the latter on the first Sunday of October, whether before or after its fixed date of October 7.

An external solemnity is classified as a Votive Mass of the Second class (rubr. gen. 341d), and therefore does not take precedence over a feast of the First class such as that of Ss Peter and Paul.

Origins of Devotion to—and Artistic Depictions of—the Wounds, Blood, and Heart of Christ

Louis Charbonneau-Lassay. The Vulnerary of Christ: The Mysterious Emblems of the Wounds in the Body and Heart of Jesus Christ. Translated by G. John Champoux. Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2021. 586 pp. Paperback $30 / Hardcover $40. Available at Angelico and Amazon.

The author of The Vulnerary of Christ, Louis Charbonneau-Lassay (1871–1946; hereafter C-L), was among the most versatile and erudite researchers of Christian archaeology and symbolism the world has ever seen. He traveled throughout Europe looking at churches, monasteries, public buildings, monuments, manuscripts, paintings, vestments, stained glass, furniture, host-molds, escutcheons, banners, trademarks, objets d’art, anything that bore or could possibly bear Christian symbols, and carefully drew copies of them into his notebooks. He left behind in his files tens of thousands of drawings and notes which he planned to include in a series of books. The one major work published in his lifetime, The Bestiary of Christ, appeared in English in an abbreviated version.

To add intrigue, the finished manuscript of his masterpiece, The Vulnerary of Christ, was stolen by a visitor who arrived at C-L’s home shortly before his death. Fortunately for us, a detailed outline of the book, the notes used to compose it, and the drawings all remained in his home. Thanks to a painstaking reconstruction by Gauthier Pierozak, it was possible to publish the work in French in 2018. In 2021, Angelico Press brought out a deluxe, copiously-illustrated English translation, of which I had the privilege of reading the page proofs, and which I cannot recommend too highly.

How best to describe this encyclopedic work—at once archaeological, artistic, historical, literary, liturgical, and devotional? The author’s fundamental thesis is that devotion to the wounded Heart of Christ, far from being a pure invention of eighteenth-century French piety or even of high medieval piety, as is so often claimed, has its roots deep in the early Church, in the earliest artistic representations and symbols of Christ.

We find ubiquitous use of the “signaculum Domini” that consists of five marks (be they points, crosses, crescents, hearts, flowers, lozenges, asterisks, annulets), in which the mark that represents the wound in the side becomes progressively more important, until the Heart that was pierced and exposed by the lance becomes the object of loving adoration, the visible symbol of the immensity of divine Love: “We will see later that this particular cult of the wound in the side has quite naturally led to the exteriorizing of the cult of the heart of Jesus under its anatomical form, which it contained in potency and towards which it inevitably oriented thought; but here, as in all such cases, the symbol has necessarily preceded the thinking responsible for interpreting it” (62).

There is a gentle anti-Protestant and anti-Orthodox polemic underlying the argument: on the one hand, the Protestants do not understand the implications of the Incarnation for Christian art and liturgy; on the other hand, the Orthodox, who possess a rich iconographical tradition, too quickly write off Catholic devotions and artistic representations as decadent corruptions when, in fact, they find support in Scripture, the Church Fathers, and early artistic evidence.

C-L successfully shows that the devotion to the Passion, the Five Wounds, the Sacred Heart, the Precious Blood, and the Holy Face are all inseparable from one another, mutually implicatory and reinforcing. “At the place of the wounded heart of Jesus, as with everything that is the object of adoration, today’s Christian rediscovers, in bending the knee to the ground, the incontestable trace of the knees of all his ancestors” (84).

Protestantism, with its surface rigorism and theological sophisms, Jansenism, with its narrow and rigid conception of the idea of Christ, cast upon France a cold mist that obscured and weakened, though without extinguishing it, the broad piety for the heart of Jesus. After them, it would take the great breath of Paray-le-Monial to stir up the embers and kindle the flame. (281)

The book is organized into eight parts:

1. Representations of the Five Wounds of Christ in Earliest Christian Art
2. Depictions of the Wound in the Side of Christ
3. Representations of the Redemptive Shedding of Blood
4. Plants Emblematic of Christ’s Five Wounds
5. Stones Emblematic of the Wounded Christ
6. The Iconography of the Wounded Heart of Jesus
7. The Iconography of the Heart of Jesus in the Counter-Revolutionary Armies of the Vendée
8. Diverse Representations Relating to or Foreign to the Cult of the Heart of Jesus

Although much of the time C-L is patiently reviewing, comparing, and drawing conclusions from the hundreds of artistic objects he has sketched—there are 359 engravings and 32 plates in the book, all of them commented on—the prose rises every few pages to the heights of poetry:

Nailed to the wood of his cross, the tortured divine Victim had sensed death achieving its conquest within him, and, with one last effort towards the world, he had cried out that his redeeming work was consummated.
       Next, in the unexpected night that had suddenly fallen over it, as the earth trembled with emotion and rocks split apart, Jesus bowed his head and rendered up his soul to his Father.
       Then, as the hour of the sabbath approached, his own had to quickly take him down from the cross to be able to bury him. But, before allowing them to do as they wished, soldiers approached to break the legs of Jesus and of the two others crucified with him, so as to finish them off. But, seeing that the Savior was already dead, they did not break his legs. “But one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side: and immediately there came out blood and water.”
       The wounds to his hands and feet, as well as the bruises over his entire body, had stopped the life of the Victim and satisfied justice. The wound from the spear-thrust, a wound of supererogation, brought forth from the very body of this corpse the blossoming of a divinely fecund life, and satisfied infinite munificence and love.
       And since that time, and for evermore, the Christian world has lived and will live from this life springing forth, through his side, from the opened heart of Christ Jesus! (67)

The sheer exuberance of the imagery C-L compiles—where we see, for instance, the Heart of Jesus depicted as a grape in the winepress (126–28), or as the cup of a holy water stoup (106); a chalice so depicted that its opening suggests the wound in His side (80); the Pantocrator reigning upon a heart-shaped throne (255, 277–78); the divine Blood depicted as a jewel in a cup (195); Adam and Eve in the garden, holding aloft a Heart surmounted by a Cross as a foreshadowing of their redemption (270); a trademark in which chant notation provides the “so-la” for the phrase “fides sufficit” (274); a Carthusian astronomical marble that depicts the constellations revolving around a wounded Heart glowing like the sun (354); the depiction of a flaming Heart on which has been drawn the map of the world (364); a brotherhood’s emblem consisting of thirty-three tiny hearts enclosed in a Heart surrounded by a braid of thorns (399); a carved wooden lyre in the shape of a Heart (417)—is enough to fill the reader’s mind with an ever-growing wonder at the inexhaustible profundity and playfulness of the Christian imagination suffused with faith in the Redeemer. Among the many categories of readers who would find this book enthralling must not be forgotten artists, craftsmen, and designers, who will discover in it a delightful catalogue of inspiration.

The level of detail in the book is nothing short of mind-boggling. Just to take an example at random, Part 4, concerning Plants Emblematic of Christ’s Five Wounds, tells us in chapter 11 about “The Trees of the Passion” (olive tree, trees shaped like crosses, gum trees that produce valuable sap by being wounded), in chapter 12 about “Plants of the Divine Torture” (St. John’s Wort, called “Flagellation grass”; prickly marine rushes; hyssop and sponge), in chapter 13 about “The Garden of the Wounded Christ” (the strawberry, the poppy, the lychnis, the red rose, the amaranth, the adonide, the passionflower, and the paulownia flower).

C-L shares the conviction of the medieval allegorists that everything in nature was created not only through the Word but also in some way to reflect the Word’s Incarnation, the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. Certainly this principle is required for any intelligent “reading” of the works of Christian artists from all periods prior to modernity. Indeed, C-L complains at one point that artists of the nineteenth century had lost the ability to understand iconography and therefore produced atrocious art:

The admirable and zealous movement begun at Paray, a wonderful stimulus to piety towards the heart of Jesus, did not induce, with its iconography, any return to [artistic] order. At least the religious imagery posterior to this movement did not increase confusion further. Finally, the deplorable fantasies dreamt up in the nineteenth century for the populace succeeded in crossing the bounds of the ridiculous with their absurd compositions, where we find all mixed together: grinning angels, ecstatic urchins, any flower whatsoever, hearts without distinctive features, and flights of doves that draw on high other hearts with implausible garlands or cords; the whole arsenal of a winded and fretful art (?) that had its peak around 1880, and which is now, quite thankfully, over and done with. (295)

The Vulnerary of Christ contains some “bonus” chapters that one might not have expected from its title. The legend of the Holy Grail is examined in chapter 15, and competing stories about the vessels of Jerusalem, Genoa, and Valencia, each claiming to be the cup of the Last Supper, are compared. Chapter 16 presents evidence that the ancient Egyptians venerated the heart of the supreme God. The cult of the Holy Name of Jesus and the depiction of the monogram is explored in chapter 18. The use of Christic symbols in the coats of arms of royalty is the subject of chapter 20. Chapters 21 and 22 look at astronomical sculptures and heart-shaped sundials, primarily from Carthusian monasteries.

Chapters 30 and 31 enter into the question of secular adaptations or thefts, misuses, even mockeries, of the Heart. For example, the Freemasons in France produced blasphemous versions of the Sacred Heart that they distributed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as “counter-propaganda” against the Faith. Large numbers of five-starred medals depicting the Sacred Heart bound with a chain and surrounded by the words “Psychology and Science” were sent to French soldiers on the front in World War II to combat the “threat” of popular devotional medallions.

Perhaps the most gripping portion of the book, at least for us at this time, is Part Seven, on the use of the Heart of Jesus as the identifying emblem of the counterrevolutionary armies of the Vendée (pp. 431–87). So far from fading with the passage of time, this characteristically Vendéan image has received new life in the postconciliar period as a potent symbol of the Catholic traditionalism that resists both the ideology of the French Revolution and its infiltration into the Church. The attentive reader will recognize how the ancient double heart symbol on p. 467 has gained a second career as the emblem of an important Society.

This book is a one-of-a-kind exposé of the subtle interplay between theology and symbolism, spirituality and art, faith and culture. It bears witness to the irreducibly visual, representational nature of Christianity, which (to paraphrase Maximus the Confessor) everywhere seeks its embodiment in the flesh, in matter, which it thereby seeks to illuminate and elevate as a herald of the Kingdom of God, which is both within and above. It is fitting to let Charbonneau-Lassay have the final word:

In truth, the cult of the wounded heart of Jesus Christ does not have its origin in the deep meditations and exaltations of theologians or teachers of the past, or in the conceptions of our old artists; it does not have its source in the revelations, the visions, the inspirations of the saintly men and women of any time or in the zeal of a particular religious order; it comes wholly and directly from the sole worship of the divine blood and the five chief wounds from which it poured, according to the word of the Nicene Creed, “for us men, and for our salvation.” By this well-marked route, the cult of the wounded heart goes back to the very birth of the Church.
       Of course, theologians, artists, doctors, saintly men and women, and religious orders, have added to, each has quickened, according to the providential views and according to their time, the cult of the five wounds, the worship of the open heart of Christ Jesus. But no, none of them has invented anything new. And when I look at Calvary, in spite of the darkness that enshrouds it with mourning, I see, already, worshipers of the pierced heart: Mary, “the dolorous Mother who stands upright,” John, Magdalene, and, surely from that moment, the legionnaire whose spear tip has just initialed with a flourish the “Consummatum est” of the Crucified One, who withdraws it from the open chest while his captain proclaims that this One, truly, is indeed the Son of God, whose heart, even now, pours forth blood and water through his wound! (245)

The Vulnerary of Christ is available in paperback and in hardcover.

Visit Dr. Kwasniewski’s Substack “Tradition & Sanity”; personal site; composer site; publishing house Os Justi Press and YouTube, SoundCloud, and Spotify pages.

The Sacred Heart in the Sacred Liturgy: Thoughts on the Symbolism of the Thurible

It is difficult to overstate the significance of fire in the collective imagination of Judeo-Christian civilization. It is, perhaps, the ultimate symbol. In ancient Greek thought, it represented the uniquely human; in Jewish thought, the divine. Young children are fascinated by it, perhaps because they sense its paradox—so easily snuffed out, like man, and yet so powerful, like God.

In Greek mythology, there are two fires: the celestial fire, which Zeus withheld from mankind, and human fire, given to mankind by Prometheus, who stole it from the Olympian gods. The former is immortal; the latter, like man, is ever on the verge of death.

The fire men have now at their disposal ... is a fire that is “born”—so it is also a fire that dies; it must be kept burning, it must be tended. This fire has an appetite like mortal man’s; unless it is constantly fed, it goes out.... It constantly recalls both his divine origin and his animal nature; it partakes of both—like man himself. [1]

The basic Hebrew word for fire is ’ēsh, which begins with א (aleph), the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the letter of origins, creation, and the perfect Unity—despite apparent dualities—of the divine Essence. Fire, like God, creates ex nihilo, and enables life: from darkness, light; from cold, warmth; from grain, bread; from rock, iron. It also destroys.

The first occurrence of ’ēsh in the Bible is Genesis 15, 17: “And it cometh to pass—the sun hath gone in, and thick darkness hath been—and lo, a furnace of smoke, and a lamp of fire, which hath passed over between those pieces.” The lamp, casting light amidst the gloom, signifies the majesty of the Almighty and seals a covenant between Abram and his God. The next occurrence is Genesis 19, 24: “Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” The next is Genesis 22, 6: “And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took in his hand the fire and the knife; and they went both of them together.” First, the love of God, eternal and true, promised to Abraham and his seed forever. Second, His justice, enacted upon men for whom Abraham prayed. Third, His justice turned upon a Victim—Isaac, Christ—who will burn with agony to save men from burning in eternity.

In Exodus, fire becomes the prevailing manifestation of God. He appears to Moses in a bush that “burned with fire and … was not consumed,” He leads the Israelites as a pillar of fire, and He comes in elemental, awe-inspiring magnificence to Mount Sinai, “which was altogether on smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.”

The theophany on Sinai is a sublimely liturgical moment. The people must purify themselves, fasting from carnal pleasures: estote parati in diem tertium, “be ye ready against the third day.” They gather and prepare to encounter the living God, but only from a distance, and only through signs and wonders. The privilege of entering into the sanctum is reserved for Aaron, the high priest, and Moses, the supreme prophet. Moses returns with an inestimable gift—the laws of God, so delightful to the faithful soul that in the Hebrew Bible’s longest chapter, Psalm 118, the inspired poet sings a love song to them.

Could fire, with a sacred history as illustrious as this, be absent from the Christian liturgy? Such a thought is not to be borne. But Christianity has no place for the funerary bonfires of the pagan Greeks, nor for the burnt offerings of the Jews. Instead, we have the orderly and aromatic fire of incense, which has been burned in Christian worship since the early centuries of the Church. This Christian fire burns hot indeed, but gently and discreetly; it is a fire of coals, hidden inside the thurible, whose shape is often reminiscent of a mountain, and whose smoke is that of silent prayer.

Exodus 24, 17 tells us that for the children of Israel, “the glory of the Lord was like devouring fire on the top of the mount.” For Christians—living in the age of grace, and called to worship in spirit and truth—the fire of the Lord is not so physically vast, not so externally tremendous. Rather than blazing in awesome splendor from mountain heights, it burns with infinite intensity in the Heart of Jesus Christ. Saint Margaret Mary saw what most of us must imagine:

Flames issued from every part of His Sacred Humanity, especially from His Adorable Breast, which resembled an open furnace and disclosed to me His most loving and most amiable Heart, which was the living source of these flames.

Catholic artists have struggled to worthily depict the Sacred Heart. Were I a painter, I would approach the task with fear and trembling, very much as the Israelites must have approached the mountain of the Lord: “when the trumpet soundeth long, they shall come up to the mount,” but “whosoever toucheth the mount shall be surely put to death.”

Perhaps the most worthy depiction of the Sacred Heart is not a depiction at all, but a symbol. The thurible shows us the Sacred Heart as a beautiful enclosure in which the sacred fire burns, and which swings and flows with the rhythms of life—the slow, solemn heartbeat of the liturgy. Hanging from a chain, as Our Lord hung from the Cross, the thurible reminds us that the divine Heart burns for men, was pierced by a man, and is entrusted to men when distributed in Holy Communion. [2]

From the crown of the thurible, as from the holy mountain of which the psalmist speaks, the smoke of prayer rises steadily, ever ascending from the Heart of Christ to the throne of His heavenly Father. But Our Lord wills that it be renewed from time to time by the devotion of His servants. The priest does this on our behalf, sprinkling grains of incense as the Gospel sower sprinkled “the word of the kingdom ... upon good ground” (Matthew 13, 19; 23). Indeed, the thurible is an enclosure, but it is not sealed. The Heart of Our Lord is ineffably holy yet offered to all who approach Him with humility and love, striving to “hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11, 28). 

Finally, we can reflect on the resilience of the thurible, an object made of metal and subjected repeatedly to heat that no flesh could endure. After St. Margaret Mary felt endangered by the overwhelmingly ardent fire of the divine Heart, Our Lord consoled her with these words: “I will be your strength. Fear nothing.”

NOTES

1. Jean-Pierre Vernant, The Universe, the Gods, and Men: Ancient Greek Myths, translated by Linda Asher, pp. 55–56. 

2. I am referring here to the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, which suggests, by means of twentieth-century scientific analysis, that the Flesh received in Holy Communion bears a special relationship with Our Lord’s physical Heart.

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How Do Sins Against the Eucharist Cause Our Lord to Suffer?

On June 16, 1675, Our Lord said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial:

I ask of you that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that My Heart shall expand Itself to shed in abundance the influence of Its divine love upon those who shall thus honor It, and cause It to be honored.

It has never been a matter of doubt that the Lord Jesus can be sinned against in the Holy Eucharist in a variety of ways — unbelief, indifference, the contempt of irreverence, reception in a state of mortal sin, sacrilege — and that He is rightly offended by these actions, for human sin and divine righteousness cannot cohabitate. As Cardinal Ratzinger exclaimed in his 2005 Via Crucis in Rome:

Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the Holy Sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency!

What we read of the Israelites in the Book of Numbers may be applied to the faithful who act unfaithfully: “Behold, we perish, we are undone, we are all undone. Everyone who comes near . . . shall die” (Num 17:12–13). The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Lord’s Passion. Those who approach and receive worthily are united to His mystical death and receive some share of its fruits; those who receive unworthily die the death of compounded mortal sin. All who come near can be said to die — some in order to live forever, and some, to incur the danger of dying forever (cf. Rev 20:6).

A much more difficult question arises, however, when we ask whether it is possible to say that Our Lord suffers when He is thus sinned against. Many such texts, from private revelations and from the works of theologians and spiritual writers, can be collated, all claiming that He can — as, for example, in St. John Vianney’s remarks about how an unworthy communicant crucifies the Lord again. To put the question more precisely: is there a way in which Our Lord may be said to suffer now, after His resurrection, by the things we do to His Most Holy Sacrament?

On the one hand, we know that Christ, having conquered sin and death, is no longer subject to suffering in His glorified state. The Protestant troops who desecrated hosts during the Reformation, trampling them underfoot or feeding them to the beasts, did not diminish Jesus, did not lessen His perfection or His glory; rather, the troops made themselves guilty of a horrendous crime for which they would have to suffer either in this life or in the next. On the other hand, in many approved private revelations over the span of many centuries, beginning in the Middle Ages and coming down to our own times, the Lord says that the sins of men cause Him to grieve, sorrow, and suffer. We must accept this as true in a mysterious way that we will never fully grasp in this life.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider weighed in on this question in the text of his “Sins Against the Blessed Sacrament and the Need of a Crusade of Eucharistic Reparation,” which was published many places online (e.g., here) and which was also published an an appendix to my book The Holy Bread of Eternal Life: Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety (Sophia, 2020). His Excellency writes, inter alia:

To say that the Lord is not suffering because of the outrages committed against Him in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist can lead to a minimizing of the great atrocities committed. Some people say: God is offended by the abuse of the Blessed Sacrament, but the Lord does not personally suffer. This is, however, theologically and spiritually too narrow a view. Although Christ is now in His glorious state and hence no more subject to suffering in a human way, He nevertheless is affected and touched in His Sacred Heart by the abuses and outrages against the Divine majesty and the immensity of His Love in the Blessed Sacrament….
          Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité gave a profound theological explanation of the meaning of the “suffering” or “sadness” of God because of the offenses that sinners commit against Him: “This ‘suffering,’ this ‘sadness’ of the Heavenly Father, or of Jesus since His Ascension, are to be understood analogically. They are not suffered passively as with us, but on the contrary freely willed and chosen as the ultimate expression of Their mercy towards sinners called to conversion. They are only a manifestation of God’s love for sinners, a love which is sovereignly free and gratuitous, and which is not irrevocable.”
          This analogical spiritual meaning of the “sadness” or the “suffering” of Jesus in the Eucharistic mystery is confirmed by the words of the Angel in his apparition in 1916 to the children of Fatima and especially by the words and the example of the life of St. Francisco Marto. The children were invited by the Angel to make reparation for offenses against the Eucharistic Jesus and to console Him, as we can read in the memoirs of Sister Lucia: “…He gave the Host to me, and to Jacinta and Francisco he gave the contents of the chalice to drink, saying as he did so: ‘Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Repair their crimes and console your God.’”…
          Jesus Christ continues in a mysterious way his Passion in Gethsemane throughout the ages in the mystery of His Church and also in the Eucharistic mystery, the mystery of His immense Love. Well-known is the expression of Blaise Pascal: ‘Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.’… Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic mystery is not indifferent and insensitive towards the behavior which men show in His regard in this Sacrament of Love. Christ is present in this Sacrament also with His soul, which is hypostatically united with His Divine Person…. “Christ in the sacramental state sees and in a certain divine way perceives all the thoughts and affections, the worship, the homages and also the insults and sins of all men in general, of all his faithful specifically and his priests in particular; He perceives homages and sins that directly refer to this ineffable mystery of love” (Cardinal Franzelin).

Let it not be said that such language is exaggerated, sentimental, or imprecise. The mysteries of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ endure as long as His glorified humanity endures, which is to say, forever; and our behavior toward the Sacrament is our way of receiving Him or rejecting Him (cf. Prologue of St. John’s Gospel), of entering with love into His Passion, as did St. John at the Last Supper and upon the hill of Golgotha, or, conversely, of turning our backs to Him in company with Judas and the high priests, clamoring: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” We are all present to His soul and all have an effect on His soul.

All the sins that men have committed or will commit from the beginning of time until the end of time were distinctly present to Our Lord’s mind and heart throughout His Passion, from the Garden of Gethsemane until He breathed His last  upon the Cross, and therefore He has truly received injury and suffered pain from each of our sins, until the present order of creation shall be no more. Through the perfections of His human intellect (beatific and infused knowledge), Our Lord had knowledge of men’s sins, whenever they had been or would be committed, and for each sin He suffered pain. 

What St. Alphonsus says in his traditional Stations of the Cross, viz., that it is my sins that are driving in the nails, etc., is therefore perfectly correct: the mystical reality of this Passion — in its source, which is the charity of His heart; in its effect, which is our redemption; in its primary external sign, His wounds — remains present and active for all eternity. For Christ as our High Priest is “always living to make intercession for us” (Heb 7:25).

Moreover, we may say that Christ’s power of memory, being hypostatically united to a divine Person, has a greater depth and intensity than even our primary experience, dulled as it is by the limits of our nature and of our fallen condition. His ever-living memory of His Passion is more intensely real than the experience of the same suffering and death would have been to any other human being. Could we not say that Christ’s memory of His suffering during His mortal life is more truly called suffering than our actual sufferings are? And if this is true, would they not deserve the strongest words we could give them? Yet this point could be argued against by stating that the mere memory of suffering (as St Thomas points out in speaking about the causes of pleasure) seems rather a cause for happiness, if the suffering itself has passed by.

A theologian suggested to me the following (admittedly highly speculative) possibility. We know that the possession of the beatific vision would “normally” render the possessor immune to all pain and all sadness, and yet that during His earthy life our Lord prevented the beatific vision from producing all its effects in His soul, for the sake of the Redemption. Is it impossible that in heaven, out of charity, and to provoke our charity, Christ allows some part of His soul still not to benefit from the normal effect of the beatific vision, so that there may be still some drop of sorrow, of want, in the midst of the joy of heaven? Might the same be the case for the Blessed Virgin, since private revelations seem to speak of her in very much the same way?

I conclude once more with words by Cardinal Ratzinger in his Via Crucis meditations:

His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison — Lord, save us.

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The Cordocentrism of Father Damien and His Congregation

A portrait of Fr. Damien by my Damien High School classmate, Geoffrey Butz

The great Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which we celebrate today, is an opportunity to delight in God’s unspeakable love for us and to respond to His love with an unconditional “Yes.” As Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger writes:

In the Heart of Jesus, the center of Christianity is set before us. It expresses everything, all that is genuinely new and revolutionary in the New Covenant. This Heart calls to our heart. It invites us to step forth out of the futile attempt of self-preservation and, by joining in the task of love, by handing ourselves over to him and with him, to discover the fullness of love which alone is eternity and which alone sustains the world.[1]

Recently my wife Alexandra and I had the privilege of visiting the grave of someone who joined Jesus in the task of love, someone who handed himself over to Him and to the least of his brethren, and someone whose religious charism was ordered towards the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Visiting the grave of Saint Damien of Molokai (1840-1889) was a dream come true. I attended Damien High School in LaVerne, California, named after the great missionary to the lepers long before he was even declared Venerable because the religious community that founded the school was the same as Father Damien’s: the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and of the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. One of the requirements in our freshman religion class was to read John Farrow’s Damien the Leper, a riveting account of the saint’s life that I highly recommend. Even the origin of the biography is interesting. John Farrow was a filmmaker and the father of the actress Mia Farrow, who describes her father in the foreword as a believing Catholic despite his chronic womanizing. After Farrow learned about Father Damien as he was wandering about in the South Pacific, he was determined to share the story with a wider audience.

John Farrow, John Wayne, and Lana Turner

Damien the Leper

In the biography we learned that Damien de Veuster was from Flanders, Belgium and that he joined the Sacred Heart (aka Picpus) Fathers in imitation of his older brother; that he was transferred to Hawaii, which was a territory bequeathed to the Sacred Heart Fathers by the Pope; that he served the natives for eight years, learning their language, administering the sacraments, and rooting out bad pagan practices (he once dramatically tore up a voodoo doll of himself to show that witchcraft had no power over a servant of God); that when the bishop of Honolulu asked his priests for volunteers to the notorious leper colony of Molokai, three other men besides Damien bravely stood up but Damien was the one chosen; and that Damien labored tirelessly in the colony under the worst of conditions for sixteen years before succumbing to the disease himself.

And the conditions were indeed the worst. There was no law and order in the colony when he arrived because the police were terrified of the contagious disease: all a leper had to do was rush at a policeman with his open wounds and the latter would flee in terror. Amid unbearable stench (which he used his pipe to counteract), rotting limbs, and grotesque bodies, Damien built several churches and buildings, 2,000 coffins, and a 3.5 mile fresh-water supply. He baptized and buried, and celebrated the liturgical year with great pomp and grandeur (especially Corpus Christi) as a way of inspiring his flock and bringing them consolation.

Alexandra Foley with the great-granddaughter of a man who built churches with Fr. Damien

The Hawaiian authorities had chosen for the location of the colony Kalaupapa, a peninsula on the island of Molokai that is almost impossible to escape without the aid of a ship or plane since it is surrounded either by the sea or steep cliffs that are especially difficult to climb for someone whose limbs are falling off. In the 1940s a cure was finally found for Hansen’s disease, as leprosy is more properly called, and the Hawaiian Department of Health finally ended its policy of containment in 1969, granting Kakaupapa’s patients the option to leave the island. The majority, however, stayed: even though they were no longer contagious, most of their friends and family were gone, and the antibiotic that stopped the leprosy bacillus could not reverse the disfiguring effects of the disease. Incredibly, there are still a few patients left on Kalaupapa to this day: the oldest is 100. When the last patient passes away, the settlement will become a National Park.

The Kalaupapa peninsula and the current location of the settlement

The Visit

Kalaupapa is still run by the Department of Health, and so to visit the settlement we needed a resident to sponsor us and petition the department for permission to come. I contacted the Catholic priest on Kalaupapa (who turned out to be a Sacred Heart Father), and he graciously agreed to help us out. Without his sponsorship, it would have been impossible to buy a ticket for a ride in the local airline’s tiny prop plane to the Kalaupapa airport (which is smaller than some parking lots and did not have a single employee there when we visited). Our host Father Patrick was an affable Irishman who kindly showed us around, as did two sisters from St. Marianne Cope’s Franciscan order, Sr. Barbara Jean and Sr. Alicia.[2]

St. Philomena Church and Father Damien's Grave

Most of the original buildings are long gone because of the power of the elements on these windswept shores to erode and corrupt. But St. Philomena Church, which was standing when Fr. Damien arrived and which he restored and later expanded, is still there. The structure includes holes drilled into the floorboard of the original nave. One of the effects of leprosy is a violent vomiting of black blood. Rather than leave Mass, lepers could now create a funnel with banana leaves and vomit into the holes.

Floorboard with square holes

 Devotion to the Sacred Heart

Damien, as I have mentioned, was a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary and of the Perpetual Adoration of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. The Sacred Heart Fathers model their lives on the four ages of our Lord: His infancy “by the instruction of children and by the formation of youths for the priesthood”; His hidden life “by the exercise of Adoration”; His public life, “by preaching and by missionary work”; His crucified life “by the works of Christian mortification.” Damien’s own imitation of these four ages is captured by four mosaics outside St. Damien of Molokai Church on the topside of the island. The mosaics were made by 93-year-old Sister Dorothy Santos.

Damien mosaics, with Sr. Dorothy

Damien’s religious calling also served him in other ways. It was the custom of the Sacred Hearts to put a funeral pall over the candidate during the profession ceremony. This custom came to his mind when the bishop asked for a volunteer to Molokai. Damien wrote: “So, remembering that on the day of my profession I had already put myself under the funeral pall, I offered myself to his lordship [the bishop] to meet, if he thought it well, this second death.” By a strange coincidence, when someone contracted leprosy in the Middle Ages, a Requiem Mass was held for him, and he attended his own funeral underneath a black canopy near the altar.

Praying at Father Damien’s grave, I noticed an inscription that I had not seen before: V.C.J.S. I later learned that it was the motto of the Sacred Heart Congregation: Vivat Cor Jesu Sacratissimum, Long live the most Sacred Heart of Jesus! It is a fit sentiment for the feast today, and every day.

Notes

[1] Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, p. 69. 

[2] St. Marianna Cope and her sisters came to the settlement as Fr. Damien lay dying of leprosy and made even more improvements. She was canonized in 2012, three years after Fr. Damien.

A Liturgical Curiosity for the Feast of the Sacred Heart

Just as devotion to the Blessed Sacrament is older than the liturgical feast of Corpus Christi, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus predates the formal institution of a feast in its honor, by many centuries in fact. For example, St Gertrude the Great, who lived from 1256 to the first years of the following century, writes of a vision of St John the Evangelist which she beheld on his feast day, in which he brought her to lay her head upon the breast of the Lord, as he himself had done at the Last Supper. St Gertrude than ask John if he had also heard the beating of the Lord’s heart as she did, and when he replied that he had, and that the sweetness of it had penetrated into his very marrow, she asked him why he had not written about this in the Gospel. St John replied:

My duty was to write to the young Church only about the uncreated Word of God the Father, ... To speak of the sweet beatings of (this heart) was reserved for modern times, so that from the hearing of such things, the world might grow warm again when it had become old and tepid in the love of God. (The Herald of Divine Piety, 4, 4)

The Last Supper, by Ugolino di Nerio, 1325-28

Like the feast of Corpus Christi, that of the Sacred Heart was first proposed in a vision vouchsafed to a nun; during a Forty-hours Devotion held within the octave of Corpus Christi in 1675, the Lord appeared to the French Visitandine St Margaret-Mary Alacoque, the consummation of a long series of visions. He then asked her to work for the institution of a feast in reparation for the ingratitude and indifference which so many show to Him “in the sacrament of love,” to be kept on the day after the Octave of Corpus; this day is of course Friday, the day of His Passion. Within the Saint’s lifetime, the feast had begun to be celebrated by her order and among certain other congregations; as it slowly gained ground, it was formally recognized and permitted by Pope Clement XIII in 1765, and extended to the universal calendar of the Church by Blessed Pius IX in 1856.

When the neo-Gallican Missal of Paris was issued in 1738 by the Archbishop Charles de Vintimille, the feast had not yet been formally approved by Rome or widely accepted outside a few religious orders; however, the new Parisian Missal did fulfill one aspect of the request made by the Lord to St Margaret Mary. Among the collection of votive Masses is a special Mass “for the reparation of injuries done to Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament.” This Mass is placed between the votive Mass of the Sacrament and that of the Passion; furthermore, a rubric after the Octave of Corpus Christi prescribes this Mass be said on the following day, which is now kept everywhere as the feast of the Sacred Heart. Here is the full text of the Mass. The translations of the prayers are my own; the Scriptural quotations are taken from the Douay-Rheims translation, with a few modifications necessary to the sense.

The Apparition of Our Lord to St Margaret Mary Alacoque; stained glass window in St Brendan’s Church, Birr, County Offaly, Ireland. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Andreas F. Borchert, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)

Introit Quanta malignatus est in- imicus in sancto! in terra pollue- runt tabernaculum nominis tui, Domine. Usquequo, Deus, irri- tat adversarius nomen tuum in finem?	What things the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary! they have defiled the dwelling place of thy name on the earth. How long, O God; doth the adversary provoke thy name forever?  Psalm 73
Psalm. Ut quid, Deus, repulisti in finem? iratus est furor tuus super oves pascuae tuae. Gloria Patri. Quanta malignatus...	O God, why hast thou cast us off unto the end: why is thy wrath enkindled against the sheep of thy pasture? Glory be. What things.
Oratio Gementes et dolentes su- per cunctis abominationibus quae fiunt in domo tua, propi- tius respice, Deus omnipotens; et pro contumeliis quibus in Sa- cramento sui amoris impetitur Dominus Jesus, ipsum fac pro nobis esse apudte propitiatio- nem. Qui tecum.	The Collect Look with mercy, God almighty, upon those who mourn and grieve for all the abominations that take place in Thy house; and for the injuries by which the Lord Jesus is assailed in the Sacrament of His love, make Him the propitiation before Thee for our sake. Who liveth and reigneth with Thee...

The Epistle, Hebrews 10, 22-31 Brethren: Let us draw near with a true heart in fullness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with clean water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering (for he is faithful that hath promised), And let us consider one another, to provoke unto charity and to good works: Not forsaking our assembly, as some are accustomed; but comforting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching. For if we sin willfully after having the knowledge of the truth, there is now left no sacrifice for sins, but a certain dreadful expectation of judgment, and the rage of a fire which shall consume the adversaries. A man making void the law of Moses, dieth without any mercy under two or three witnesses: how much more, do you think he deserveth worse punishments, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath esteemed the blood of the testament unclean, by which he was sanctified, and hath offered an affront to the Spirit of grace? For we know him that hath said: Vengeance belongeth to me, and I will repay. And again: The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Graduale Viderunt altare profa- natum, et sciderunt vestimenta sua, et planxerunt planctu ma- no. V. Imposuerunt cinerem su- per caput suum, et ceciderunt in faciem super terram, et cla- maverunt in caelum.	They saw the altar profaned, and they rent their garments, and made great lamentation. V. They put ashes on their heads, and fell down to the ground on their faces, and they cried towards heaven. 1 Macc. 4, 38-40
Alleluja, alleluja. Zelus domus tuae comedit me, et opprobria exprobrantium tibi ceciderunt super me. Alleluja,	Alleluja, alleluja. Zeal of Thy house hath eaten me up, and the reproaches of them that reproached thee are fal- len upon me. Alleluja. Ps. 68, 10

The Gospel, Matthew 22, 1-14 At that time: Jesus spoke again in parables to the chief priests and Pharisees, saying: The kingdom of heaven is likened to a king, who made a marriage for his son. And he sent his servants, to call them that were invited to the marriage; and they would not come. Again he sent other servants, saying: Tell them that were invited, Behold, I have prepared my dinner; my calves and fatlings are killed, and all things are ready: come ye to the marriage. But they neglected, and went their own ways, one to his farm, and another to his merchandise. And the rest laid hands on his servants, and having treated them contumeliously, put them to death. But when the king had heard of it, he was angry, and sending his armies, he destroyed those murderers, and burnt their city. Then he saith to his servants: The marriage indeed is ready; but they that were invited were not worthy. Go ye therefore into the highways; and as many as you shall find, call to the marriage. And his servants going forth into the ways, gathered together all that they found, both bad and good: and the marriage was filled with guests. And the king went in to see the guests: and he saw there a man who had not on a wedding garment. And he saith to him: Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment? But he was silent. Then the king said to the waiters: Bind his hands and feet, and cast him into the exterior darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth. For many are called, but few are chosen.

Offertorium Ad Christum acce- damus cum vero corde in ple- nitudine fidei, aspersi corda a conscientia mala, et considere- mus invicem in provocationem caritatis, et bonorum operum.	Let us draw near to Christ with a true heart in fullness of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil con- science, and let us consider one an- other, to provoke unto charity and to good works. Hebrews 10, 22 & 24
Secreta Deus, qui Unigenitum tuum in Cruce pro transgresso- ribus orantem exaudisti; quae- sumus, ut nos, qui in altari tuo ipsum offerimus pro contami- atoribus mensae illius orantes, clementer exaudire digneris. Per eundem.	The Secret O God, who didst harken to Thy Only-Begotten Son as He prayed upon the Cross for the trans- gressors; we ask that Thou mercifully deign to hear us, as we pray upon Thy altar for them that defile His table. Through the same.
Communio Quanta putatis me- reri supplicia, qui Filium Dei conculcaverit, et sanguinem testamenti pollutum duxerit, in quo sanctificatus est?	Communion How great punisments do you think he deserveth, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath esteemed the blood of the testament unclean, by which he was sanctified? Hebrews 10, 29
Postcommunio Domine Jesu Christe, qui zelo domus Dei succensus, vendentes et e- mentes de templo ejecisti: da comedentibus panem tuum, eodem zelo animari; et propter reos corporis tui aut tabescere gementes, aut ad prohibendum fortes ignescere. Qui vivis..	Post Communion Lord Jesus Christ, who, kindled with zeal for the house of God, didst cast out from the tem- ple them that bought and sold: grant to those that eat Thy bread, that they may be filled with the same zeal; and either to languish with mourning over those guilty of Thy body, or to burn mightily to stop them. Who livest and reignest.

Our Lord’s Request for the Institution of the Feast of His Sacred Heart

The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has deep roots; texts can be found in the ancient and medieval periods that speak of the love of His wounded and glorious Heart, and of the appropriate response of adoring love we should make to Him.

However, the devotion in the form more familiar to Catholics today is traceable to the private revelations made by Our Lord Jesus Christ to St Margaret Mary Alacoque in the later 17th century. The content of these revelations was written down for her spiritual director, St Claude de la Colombiere, and are widely available (see, e.g., here).

A priest mentioned to me a detail that had previously escaped my notice. When Our Lord appeared to St Margaret Mary on June 16, 1675, to request the institution of a feast in honor of His Sacred Heart, He spoke as follows:

I ask of you that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that My Heart shall expand Itself to shed in abundance the influence of Its divine love upon those who shall thus honor It, and cause It to be honored.

The very Son of God — God from God, Light from Light, Word Incarnate, Eternal High Priest, Head of the Mystical Body, Creator, Savior, and Judge of the universe — refers as a matter of course to the “Octave of Corpus Christi” and places His request for a special feast precisely in this context. Moreover, He specifically asks that the feast be one of reparation, and that this reparation be connected with the extended Eucharistic adoration during the Octave of Corpus Christi. Finally, He promises to shed His divine love on those who shall thus honor His Heart, that is, honor It in the manner He has explained.

Is it not disturbing, then, to think of liturgical reformers under Pius XII simply chucking out this Octave of Corpus Christi, which had endured from the time of its widespread observance in the 14th century until 1955, at which time all octaves were abolished except those of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost? [1] The invisible supreme Head of the Church endorsed this octave and made His requests based on it, but no matter; committees know better, and popes always know better, as we can see today.

Although the feast of the Sacred Heart always possessed a reparatory character, this was underlined by the new Mass and Office for the feast promulgated by Pius XI in 1928, to replace the Mass and Office first approved by Clement XIII in 1765, and extended to the universal Church in 1856. For 41 years, this Collect, which so aptly mirrors Our Lord’s request, was recited at Mass:

O God, Who in the Heart of Thy Son, wounded by our sins, dost mercifully vouchsafe to bestow upon us the infinite wealth of Thy love; grant, we beseech Thee, that revering It with meet devotion, we may fulfil our duty of worthy reparation. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…

Moreover, the Postcommunion prays for detachment from worldly goods and attachment to heavenly ones, a petition characteristic of the usus antiquior in general, and fitting for this feast in particular, which is very much about the truth “where your heart is, there your treasure is also”:

May Thy holy mysteries, O Lord Jesus, produce in us a divine fervour, whereby, having tasted the sweetness of Thy most dear Heart, we may learn to despise earthly things and love those of heaven: Who livest and reigneth.

In contrast, the Novus Ordo Collect borrows some of its phrasing from Clement XIII, while recasting it in a more generic Christological way that does not emphasize the rationale behind the institution of the feast:

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we, who glory in the Heart of your beloved Son and recall the wonders of his love for us, may be made worthy to receive an overflowing measure of grace from that fount of heavenly gifts. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son…

Happily, the Collect of Pius XI was added back as an option in the most recent edition of the Pauline missal, which will bring it back into circulation to some extent. The Postcommunion, regrettably, excises the unfashionable sentiment discamus terrena despicere, et amare caelestia, and, recasts the prayer to the Father, due to the subordinationist principle that we must nearly always address the Father rather than the Son in our public prayer:

May this sacrament of charity, O Lord, make us fervent with the fire of holy love, so that, drawn always to your Son, we may learn to see him in our neighbor. Through Christ our Lord.

As a friend commented on this prayer, “All man, all the time.” As Gaudium et Spes 12 begins, “According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.”

In 1904, Pope St Pius X added the threefold invocation Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis to the already-existing Leonine prayers after Low Mass. In 1964, the Instruction Inter Oecumenici abolished all of the prayers after Mass. For sixty years, Catholics on every continent, of every culture, in every conceivable situation, prayed, “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.” But this was, one supposes, just another of those useless repetitions that had to be purged for the benefit of . . .

Come to think of it, cui bono? Why was the character of the feast tilted away from the theme of reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for sins, blasphemies, outrages, sacrileges, indifference, and worldliness? Why was the octave of Corpus Christi abolished, depriving the Church and the world of more solemn, calendrically set-apart opportunities to adore the Lord with Eucharistic adoration, exposition, and procession? Why did we abandon the humble collective invocations that united us to one another and to the merciful God at the end of Low Mass?

Indeed, the very Offertory of the Mass in which the priest says that he is offering sacrifice for his sins, offenses, and negligences, as also for the welfare of the living and the dead, was abolished, as was the Placeat tibi at the end of Mass:

May the homage of my bounden duty be pleasing to Thee, O Holy Trinity; and grant that the sacrifice which I, though unworthy, have offered in the sight of Thy Majesty may be acceptable to Thee, and through Thy mercy be a propitiation for me and for all those for whom I have offered it. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

What benefit did the reformers under Pius XII and Paul VI think they were bringing to the Church by removing so many references to the “sins, offenses, and negligences” for which we are called upon to make reparation?

On a good day in October 1946, a day when chopping off digits and limbs from the liturgical calendar wasn’t on the agenda, Pius XII said, “Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.” Whatever else may be said, this much is clear: the changes to the liturgy have not helped us regain it.

Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.
Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.
Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.

NOTE

[1] As the incomparable St. Andrew Daily Missal of 1945 tells us on p. 782: “To resist the attacks of renewed heresies against the Holy Eucharist and to revive in the Church a zeal which had somewhat grown cold, the Holy Ghost inspired, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the solemnity of Corpus Christi. In 1208, the blessed Juliana of Mount Cornillon, near Liège, saw in a vision the full moon with an indentation indicating that a feast was missing in the liturgical cycle. . . . It was thought that immediately after Paschaltide a feast with an octave should be established. As the Last Supper took place on Thursday, the Bishop of Liège instituted in 1246 this solemnity in his diocese on the Thursday which follows the octave of Pentecost. In 1264, Pope Urban IV extended this feast to the whole world.”

This commentary brings several truths to mind: first, that the Holy Spirit is the principal agent of organic liturgical development, who also inspires the conservation of that which has been established; second, that the double fittingness of a Thursday feast followed by an octave was intuitively grasped, precisely because of the need to resist heresy and rekindle fervor; third, that if this feast was needed by medieval Catholics, a fortiori it is needed by Catholics today, who are facing heresy, apostasy, and indifference several magnitudes greater; fourth, that the Church observed this Corpus Christi octave for between 500 and 700 years (depending on the region, as the feast was of variable diffusion), before Pius XII unceremoniously scrapped the octave and later bishops bumped it to a Sunday (I refer not to the concept of a so-called “external solemnity,” but of a simple switch from the proper day to the nearest Sunday, thereby effectively surrendering to the Protestant conception of the secular work week). The changes offer another a textbook example of how badly mistaken recent popes and liturgists have been in “interpreting the signs of the times.”

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The Heart-Warming Orations of the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

The Sacred Heart, by Lattanzio Querena (1768-1853); in the church of the Holy Name of Jesus in Venice. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Didier Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Lost in Translation #80

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus takes its Biblical inspiration from the account of Our Lord’s crucifixion, and the piercing by the soldier’s lance of His heart, which yielded blood and water, signs of the Eucharist and Baptism, marking the birth of the Church, purveyors of those sacraments. (See John 19, 34) Devotion to the Sacred Heart existed privately in the early Church and among medieval doctors such as St. Bonaventure, but it was not until the seventeenth century that it became part of the Church’s public liturgy, when dour heresies such as Jansenism tended to deny God’s sweet and gentle love for all mankind. and when secular indifference threatened to ignore it entirely.

In response to these distortions, Divine Providence inspired St. John Eudes in 1672 to compose a Mass of the Sacred Heart for the religious order he had founded. But it was St. Margaret Mary Alacoque who is chiefly remembered for the spread of this devotion. In 1675 Our Lord appeared to her on the Friday following the octave of Corpus Christi, and asked her to work for a feast of the Sacred Heart on this day. It was fixed on the universal calendar in 1856, and in 1929 an Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart, with a plenary indulgence attached to its public recital, was added.

St Margaret Mary Alacoque’s Vision of the Sacred Heart, 1863, by Armand Cambon (1819-85); in the cathedral of Montauban, France. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Didiers Descouens, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The feast of the Sacred Heart is an example of the principle of “liturgical recapitulation,” when a particular mystery is revisited later in the year, but viewed under a different aspect. [1] In a sense, the original feast honoring Jesus’ Sacred Heart is Good Friday, but our hearts are too filled with sorrow on that day to appreciate the joyful mercy of His own. A second feast is more than warranted for meditating on the mystery of Our Lord’s Sacred Heart in a more jubilant key.

The Collect for the feast is:

Deus, qui nobis in Corde Filii tui, nostris vulneráto peccátis, infinítos dilectiónis thesauros misericórditer largíri dignáris: concéde, quáesumus; ut, illi devótum pietátis nostrae praestantes obsequium, dignae quoque satisfactiónis exhibeámus officium. Per eundem Dóminum nostrum.

Which I translate as:

O God, who in the Heart of Thy Son, wounded by our sins, dost mercifully deign to bestow upon us the infinite treasures of Thy love: grant, we beseech Thee, that we who render to It the service of our devotion and piety may also fulfill our duty of worthy satisfaction. Through the same Our Lord...

This prayer teaches that God plans to give us the infinite treasures of His love not through His Son’s Heart, but in it. The Sacred Heart of Jesus contains us; we are not just close to His Heart or dear to His Heart but in His Heart, and it is there that God the Father will inundate us with love.

The Collect also has a subtle word play to boot. God deigns (dignare) to bless us with His treasures, and we pray that we may offer worthy (dignus) satisfaction through our devotion to His Son’s Sacred Heart, despite the fact that that Heart was wounded by our very sins. How merciful is God the Father, to reward us through our sins in such a way.

The Secret, which builds upon this theme, is:

Réspice, quáesumus, Dómine, ad ineffábilem Cordis dilecti Filii tui caritátem: ut quod offérimus sit tibi munus acceptum et nostrórum expiatio delictórum. Per eundem Dóminum.

Which I translate as:

Look upon, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the inexpressible charity of the Heart of Thy beloved Son: so that what we are offering may be a gift acceptable to Thee and an expiation of our offenses. Through the same Our Lord...

Let us not forget that when God the Father looks at the Heart of His Son, He is looking at a Heart with an enormous gash in it. If forensic evidence from the Shroud of Turin is to be taken into account, the Roman soldier pierced Our Lord’s Heart with so much force that the spear point passed completely through and pierced the skin of His back. Nor did the Resurrection close this wound, which is why St. Thomas was told by Jesus to put his (entire) hand into His side. And so, when the Father gazes at His Son sitting at His right hand for all eternity, He sees in His Son’s Sacred Heart vivid proof of a love to which no words can do justice.

A photographic negative of the Shroud of Turin.

We want the Father to look at His Son’s Heart to remind Him not of what scoundrels we are for being complicit in His Son’s death, but of His Son’s great love for us and how much He suffered for our sake. “Christ shows without ceasing the marks of His wounds to His Father for us,” writes Blessed Columba Marmion. “He causes all His merits to be of avail to us: and because He is always worthy of being heard by His Father, His prayer is always granted.” [2]  We therefore approach the Father with hope that our petition will be granted, namely, that our offenses may be expiated (“purged by sacrifice”) by this Sacrifice of the Mass.

The Postcommunion is:

Práebeant nobis, Dómine Jesu, divínum tua sancta fervórem: quo dulcíssimi Cordis tui suavitáte percepta; discámus terréna despícere, et amáre caelestia: Qui vivis et regnas.

Which I translate as:

May Thy holy mysteries, O Lord Jesus, impart to us divine fervor: whereby having tasted the sweetness of Thy most loving Heart, we may learn to despise earthly things and to love what is heavenly: Who livest and reignest...

This is a powerful prayer. It boldly equates the act of Holy Communion with tasting the Heart of Jesus. The prayer is especially powerful when one recalls the Eucharistic miracles in which consecrated Hosts miraculously turned to flesh. Such miracles have taken place in Lanciano, Italy in the eighth century (where the Host-Flesh is intact to this day), Buenos Aires in 1996, Tixtla, Mexico in 2006, Sokolka, Poland in 2008, and Legnica, Poland in 2013. In each case, histopathological studies or related analyses have revealed that the flesh is the heart tissue of a living person with AB (the universal) blood-type suffering great trauma. [3]  Every time we receive Holy Communion, we are getting a Heart transplant and a Blood transfusion from Christ on the Cross. [4]

The Miraculous Eucharist at Lanciano

And should our hearts be one with Jesus’, and should His blood course through our veins, what kind of lover would we become? The petition of the Postcommunion answers: a lover who loves what is heavenly and looks down on what is earthly. It is a love that dare not speak its name in the new Missal, which has all but eliminated this reference to our Catholic patrimony. [5] Nevertheless, an essential component of being holy is being a lover whose subjective loves are perfectly aligned with the objective order of lovable things. [6] And as we will see in several of the Orations in this chapter, “despising the earthly” does not mean hating God’s creation or having a contempt for the people and things around us but simply assessing temporal goods accurately and not getting too attached to them. [7] Paradoxically, this reality-oriented approach makes one a better lover of those goods. It is to see with the eyes of God and to love with His Heart.

Notes

[1] For more on this topic, see Michael P. Foley, “Divine Do-Overs: The Secret of Recapitulation in the Traditional Calendar.” 

[2] Blessed Columba Marmion, Christ the Life of the Soul Angelico Press, 2012), 70, emphasis added.

[3] Franco Serafini, A Cardiologist Examines Jesus: The Stunning Science Behind Eucharistic Miracles (Sophia Institute Press, 2021).

[4] This line is from Fr. Leo Patalinghug.

[5] See Michael P. Foley, “Renewing Respect for Christian Despisal.”

[6] See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.27.28.

[7] See “The Heartfelt Collect of the Second Sunday of Advent.”