Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

There’s an image I’ve grown used to seeing in the homes of older folks — see if you’ve come across it where you live too. It’s the image of the heart of Jesus: open, wrapped in flames, encircled by a crown of thorns, and topped by a cross. At first glance it looks like just an old picture. But it is, in truth, the whole Gospel summed up in a single symbol: God loved us first, and He loved us with a heart of flesh, capable of tenderness, of weariness, and of pain. In June, the month the Church has for centuries devoted to the Sacred Heart, we are invited to look again at this love and to let it reach us.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is, above all, the worship of Christ’s love, represented by His heart. It is not about venerating an isolated part of the body, as though it were a charm, but about contemplating the whole Person of the Lord through what the heart has always meant in the language of the Bible: the innermost center of each of us, the place from which love, decisions, and self-giving spring. When we look at the Heart of Jesus, we are looking at just how truly God loves us.

This devotion has very ancient roots — the Fathers of the Church already meditated on the pierced side of Christ on the cross — but it took the form we know above all in the seventeenth century. In Paray-le-Monial, France, between 1673 and 1675, Jesus appeared to a humble religious sister, Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, showing her His heart and asking that this love be known and returned. Her confessor, the Jesuit Saint Claude de la Colombière, helped to discern and to spread the message. Before her, Saint John Eudes had already promoted the liturgical devotion to the Heart of Jesus. Prudently, over time, the Church examined, approved, and made this devotion her own.

Why does this matter for our Christian life? Because Christianity is not first a list of rules, but the response to a Love. The Heart pierced on the cross, from which the Gospel tells us blood and water flowed, is the sign that God gave Himself completely for us. Before such great love, the Catholic faith proposes to us two simple movements: to trust — to abandon ourselves to this Heart that never closes — and to make reparation, that is, to respond with faithfulness and tenderness to the indifference and sin that so often wound this love.

The Church has spoken of this many times. The Catechism, at number 478, recalls that Jesus knew and loved each of us during His whole life and Passion, and that His Heart, pierced for our sins and for our salvation, is considered the chief sign and symbol of the love with which the Redeemer continually loves the Father and all mankind. In the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII devoted to the theme the encyclical Haurietis Aquas (1956), showing that this devotion is not a passing sentimentality but a serious contemplation of the love of God who became man for us.

In practice, the Church has approved concrete ways of living this devotion. The best known are reparatory Communion on the first Fridays of the month, the Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament, personal consecration, and the enthronement of the Heart of Jesus in the home, along with the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart itself, celebrated in June. A word of common sense is in order: these practices are not magic formulas or an automatic guarantee of anything. They are worth something only insofar as they spring from living faith, conversion, and love — otherwise they turn into superstition, the very opposite of what the Heart of Jesus asks of us.

June is, by long tradition, the month the Church consecrates to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and it is during this season that we celebrate its solemnity, on the Friday following the feast of Corpus Christi. The theme, however, is far from being merely an old custom: in 2024, Pope Francis once again placed it at the heart of the Church’s life with the encyclical Dilexit Nos (“He loved us”), reminding us that, in a hurried and hardened world, we need to rediscover the Heart that loves without growing weary. To pause today and contemplate this love is not nostalgia: it is a return to the source.

And you need nothing complicated to begin. Set aside a moment before an image of the Sacred Heart — or simply close your eyes — and tell Jesus, in your own words, that you trust in Him. Many of the faithful live this devotion through Communion on the first Fridays, through a midweek visit to the Blessed Sacrament, through the consecration of their own family to the Heart of Jesus at home. But what matters most is not the method, it is the love: to answer love with love and to offer, in reparation, the small acts of faithfulness of each day. Why not, this very day, hand over to Him a weariness, a pain, or a hard act of forgiveness? Start there, opening your heart to the Heart that never closes to you.

Come to me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls.

Mt 11:28-29 (Douay-Rheims)