The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus

In the first ten centuries of Christianity, there is nothing to indicate that any particular devotion was paid to the wounded Heart of Jesus. The devotion arose little by little, as a fruit of love for the holy humanity of Christ and, above all, for his wounds — especially the wound opened in his side. It was the fresh flowering of religious life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the zeal of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and Saint Francis of Assisi, joined to the fervor of the crusaders returning from the Holy Land, that rekindled in Christendom a love for the Passion of the Lord. The earliest traces of this devotion appear in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the fervent climate of the Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries — and the sources themselves admit that it is impossible to say with certainty which were its first texts or its first devotees.

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who died in 1153, taught that the opening of Christ’s side revealed his goodness and the charity of his Heart toward us. From that age comes the oldest known hymn to the Sacred Heart, the Summi Regis Cor Aveto, attributed to a Norbertine canon of Cologne, which opens by saluting the most high, kingly Heart. In the cloisters, mystics such as Saint Gertrude the Great and Saint Lutgardis — a Cistercian of Aywières, who died in 1246 — are numbered by tradition among the great forerunners of the devotion, the latter recounting a mysterious exchange of hearts with the Lord.

Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries the devotion spread, practiced by devout souls and by entire religious orders: Franciscans, Dominicans, Carthusians. Among the Franciscans it had champions such as Saint Bonaventure, who died in 1274 and who, in his Vitis Mystica, the “Mystical Vine,” wrote: “Who is there who would not love this wounded Heart? And who would not love, in return, the One who so loves us?”; and Blessed John of La Verna as well. Yet it was still a private devotion, of mystical souls — what was missing was the impulse that would make it the inheritance of the whole Church.

That impulse began in the seventeenth century, with the zeal of Saint John Eudes (1602–1680), a great promoter of devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. But the decisive moment came in France, between 1673 and 1675, when Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun, received a series of apparitions in which Jesus himself taught her the devotion to his Heart, along with his twelve promises to those who would consecrate themselves to it. From there the devotion took on the modern form we know and spread throughout the world.

Later, in the nineteenth century, in Portugal, Blessed Mary of the Divine Heart Droste zu Vischering, a Sister of the Good Shepherd, asked in the name of Christ that Pope Leo XIII consecrate the whole world to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. The devotion also took firm root in the practice of the First Fridays of each month and in a simple prayer that so many of us still repeat today: “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in you.”