Sacred Heart

Christians meditated on the open side of Christ from the earliest centuries. John’s Gospel says a soldier opened his side with a spear, “and immediately blood and water flowed out”. The Catholic Encyclopedia finds nothing to show that the wounded Heart was worshipped in the first ten centuries, and dates the first unmistakable signs of the devotion to the eleventh and twelfth, in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, where the wound in the Heart came to stand for the wound of love. To the nuns St Mechtilde (d. 1298) and St Gertrude (d. 1302) it was a familiar devotion. By the seventeenth century the image of the heart was everywhere, which the encyclopedia puts down to the Franciscans’ devotion to the Five Wounds and to the Jesuits’ habit of printing it on the title pages of their books and placing it on the walls of their churches. Jean Eudes made the devotion public: the first feast of the Sacred Heart was kept at the seminary of Rennes on 31 August 1670.

Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690) described a series of visions of Christ at Paray-le-Monial between 1673 and 1675. In the “great apparition” of June 1675 she heard him say, “Behold the Heart that has so loved men”, and ask for a feast of reparation on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi. Her Jesuit spiritual adviser, Claude de la Colombière, had her write the account down, and it was published at Lyons in 1684. Rome moved slowly. It granted the feast to the Visitation nuns in 1697, refused a feast for the whole Church in 1729, and allowed it in France in 1765; in 1856 Pope Pius IX extended it to the universal Church. On 11 June 1899 Leo XIII consecrated all mankind to the Sacred Heart, an act he called “the great act” of his pontificate. Benedict XV canonized Margaret Mary on 13 May 1920.