Saint Charles de Foucauld and Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, without intending to, reshaped certain aspects of devotion to the heart of Christ and thus helped us understand it in an even more evangelical spirit. Let us now examine how this devotion found expression in their lives. In the following chapter, we will return to them, in order to illustrate the distinctively missionary dimension that each of them brought to the devotion.
In Louye, Charles de Foucauld was accustomed to visit the Blessed Sacrament with his cousin, Marie de Bondy. One day she showed him an image of the Sacred Heart. 122SAINT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD, Letter to Madame de Bondy, 27 April 1897. His cousin played a fundamental role in Charles’s conversion, as he himself acknowledged: “Since God has made you the first instrument of his mercies towards me, from you everything else began. Had you not converted me, brought me to Jesus and taught me little by little, letter by letter, all that is holy and good, where would I be today?” 123Letter to Madame de Bondy, 28 April 1901. Cf. Letter to Madame de Bondy, 5 April 1909: “Through you I came to know the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the benedictions and the Sacred Heart”. What Marie awakened in him was an intense awareness of the love of Jesus. That was the essential thing, and centred on devotion to the heart of Jesus, in which he encountered unbounded mercy: “Let us trust in the infinite mercy of the one whose heart you led me to know”. 124Letter to Madame de Bondy, 7 April 1890.
Later, his spiritual director, Father Henri Huvelin, helped Charles to deepen his understanding of the inestimable mystery of “this blessed heart of which you spoke to me so often”. 125Letter to l’Abbé Huvelin, 27 June 1892. On 6 June 1889, Charles consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart, in which he found a love without limits. He told Christ, “You have bestowed on me so many benefits, that it would appear ingratitude towards your heart not to believe that it is disposed to bestow on me every good, however great, and that your love and your generosity are boundless”. 126SAINT CHARLES DE FOUCAULD, Méditations sur l’Ancien Testament (1896-1897), XXX, 1-21. He was to become a hermit “under the name of the heart of Jesus”. 127ID., Letter to l’Abbé Huvelin,16 May 1900.