We have seen how Saint Claude de La Colombière combined the spiritual experience of Saint Margaret Mary with the aim of the Spiritual Exercises. I believe that the place of the Sacred Heart in the history of the Society of Jesus merits a few brief words.
The spirituality of the Society of Jesus has always proposed an “interior knowledge of the Lord in order to love and follow him more fully”. 139Cf. SAINT IGNATIUS LOYOLA, Spiritual Exercises, 104. Saint Ignatius invites us in his Spiritual Exercises to place ourselves before the Gospel that tells us that, “[Christ’s] side was pierced by the lance and blood and water flowed forth”. 140Ibid., 297. When retreatants contemplate the wounded side of the crucified Lord, Ignatius suggests that they enter into the heart of Christ. Thus we have a way to enlarge our own hearts, recommended by one who was a “master of affections”, to use the words of Saint Peter Faber in one of his letters to Saint Ignatius. 141Cf. Letter to Ignatius Loyola, 23 January 1541. Father Juan Alfonso de Polanco echoed that same expression in his biography of Saint Ignatius: “He [Cardinal Gasparo Contarini] realized that in Father Ignatius he had encountered a master of affections”. 142De Vita P. Ignatii et Societatis Iesu initiis, ch. 8. 96. The colloquies that Saint Ignatius proposed are an essential part of this training of the heart, for in them we sense and savour with the heart a Gospel message and converse about it with the Lord. Saint Ignatius tells us that we can share our concerns with the Lord and seek his counsel. Anyone who follows the Exercises can readily see that they involve a dialogue, heart to heart.
Saint Ignatius brings his contemplations to a crescendo at the foot of the cross and invites the retreatant to ask the crucified Lord with great affection, “as one friend to another, as a servant to his master”, what he or she must do for him. 143Spiritual Exercises, 54. The progression of the Exercises culminates in the “Contemplation to Attain Love”, which gives rise to thanksgiving and the offering of one’s “memory, understanding and will” to the heart which is the fount and origin of every good thing. 144Ibid., 230ff. This interior contemplation is not the fruit of our understanding and effort, but is to be implored as a gift.
This same experience inspired the great succession of Jesuit priests who spoke explicitly of the heart of Jesus: Saint Francis Borgia, Saint Peter Faber, Saint Alphonsus Rodriguez, Father Álvarez de Paz, Father Vincent Carafa, Father Kasper Drużbicki and countless others. In 1883, the Jesuits declared that, “the Society of Jesus accepts and receives with an overflowing spirit of joy and gratitude the most agreeable duty entrusted to it by our Lord Jesus Christ to practise, promote and propagate devotion to his divine heart”. 145THIRTY-THIRD GENERAL CONGREGATION OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS, Decree 46, 1: Institutum Societatis Iesu, 2, Florence, 1893, 511. In September 1871, Father Pieter Jan Beckx consecrated the Society to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and, as a sign that it remains an outstanding element in the life of the Society, Father Pedro Arrupe renewed that consecration in 1972, with a conviction that he explained in these words: “I therefore wish to say to the Society something about which I feel I cannot remain silent. From my novitiate on, I have always been convinced that what we call devotion to the Sacred Heart contains a symbolic expression of what is most profound in Ignatian spirituality, and of an extraordinary efficacy – ultra quam speraverint – both for its own perfection and for its apostolic fruitfulness. I continue to have this same conviction… In this devotion I encounter one of the deepest sources of my interior life”. 146In Him Alone is Our Hope. Texts on the Heart of Christ, St. Louis, 1984.
When Saint John Paul II urged “all the members of the Society to be even more zealous in promoting this devotion, which corresponds more than ever to the expectations of our time”, he did so because he recognized the profound connection between devotion to the heart of Christ and Ignatian spirituality. For “the desire to ‘know the Lord intimately’ and to ‘have a conversation’ with him, heart to heart, is characteristic of the Ignatian spiritual and apostolic dynamism, thanks to the Spiritual Exercises, and this dynamism is wholly at the service of the love of the heart of God”. 147Letter to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Paray-le-Monial, 5 October 1986: L’Osservatore Romano, 6 October 1986, p. 7.