In numerous ways, Christ’s heart has always been present in the history of Christian spirituality. In the Scriptures and in the early centuries of the Church’s life, it appeared under the image of the Lord’s wounded side, as a fountain of grace and a summons to a deep and loving encounter. In this same guise, it has reappeared in the writings of numerous saints, past and present. In recent centuries, this spirituality has gradually taken on the specific form of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
A number of my Predecessors have spoken in various ways about the heart of Christ and exhorted us to unite ourselves to it. At the end of the nineteenth century, Leo XIII encouraged us to consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart, thus uniting our call to union with Christ and our wonder before the magnificence of his infinite love. 69“Since there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and the express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ that moves us to love one another, it is fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to his most Sacred Heart – an act that is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, for whatever honour, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ himself…And now, today, behold another blessed and heavenly token is offered to our sight – the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a cross rising from it and shining forth with dazzling splendour amidst flames of love. In that Sacred Heart all our hopes should be placed, and from it the salvation of men is to be confidently besought” (Encyclical Letter Annum Sacrum [25 May 1899]: ASS 31 [1898-1899], 649, 651). Some thirty years later, Pius XI presented this devotion as a “summa” of the experience of Christian faith. 70“For is not the sum of all religion and therefore the pattern of more perfect life, contained in that most auspicious sign and in the form of piety that follows from it inasmuch as it more readily leads the minds of men to an intimate knowledge of Christ our Lord, and more efficaciously moves their hearts to love him more vehemently and to imitate him more closely?” (Encyclical Letter Miserentissimus Redemptor [8 May 1928]: AAS 20 [1928], 167). Pius XII went on to declare that adoration of the Sacred Heart expresses in an outstanding way, as a sublime synthesis, the worship we owe to Jesus Christ. 71“For it is perfectly clear that this devotion, if we examine its proper nature, is a most excellent act of religion, inasmuch as it demands the full and absolute determination of surrendering and consecrating oneself to the love of the divine Redeemer whose wounded heart is the living sign and symbol of that love… In it, we can contemplate not only the symbol, but also, as it were, the synthesis of the whole mystery of our redemption… Christ expressly and repeatedly pointed to his heart as the symbol by which men are drawn to recognize and acknowledge his love, and at the same time constituted it as the sign and pledge of his mercy and his grace for the needs of the Church in our time” (Encyclical Letter Haurietis Aquas [15 May 1956], Proemium, III, IV: AAS 48 [1956], 311, 336, 340).
More recently, Saint John Paul II presented the growth of this devotion in recent centuries as a response to the rise of rigorist and disembodied forms of spirituality that neglected the richness of the Lord’s mercy. At the same time, he saw it as a timely summons to resist attempts to create a world that leaves no room for God. “Devotion to the Sacred Heart, as it developed in Europe two centuries ago, under the impulse of the mystical experiences of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, was a response to Jansenist rigor, which ended up disregarding God’s infinite mercy... The men and women of the third millennium need the heart of Christ in order to know God and to know themselves; they need it to build the civilization of love”. 72Catechesis, 8 June 1994, 2: L’Osservatore Romano, 9 June 1994, p. 5.
Benedict XVI asked us to recognize in the heart of Christ an intimate and daily presence in our lives: “Every person needs a ‘centre’ for his or her own life, a source of truth and goodness to draw upon in the events, situations and struggles of daily existence. All of us, when we pause in silence, need to feel not only the beating of our own heart, but deeper still, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible with faith’s senses and yet much more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world”. 73Angelus, 1 June 2008: L’Osservatore Romano, 2-3 June 2008, p. 1.