The expressive and symbolic image of Christ’s heart is not the only means granted us by the Holy Spirit for encountering the love of Christ, yet it is, as we have seen, an especially privileged one. Even so, it constantly needs to be enriched, deepened and renewed through meditation, the reading of the Gospel and growth in spiritual maturity. Pius XII made it clear that the Church does not claim that, “we must contemplate and adore in the heart of Jesus a ‘formal’ image, that is, a perfect and absolute sign of his divine love, for the essence of this love can in no way be adequately expressed by any created image whatsoever”. 74Encyclical Letter Haurietis Aquas (15 May 1956), IV: AAS 48 (1956), 344.
Devotion to Christ’s heart is essential for our Christian life to the extent that it expresses our openness in faith and adoration to the mystery of the Lord’s divine and human love. In this sense, we can once more affirm that the Sacred Heart is a synthesis of the Gospel. 75Cf. ibid.: AAS 48 (1956), 336. We need to remember that the visions or mystical showings related by certain saints who passionately encouraged devotion to Christ’s heart are not something that the faithful are obliged to believe as if they were the word of God. 76“The value of private revelations is essentially different from that of the one public revelation: the latter demands faith… A private revelation… is a help which is proffered, but its use is not obligatory” (BENEDICT XVI, Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini [30 September 2010], 14: AAS 102 [2010]), 696). Nonetheless, they are rich sources of encouragement and can prove greatly beneficial, even if no one need feel forced to follow them should they not prove helpful on his or her own spiritual journey. At the same time, however, we should be mindful that, as Pius XII pointed out, this devotion cannot be said “to owe its origin to private revelations”. 77Encyclical Letter Haurietis Aquas (15 May 1956), IV: AAS 48 (1956), 340.
The promotion of Eucharistic communion on the first Friday of each month, for example, sent a powerful message at a time when many people had stopped receiving communion because they were no longer confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness and regarded communion as a kind of reward for the perfect. In the context of Jansenism, the spread of this practice proved immensely beneficial, since it led to a clearer realization that in the Eucharist the merciful and ever-present love of the heart of Christ invites us to union with him. It can also be said that this practice can prove similarly beneficial in our own time, for a different reason. Amid the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media, we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist.
While no one should feel obliged to spend an hour in adoration each Thursday, the practice ought surely to be recommended. When we carry it out with devotion, in union with many of our brothers and sisters and discover in the Eucharist the immense love of the heart of Christ, we “adore, together with the Church, the sign and manifestation of the divine love that went so far as to love, through the heart of the incarnate Word, the human race”. 78Ibid.: AAS 48 (1956), 344.
Many Jansenists found this difficult to comprehend, for they looked askance on all that was human, affective and corporeal, and so viewed this devotion as distancing us from pure worship of the Most High God. Pius XII described as “false mysticism” 79Ibid. the elitist attitude of those groups that saw God as so sublime, separate and distant that they regarded affective expressions of popular piety as dangerous and in need of ecclesiastical oversight.
It could be argued that today, in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularization that seeks to build a world free of God. In our societies, we are also seeing a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality. I must warn that within the Church too, a baneful Jansenist dualism has re-emerged in new forms. This has gained renewed strength in recent decades, but it is a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of “the salvation of the flesh”. For this reason, I turn my gaze to the heart of Christ and I invite all of us to renew our devotion to it. I hope this will also appeal to today’s sensitivities and thus help us to confront the dualisms, old and new, to which this devotion offers an effective response.
I would add that the heart of Christ also frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes. The result is often a Christianity stripped of the tender consolations of faith, the joy of serving others, the fervour of personal commitment to mission, the beauty of knowing Christ and the profound gratitude born of the friendship he offers and the ultimate meaning he gives to our lives. This too is the expression of an illusory and disembodied otherworldliness.
Once we succumb to these attitudes, so widespread in our day, we tend to lose all desire to be cured of them. This leads me to propose to the whole Church renewed reflection on the love of Christ represented in his Sacred Heart. For there we find the whole Gospel, a synthesis of the truths of our faith, all that we adore and seek in faith, all that responds to our deepest needs.
As we contemplate the heart of Christ, the incarnate synthesis of the Gospel, we can, following the example of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, “place heartfelt trust not in ourselves but in the infinite mercy of a God who loves us unconditionally and has already given us everything in the cross of Jesus Christ”. 80Apostolic Exhortation C’est la Confiance (15 October 2023), 20: L’Osservatore Romano, 16 October 2023. Therese was able to do this because she had discovered in the heart of Christ that God is love: “To me he has granted his infinite mercy, and through it I contemplate and adore the other divine perfections”. 81SAINT THERESE OF THE CHILD JESUS, Autobiography, Ms A, 83v°. That is why a popular prayer, directed like an arrow towards the heart of Christ, says simply: “Jesus, I trust in you”. 82SAINT MARIA FAUSTINA KOWALSKA, Diary, 47 (22 February 1931) , Marian Press, Stockbridge, 2011, p. 46. No other words are needed.
In the following chapters, we will emphasize two essential aspects that contemporary devotion to the Sacred Heart needs to combine, so that it can continue to nourish us and bring us closer to the Gospel: personal spiritual experience and communal missionary commitment.