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The Jesuits and the Sacred Heart of Jesus
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July 14, 2022On 27 December 1673—the Feast of St. John the Evangelist—Visitation Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque had a vision in which Jesus invited her to rest her head upon his heart, revealed to her for the first time the great love in which he held all humanity, and called her to share the image of his Sacred Heart with all people. Continuing for the next 18 months, these visions guided Margaret Mary to promote a devotion to the Sacred Heart that would include Eucharistic Adoration, First Friday reception of Holy Communion, and a feast day dedicated to the Sacred Heart. The visions of Mary Margaret were given little consideration, even among members of her own community, until a Jesuit priest, sent as a temporary confessor to the convent in 1675, came to believe that Margaret Mary was indeed blessed by God with a special revelation. With the support of this Jesuit, Claude La Colombière, the vision of Margaret Mary became more widely accepted: first within her own convent and then within the larger Catholic community. Though Claude spent only a year as Margaret Mary’s confessor, he served as her spiritual director for the rest of his life, providing guidance via letter until his death in 1682. Little wonder then, that in 1688, during one of her last revelations, Margaret Mary heard Christ entrusting the devotion of the Sacred Heart to the care of the Visitation Sisters and the Society of Jesus.
For the Jesuits, devotion to the Sacred Heart seemed consistent with the experience of St. Ignatius, whose vision of Christ at La Storta had not been of a triumphant king, but of a condemned man carrying his cross. This was the Christ who called Ignatius into Companionship: a human Christ, moved by divine love and pierced for the sake of those he would redeem. In the Sacred Heart, the Jesuits found a devotion that expressed this combination of divinity and humanity, of suffering and love, of comfort and mission. Consequently, as the Jesuits spread across the world, so too did the devotion to the Sacred Heart, becoming one of the principal forms of prayer for the entire Church.
But while the devotion to the Sacred Heart was strongly promoted by the Jesuits, it was not officially recognized as part of the Jesuit mission until 1856, when St. Pius IX, who established the feast of the Sacred Heart, formally entrusted its promulgation to the Society. Given this sweet task (“munus suavissimum” as it was described at the time), the Jesuits redoubled their efforts and their embrace of the devotion, pointing to its ancient roots in the Scriptures and the history of the Church. Finally, on 1 January 1872, over 200 years after Margaret Mary’s first revelation, the Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Pieter Jan Beckx, consecrated the whole Society and its ministries to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a fulfillment of that process that went back to the visions of St. Margaret Mary Alocoque and her friend and confessor, St. Claude La Colombière.
As part of Jesuit sponsorship for the devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Apostleship of Prayer was founded, offering opportunities for the devotion to flourish throughout the world. However, by the time the Second Vatican Council rolled around, the devotion to the Sacred Heart, like many forms of devotional prayer, had begun to seem old-fashioned and even, perhaps, obsolete. In the spiritual fire of Vatican II, the old forms seemed tired, and many questioned if they might not best be put aside. Even a number of younger Jesuits thought of the image of the Sacred Heart as something inappropriate for the Church of the 20th century—smacking, as it appeared to, of the sentimentality and other-worldliness of the 19th. Yet, for Jesuit Superior General Fr. Pedro Arrupe, this old devotion needed not abandonment, but only revision: a new look that would allow us to see how deeply the image of the human heart of Christ, pierced by the violence of the world yet filled with the love of God, was profoundly in line with the call of the Society in the modern world. What better image, thought Arrupe, then the Sacred Heart, to remind each Jesuit that he is “a sinner, yet called to be a companion of Jesus as Ignatius was: Ignatius, who begged the Blessed Virgin to ‘place him with her Son,’ and who then saw the Father himself ask Jesus, carrying his Cross, to take this pilgrim into his company.” So it was that in 1972, on the 100th anniversary of the original consecration of the Society to the Sacred Heart, Fr. Arrupe renewed—and revised—that consecration, dedicating all Jesuits and Jesuits works to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a sign of incarnate love.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of Fr. Arrupe’s re-consecration of the Society to the Sacred Heart, and as we close out the Ignatian Year, in which Jesuit ministries and communities have recalled the 500th anniversary of the conversion of St. Ignatius following his wounding at Pamplona, we are called again to dedicate ourselves and our ministries to the Sacred Heart. On the Feast of St. Ignatius—the weekend of 31 July—St. Ignatius Parish will join other Jesuit communities and ministries around the world in placing ourselves in the heart of Christ. In this, we will follow Ignatius, placed with the Son by the grace of the Father and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Next week, I will explore what this dedication might mean to us as a Jesuit parish, and discuss how each of us might take it to heart. In the meantime, may we give thanks that we are held in the heart of Christ—a human heart, like our own, whose love pours out to all the world.
