Happy Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus! If you’re wondering why Catholics have a feast dedicated to Jesus’ heart, you’re in luck. I trace a little bit of that history today for Catholic Answers Magazine, particularly in relation to the Jansenist heresy. The piece (for reasons which will be clear if you read it) is called “How You Can Personally Console Jesus in Gethsemane.” Here’s a taste:
What was the combined effect of these three [Jansenist] teachings? That ordinary Catholics doubted God’s love for them; doubted whether they were (or could be) forgiven, even after going to confession; and stayed away from the Body and Blood of Christ in Communion out of fear, thereby depriving themselves of sacramental graces. The resulting vision of God was thereby distorted. As Pius XI would later recount, “God was not to be loved as a father but rather to be feared as an implacable judge.”
This is an important insight, because it gets to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Jansenism got the details of predestination or contrition or sacramental reception wrong. It’s that Jansenism got God wrong, in a fundamental way that many of us still get him wrong today.
Perhaps it is only fitting, then, that it was God himself who set things straight. While multiple seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popes vainly tried to quash Jansenism, Jesus intervened in an unexpected way: through a series of apparitions to a French nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690). In the last and most famous of these apparitions, Jesus showed her his heart and said:
“Behold the heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love; and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for me in this sacrament of love.“Theologically, this is the corrective Jansenism needed. Jesus did not deny any of what Jansenism was getting right: that sin offends God, that so many of us seem indifferent to God, that we can slip into ingratitude toward God with startling ease. But rather than express this in terms of divine wrath, Jesus presents it as a tragedy of unrequited love. That is, sinners act this way not because God denies them the graces to do otherwise, but because they fail to appreciate the depth and breadth of God’s love for them. Jesus saw the same problem that the Jansenists saw, but he answered it with open arms and an open heart.
And also… Happy Feast! (By the way, you can totally eat meat today, it’s a Solemnity!)
I’ve always wondered what was up with this “Sacred Heart of Jesus” and “Sacred Heart of Mary” stuff Catholics are on about so often with flaming hearts floating out of their bodies was all about. So, its a way to soften the heartlessness of Jansenism (i.e. Catholic Calvinism) but for illiterate people apparently. Interesting.
Years ago when my son was in his high school band ,they would occasionally play in a non school setting. My wife and I would always attend. Once they performed at a little evangelical church where to my great surprise they had a large tapestry in front of the Sacred Heart. I doubt that they had the foggiest idea it was a catholic symbol. Thinking about it however, it has universal meaning obvious to anyone who anyone is any kind of christian .It appears to have meant a lot to that little rural community.