By Austen Ivereigh
Francis, a pope devoid of nostalgia, concerned with church renewal, attentive to the signs of the times and totally committed to the Second Vatican Council, sees in an old devotion a vision of the Church’s future.
In 1988, a young law student went to confess in the Jesuits’ parish in downtown Buenos Aires. The priest who heard Fabián Báez’s confession struck him by his wisdom and kindness. As they finished, the priest took something from a box he had by his chair and gave it to Báez, telling him: “This little book will help you pray.” It was the Devocionario del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús, a collection of Sacred Heart devotional prayers.
The student later became a priest, ordained by the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, who was the Jesuit who had heard his confession that day. Many years later, in 2014, Fr Báez was in Rome with Argentine pilgrims. At the general audience in St Peter’s Square the same Jesuit, now in white, spotted him and invited him up on to the popemobile. At another Wednesday general audience in June this year, Pope Francis announced he was preparing a document on the Sacred Heart of Jesus, “in order to re-propose today, to the whole Church, this devotion imbued with spiritual beauty”. It is to be released some time in September, midway through the 350th anniversary of the first of many visions that Sr Margaret Mary Alacoque had in her convent in Paray-le-Monial, eastern France. “It will do us great good to meditate on various aspects of the Lord’s love,” Francis said, “which can illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal and say something meaningful to a world that seems to have lost its heart.”
When he says “re-propose” the devotion, he is not exaggerating. This will be the fourth document by a pope on the Sacred Heart – after Leo XIII’s Annum Sacrum (1899), Pius XI’s Miserentissimus Redemptor (1928) and Pius XII’s Haurietis Aquas in 1956 – but the first since the Second Vatican Council. Why would Francis, a pope devoid of nostalgia, concerned with church renewal, attentive to the signs of the times and totally committed to the Second Vatican Council, wish us to retread this old road? For most, the devotion is a 1950s anachronism, associated above all with the oleograph that used to hang on every Catholic family’s kitchen wall, the apex of pious kitsch. A doe-eyed, effeminate, pasty-faced Jesus points to his heart outside his body, which is bleeding and surrounded by a crown of thorns. For a devotion so harmed by its artistic representation, only the light-sabre Divine-Mercy Jesus comes close.
But as the Fr Báez anecdote illustrates, for Jorge Mario Bergoglio the devotion never went away. Sr Margaret Mary’s confessor, St Claude La Colombière, was a Jesuit, and the spirituality of the Sacred Heart was spread above all by the Society of Jesus in the eighteenth century. It took root especially in Latin America in the late nineteenth century, and is a key element of the popular religiosity which Francis values so highly. In a pre-visit video message to Cuba in Sept 2015, Francis said he was delighted that the bishops had urged the people to repeat several times a day “Sacred Heart of Jesus, make my heart like yours” because, he said, that was “the prayer we learned as children”.
Yet many Jesuits abandoned it in the 1960s and 1970s, to the point where the superior general of the society, Pedro Arrupe, lamented in his last address to the society in 1981 that “in recent years the very expression ‘Sacred Heart’ has constantly aroused, from some quarters, emotional, almost allergic reactions”. He reminded his brother Jesuits that the devotion was “the centre of the Ignatian experience” and needed renewal, not abandonment, for it remains “an extraordinarily effective means … both for gaining personal perfection as for apostolic success”. The one whom he had named in 1973 to lead the Argentine province did not need persuading that “the society needs the power (dynamis)” contained in the devotion. Bergoglio had encouraged young Jesuits to embrace it among other popular devotions, and himself remained loyal to it. As provincial, he secured the publishing rights to the Devocionario, copies of which he gave out not just in the confessional but as Christmas gifts.
And now, maybe, it is Arrupe’s call to reflect and discern what the devotion has meant “and what it should mean even today” that is behind Francis’ new document. As the Pope’s constant emphasis on the tender, merciful nature of God shows, he agrees with Arrupe that today’s world presents “challenges and opportunities that can be fully met only with the power of this love of the Heart of Christ”. Francis wants to show us why that is true, and also how it can enable the spiritual and institutional renewal that the Church badly needs in a post-Christendom, but also post-secular, world.
Sr Margaret Mary’s first vision on 27 December 1673 was of the Heart of Jesus, wreathed in thorns, surmounted by a cross on a throne of flames (a very different image from the mass-produced twentieth-century oleographs). She said that Jesus took her heart and returned it to her “ablaze”. When she tried to share this and the following experiences with her fellow Visitation sisters, she was disbelieved, and suffered. But she found an ally in Fr La Colombière, a mild-mannered Jesuit living close by, who became her spiritual director. Over the next 18 months, as the visions continued, he became convinced that God was revealing something important to her, and helped her to venerate Jesus’ sacred heart in response.
Sr Margaret Mary received a series of 12 promises to those who would honour Jesus’ Heart. The first five begin, “I will give …” graces, peace, consolation, refuge and abundant blessings. The sixth says that “sinners shall find in my Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy”. The next three promises pledge that tepid souls will become fervent, zealous souls will rise to perfection and priests will be given “the power to touch the most hardened hearts”. Two more promise that the places where the image is venerated and those who propagate the devotion will be blessed. And the final promise is that those who receive Communion on the first Fridays for nine consecutive months will be granted “the grace of final repentance: they will not die in my displeasure, nor without receiving the sacraments; and my Heart will be their secure refuge in their last hour.”
In devotion to the Sacred Heart the initiative is taken by Christ, who enables and empowers by his grace. Francis captures this aspect of God in his neologisms primerear and misericordiar – “to first” and “to mercy” – that show God always there out in front of us, loving us, pledging himself to us. It is not knowledge or effort that obtains God’s love and mercy; all is gift and grace. Our faith is not a transaction, but a grateful response to an experience; as Benedict XVI famously said, it is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but an encounter with a person, an experience which gives life a new horizon.
Conversion is how we respond to God’s coming close, to his self-emptying, by our own self-offering. The interaction is possible because God is a wounded, merciful, self-offering presence, allowing us (as wounded, limited, faulty beings restless for love) to be embraced by him. We do not need to be “good” to be loved; we become good by accepting Christ’s love for us, which is what devotion to the Sacred Heart enables. As St Augustine insisted, it is not the keeping of the commandments that earns God’s love but the other way around: we are offered God’s mercy and love unconditionally, and in receiving it we discover our true value. We are transformed and in turn become agents of transformation.
When a person feels loved, he or she is inclined to “leave behind the self-centredness that disfigures human freedom”, Francis said in a September 2018 address, and “to pour into the world the love received from the Lord, to channel it into the Church, in the family, in society, to interpret it in serving and giving ourselves”. And to do so, “not out of duty, but out of love for him, by whom we are tenderly loved”. In the document that came out of the meeting of Latin American bishops at Aparecida in May 2007, Cardinal Bergoglio – its chief redactor – described this as el encuentro fundante, the “founding encounter”, for it is what makes us Christians. In Francis’ discernment, it is also the source of the re-founding of the Church today, (re-)shaped by the encounter with mercy. That future is now being born among us, at the same time as cultural Christianity – a Church marked by social conformity, links with power, middle-class moralism, clericalism and so on – falls away. The shift is envisioned in Evangelii Gaudium, and is being enabled by synodality, which is the bid to incarnate “God’s style” in the culture and structures of the Church.
For Francis, in today’s secular, technocratic age, the Church can no longer moralise from a place of authority, nor evangelise by conquering the state, but must witness through service and mercy – as a battlefield hospital, not as a flag-bearing crusader. That option is contested by the “integrist” forces in the United States, including many pro-Trump Catholics seeking to reconquer the public square: they see Francis’ emphasis on mercy as a capitulation to the dissolving forces of liberal modernity. But Francis is adamant: the evangelising mission in today’s world must communicate who and how God is. The Church “falls into hopeless decline whenever we confuse the power of strength with the strength of that powerlessness with which God has redeemed us”, Francis told the US bishops in Sept 2015. He warned them against making the Cross “a banner of worldly struggles”, and reminded them that “the price of lasting victory is allowing ourselves to be wounded and consumed”.
That is a Sacred Heart manifesto. So too is his assertion in Evangelii Gaudium that the Kingdom of God “is about loving God who reigns in our world”; and that “to the extent that he reigns within us, the life of society will be a setting for universal fraternity, justice, peace and dignity”. What meaning in the devotion will Francis now draw out “to a world that seems to have lost its heart”? My guess is there will be much about the wounds of the poor and the outcast in a globalised, technocratic world, and the way that those wounds – those of the discarded and the shunned, the wounds of the earth itself – are the place we encounter the wounds of Christ, and thereby experience the “founding encounter”. Perhaps he will explicitly contrast this with the temptation of the national-populist sirens to power and the rejection of woundedness in favour of triumphalism and dominance.
There is perhaps a final clue in the address Francis made to clergy and Religious at the shrine of El Quinche in Ecuador in 2015. He had been struck by how, everywhere he had been, people were joyful, content, gracious and pious; and that from the youngest to the oldest everyone had asked for his blessing, such that he had spent his time making the sign of the Cross over and over. What was the secret of this people? he had asked himself, turning the question over in his mind, and asking Jesus in prayer for the answer. That morning he had received an insight: it was because Ecuador had “had the courage” to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart back in 1874.
I remember thinking it odd that he was referring back to an act used by conservatives to assert the temporal power of the Church against liberal and masonic forces. (Famously, the year after he had the legislature make the public consecration, President Gabriel García Moreno was assassinated by freemasons.) Then I realised that Francis had made no mention of those battles, but was praising the beauty of the faith of an evangelised people, who had been shaped by their encounter with the merciful Heart of Jesus. And that this had given him a vision of the Church’s future. – The Tablet
