June is for the Sacred Heart
This month of June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The love of God made manifest in the crucified Christ has been a focus of devotion and piety since the very beginning of Christianity. But particular devotion to the heart of Christ first appeared in the Middle Ages.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart, as we know it today, arose in earnest in 17th-century France through the revelations received by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque with the assistance of her spiritual director, the Jesuit St. Claude de la Colombière.
By the 18th century, devotion to the Sacred Heart – and formal acts of consecration to the Sacred Heart – had spread across France and beyond. During the French Revolution, the Sacred Heart became an emblem of Catholic loyalists opposed to the anti-clerical, atheistic forces of the revolution. Catholic counterrevolutionaries in the Vendée wore insignia bearing the image of the Sacred Heart.
In 1856, Pope Pius IX established the Feast of the Sacred Heart for the universal Church. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical, Annum Sacrum, declaring that, in the “principal church of every town and village,” the faithful of the whole world should be solemnly consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Leo desired that the unified devotion of the Church to the Sacred Heart of Jesus would be a powerful reminder, to the faithful themselves and the world at large, of Christ’s kingship over all creation – a kingship he holds both by right as the Son of God and by virtue of the terrible price he paid to redeem it.
Also among the reasons given by Pope Leo for exhorting the Church to this consecration was his abiding concern over rising godlessness, particularly among Christian nations. He saw religion being increasingly excluded from public life, a “sort of wall being raised between the Church and civil society.”
