THE GIFT OF GOD: THE SACRED HEART
OF JESUS
Dear Friends and
Benefactors of the Society in Ireland,
The
devotion to the Sacred Heart, to Whom the month of June is
dedicated, is essentially the devotion of all Christian times. It is
a devotion for today as well.
Already
St. John, the
first apostle of the devotion, points towards the Heart upon witch he had
rested during the Last Supper.
Privileged witness at the foot of the Cross, he writes in his
gospel: "But one of the soldiers with a spear
opened his side: and immediately there came out blood and water.
And he that saw
it hath given testimony: and his testimony is true. And he knoweth
that he saith true: that you also may believe.[...] And again
another scripture saith: They shall look on him whom they pierced"
(John XIX, 34ss). The prophecy of the evangelist has been fulfilled
every century since the Golgotha; the Church has never omitted to
pay homage to that Heart in which we adore the humanity and the
divinity of Jesus Christ. St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Gertrude, St. Mechtilde, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. John
Eudes, St. Francis de Sales are only a few names among the many
saints who found in the Sacred Heart their inspiration and strength.
St
Gertrude, who died in 1302, is said to have had a vision of St. John
the Evangelist on his feast day, where he told her that devotion to
the Sacred Heart was reserved for subsequent ages, when the world
would need to be reminded of His infinite love.
When
Jansenism was freezing the hearts of the French Catholics, Our
Lord himself visited St. Margaret Mary Alacoque;
He appeared to her
on the feast of St. John, 27 December 1673, while Margaret Mary was
a nun in the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial. These are His
words: "Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared
nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself to prove to them
its love. In return, I receive from the greater number nothing but
ingratitude, contempt, irreverence, sacrilege, and coldness in this
Sacrament of my love. But what I feel still more is that there are
hearts consecrated to me who use me thus. Therefore I ask of you
that the Friday after the Octave of the Blessed Sacrament be kept as
a special festival in honour of my Heart,
to make
reparation for the indignities offered to It and as a Communion day,
in order to atone for the unworthy treatment It has received when
exposed upon the altars. I also promise that my Heart shall shed in
abundance the influence of Its Divine love on all those who shall
honour It or cause It to be so honoured."
In three
different occasions, Our Lord made to St. Margaret Mary the
following promises to those who give particular honour to His
Heart:
-
I
will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.
-
I
will establish peace in their homes.
-
I
will comfort them in their afflictions.
-
I
will be their secure refuge during life, and above all in death.
-
I
will bestow a large blessing upon all their undertakings.
-
Sinners shall find in My Heart the source and the infinite ocean
of mercy.
-
Tepid souls shall grow fervent.
-
Fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.
-
I
will bless every place where a picture of My Heart shall be set up
and honoured.
-
I
will give to priests the gift of touching the most hardened
hearts.
-
Those who shall promote this devotion shall have their names
written in My Heart, never to be blotted out.
-
The Great Promise: I promise thee in the excessive mercy of My
Heart that My all-powerful love will grant to all those who
communicate on the First Friday in nine consecutive months, the
grace of final penitence; they shall not die in My disgrace nor
without receiving the Sacraments; My Divine heart shall be their
safe refuge in this last moment.
The popes
–especially in the last two centuries- confirmed and recommended the
devotion in enthusiastic terms, writing a number of precious
encyclicals, of which Pius XII's Haurietis Aquas, 15 May
1956, is the masterpiece. Only recently Pope Benedict XVI wrote to
the General of the Society of Jesus: "Gazing at the side pierced by
the lance, where shines God's boundless will for salvation, cannot
then be considered as a passing form of veneration or devotion. The
adoration of God's love, which found historical-devotional
expression in the symbol of the pierced Heart, remains irreplaceable
for a living relationship with God." And in the Angelus
message of 5 June 2005
the pope said: "The heart that resembles that of Christ
more than any other is without a doubt the Heart of Mary, His
Immaculate Mother. Responding to the Virgin's invitation at Fatima,
let us entrust the whole world to her Immaculate Heart, so that it
may experience the merciful love of God and know true peace."
But let us
clarify the value of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Pope Pius XII
insisted that a genuine understanding of it must exclude all manner
of sentimentalism and naturalism. The contemplation of the Sacred
Heart must be approached not as a form of false mysticism which
looks suspiciously like a devotion to our own heart instead, but as
an apostolic enticement and an antidote against the modern errors:
·
The
falsification
or the open
denial of the divine Person of Jesus Christ.
How many today consider Him a legendary character? Or just a Jewish
philosopher who, with greater fortune than others, founded a school
of thought called Christianity?
Some
will see in Him a revolutionary, a political and social reformer,
like those Marxist "theologians of liberation." Not to mention the
blasphemous delirium of the Da Vinci Code which has caused
untold damage in uneducated minds. In its devotion to the Sacred
Heart, the Church provides us with the exact, authentic, and
evangelical
figure of the Word of God made flesh for our redemption.
To honour the
living Heart
of Jesus
is to honour the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, in opposition to
the naturalist and rationalist lies fostered by the Masonic lodges.
Is not then a most opportune and fundamental apostolate to propagate
nowadays the devotion to the Sacred Heart?
·
Descending from the intellectual errors to
those in
the moral domain, the
tendencies of the modern man can be exemplified by a truly satanic
pride: man will
serve
neither God nor
his neighbour. Brutal egoism, leading to an idolatry
of the individual, is not seen as a defect but as a doctrine,
formulated as a system under the name of positivism. The abdication
of all noble and spiritual aspirations, of all hope which is not
fixed on material things. Sacrifice, charity, self-denial, have no
place in our materialistic societies. The Heart of Jesus interpellates the modern man and calls him to elevate heart and
spirit towards the things of Heaven.
·
Pain and
suffering make
no sense in
today's world. Hence despair, suicides, euthanasia, and the culture of death. The suffering Heart of Christ,
pierced on the Cross, gives sense and hope to those
with infirm souls
or
bodies who
look upon Him with confidence.
· Never as
today has man spoken
about freedom,
peace, rights
and dignity, about the emancipation of countries, of women, of the
youth. And yet,
we are inundated by the filth of
pornography,
by immodest dress and degrading speech.
Look at the
destruction of the social order starting with the family, look at
the killing of innocent babies in their mother's bosoms, see the
imminent dangers
menacing
our societies by
terrorism and religious fanaticism. Satan promises freedom and
brings about destruction of everything man holds dear. The model of
the Sacred Heart raises mankind from this sad condition and teaches,
like an open book, lessons of abnegation, of respect for life, of
charity, of the beauty of chastity, of obedience, of sacrifice, and
of so many other things of which the modern mind seems to have
forgot even the name
by which they are called.
· The
estimated current
monthly average of
reported
"legal" abortions worldwide is
1,202,000,
almost 56 "legal" abortions per minute against 250 births per
minute; from 1922 to 2006, over 804 million abortions are documented
and almost 929 million estimated -the current world population being
estimated at 6.68 billion by the United Nations Population
Information Network. (Source on abortion statistics: William
Robert Johnston, from the University of Texas at Dallas, U.S.A., who
updates regularly a very meticulous
report on abortion). The devotion to the Heart of Jesus, once a
beating Heart inside a Mother's bosom, is a powerful deterrent
against the greatest massacre of history.
·
The very
notion of love has become a joke, oftentimes a blasphemous one.
Couples divorce "because they do not love each other anymore," the
youth fornicate "because they are in love," the old and the sick are
killed on
hospital beds
and too many call it "an act of love and mercy," the general
population becomes used to the idea that sodomites can marry
"because they love one another;"
and there is always a liberal Catholic around to label the condemnation of
evil as a "lack of charity." Only the attraction of a Heart at once human and divine can raise mankind from the sewer of its
own depravities; centre of all hearts, only the Heart of Jesus can
rescue us from misery and take us to the most noble regions of what
true love is, the reflection
and participation of the supreme love within the Holy
Trinity. In the
Incarnation, God has shortened the distance by becoming one of us
for all eternity;
it should not be so difficult to bring souls to
the fountain of love by being apostles
of the Sacred Heart.
·
Now that
ecumenism is the leitmotiv among many religious people, let them
be reminded that God became a man, suffered for us on the Cross, and
left us His only Church to teach, sanctify, and govern us in the way
to Heaven. We
are told by mitred heretics that we all adore the same God.
There is no Sacred Heart of Allah
or of
Buddha; just as
Our Lady is not the Mother of the Buddha; just as in the Most
Blessed Sacrament we do not adore the real presence of Allah, but
the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus Christ our Saviour,
born of Mary ever Virgin and present in all the tabernacles of the
world. With the Psalmist, the adorers of the Sacred Heart proclaim
that "all the gods of the gentiles are demons" (Psalm XCV,5).
I could
not end this letter of June without making reference to a very
practical manner of honouring the Sacred Heart: the Pledge of
Abstinence. The Pioneer Movement was founded in 1898 by
the Reverend
James Cullen, S.J., in the Jesuit church at Upper Gardiner Street in
Dublin, to address the problem of alcohol abuse, which was rampant
in Irish society at that time, and to spread devotion to the Sacred
Heart of Jesus. Fr. Cullen
maintained
that it was only through devotion to the Sacred Heart that the
scourge of alcohol could be destroyed. In
spirit of reparation, and
also to
obtain graces for those
struggling with the addiction, pioneers commit themselves for life
-the "Heroic Offering"- or for a determined amount of time to
abstain completely from alcohol and to say twice a day the prayer:
"For thy greater glory and consolation, O Sacred Heart of Jesus, for
thy sake to give good example, to practise self-denial, to make
reparation to Thee for the sins of intemperance and for the
conversion of excessive drinkers, I will abstain (for life, for
three months, one year...) from all intoxicating drinks." Others add
as well the
following prayer
for the recovery of
drug addicts: "We commend to
Thee, O
Sacred Heart of Jesus, all whose lives have been broken through the
misuse of drugs. We ask
Thee,
O Lord, to protect them from harm and
restore them to health, so that they can live out the years
Thou
hast
given them in serenity and joy. Praise to the Heart of Jesus, our
King and our God!" It
would be very encouraging if some of our senior Pioneers organize
local chapters in our chapels, and to see young people taking at
least a temporary pledge.
The month
will end with a very special gift from the Sacred Heart: the priestly
ordination of our Irish deacon David Sherry, at the seminary of Ecône, Switzerland, June 29 at 9.00 am. Many of us will be there to
share the joy of his family. Father David Sherry will spend part of
his summer in Ireland and we will have the opportunity to attend his
mass and receive the first blessing of the newly ordained priest. We
recommend him, along with our Irish seminarians
and religious, to the Hearts of
Jesus and Mary, while asking for many more vocations from our
country, from your families.
As of today
we have not one booking made for the Men's Retreat at Orlagh,
August 20-24. Do not let this opportunity pass!
On the other hand, it is reassuring to know that this year we have a record number for the summer
Eucharistic Crusade Camps.
Your
priests in Ireland bless you and pray for you, always grateful for
your own prayers, affection, and material support.
Father Ramón
Anglés
