This past Friday, a 2012 essay by Fr. James Martin, S.J. on devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus shot to the top of America’s list of the top five most popular articles on the magazine’s web site, a potential sign of latent interest in the devotion celebrated that day through a solemnity on the Church’s liturgical calendar. Martin traces the history of the devotion, which had its source in the visions of the 17th-century nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, later became especially associated with the Jesuit order, and, by the middle of the 20th century, had become immensely popular among Catholics around the world. In the second half of the 20th century, however, interest in the Sacred Heart of Jesus dropped off precipitously.
Martin argues that it is perhaps time for a revival of new forms of devotion to the Sacred Heart that respond to the pastoral and spiritual needs of Catholics today. He writes:
[T]he Sacred Heart is nothing less than an image of the way that Jesus loves us: fully, lavishly, radically, completely, sacrificially. The Sacred Heart invites to meditate on some of the most important questions in the spiritual life: In what ways did Jesus love his disciples and friends? How did he love strangers and outcasts? How was he able to love his enemies? How did he show his love for humanity? What would it mean to love like Jesus did? What would it mean for me to have a heart like his? How can my heart become more "sacred"? For in the end, the Sacred Heart is about understanding Jesus’s love for us and inviting us to love others as Jesus did.
Providing some insight into the current ecclesial context, in the Cardinal Bernardin Common Cause Lecture delivered at Loyola University Chicago in April (and recently published at Commonweal), Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, warned that the Church today is hampered both by “A Christianity configured as a political ideology, focused mostly on the definition of moral norms and training “cultural warriors” for the defense of orthodoxy” that “does not correspond to the aspirations of the human heart,” but also by “a spirituality that harbors moral laxity and projects an almost non-confessional outlook” that “fails to fulfill the thirst for the divine.”
Although Cardinal Pierre’s address did not touch on devotion to the Sacred Heart, does this devotion offer an opportunity for Church renewal, as Martin suggests, by emphasizing Christ’s infinite love, rather than rigidity and exclusion, but which is also grounded in the concrete person of Jesus and the call to be his disciples?
Before returning to that question, I think it’s worth considering the figure who was perhaps the most ardent promoter of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in recent times: the theologian Karl Rahner, S.J. This is perhaps a surprising claim because, on the surface, Rahner’s complex, abstract theology seems far removed from the very concrete, corporeal popular piety reflected in devotion to the Sacred Heart. Perhaps even more importantly, Rahner’s theology was extremely influential at the Second Vatican Council and in the years that followed, and so it would be easy to link his theology with the decline in traditional forms of popular piety in those years, including devotion to the Sacred Heart.
Nevertheless, Rahner remained deeply devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus throughout his life and included meditations on the theme in his theological work. He wrote several essays on the topics in the 1950s, when devotion to the Sacred Heart was at its height, revisited the theme in a 1967 essay written in the immediate aftermath of the council, and finally reflected on the decline in devotion to the Sacred Heart and its potential revival in an essay from 1983, a year before his death. Rahner’s commitment to traditional forms of popular piety extended beyond the Sacred Heart and adds a layer of complexity to his reputation; for example, Leo O’Donovan, S.J., Rahner’s one-time student and the former president of Georgetown University, recalls an address given at Georgetown in 1964 in which Rahner’s confrere and interpreter William Dych, S.J. delivered the talk in Rahner’s place while the latter sat silently praying the rosary.
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