Karl Rahner on the Sacred Heart of Jesus
A Devotion for Our Time?
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.
Without offering a complete overview of Rahner’s thinking on the Sacred Heart, I want to highlight some of his key ideas and explore whether they remain relevant to our own context.
First, consistently throughout his essays on the Sacred Heart, Rahner insists that the term “heart” should be understood not simply as the physical organ referred to as the “heart,” but in a more primordial sense as the fundamental unity of the person as body and soul. “Heart” also refers to the person’s going outside themselves to enter into relationship with others, whether it be with another human being with God.
Here Rahner links his reflections on the Sacred Heart to more well-known themes from his theology. He claims that it is in the heart, understood in this primordial sense, rather than in the “soul,” the “mind,” etc., that God reveals His love to us and where we respond to God. Devotion to the Sacred Heart, then, is an articulation of the sense that Christ, through the Paschal Mystery, demonstrates and shares His love with us in the deepest core of our being. Because we ultimately make a choice regarding how we will respond to God’s love, a choice we make in our hearts, Rahner insists that the term “heart” cannot simply be equated with “love.” He notes that Scripture at times refers to the human heart as cold, darkened, or hardened, representations of our capacity to turn away from God’s love. Still, it is in the heart that human love, including love of God, has its origin.
Rahner argues that this sense of the heart as representing the primordial unity of the person is prior to the distinction between body and soul, and therefore it has priority over the more physiological sense of the heart as an organ of the body. Therefore, he rejects the notion that devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a devotion to the physical heart of Jesus understood as a mere symbol or sign of Christ’s love. Such an understanding of the devotion already assumes the separation of the body from the spirit. Rather, devotion to the Sacred Heart is a devotion to the entire person of Christ, particularly his infinite love as demonstrated by his sacrificial giving of his life, sensibly manifested and represented by his physical heart (and, interestingly, Rahner insists this is why visual representations of the Sacred Heart need not, and indeed should not, be anatomically precise, because they are not meant to be representations of the anatomical heart alone). It is no surprise, then, that Rahner offers the example of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the opening of his famous essay “The Theology of the Symbol,” which argues that visible reality is the self-expression or “self-presence” of the being of things, and which lays the foundations for his theological system. Although he doesn’t quite say it, there’s a sacramental quality to the Sacred Heart as a manifestation of Christ’s love.
Finally, Rahner argues that only human persons have a “heart” understood in the primordial sense mentioned above, and so devotion to the Sacred Heart helps to emphasize Jesus’ humanity as the path to our union with divinity. He criticizes traditional forms of devotion to the Sacred Heart, however, for expressing this emphasis in too limited a way. Jesus’ taking on human flesh to bring about our salvation was not merely a one-time occurrence long ago. Without at all diminishing the historical significance of Jesus’ ministry and Passion, Rahner insists that we must understand Jesus’ humanity as something of permanent and intrinsic relevance to how we encounter and respond to God.
Some of Rahner’s essays on the Sacred Heart written in the 1950s have an almost devotional quality, perhaps reflecting an assumption that many of his readers would share his sense of the importance of this devotion. His last essay on the topic, however, takes a different tone, reflecting on the waning popularity of the devotion. He suggests that secularization, and the modern world’s grappling with the immensity of evil, have made devotion to the Sacred Heart less appealing:
. . . [I]t is natural that in an age of universal atheism and of a secularization that is more than the legitimate acknowledgment of the autonomy of earthly realities, in an age that knows less and less about the central message of Christianity, in an age of deadly danger for the whole world and of hitherto unknown and arduous challenges in organizing social life and the international community, in such a time the theme of an explicit verbalized devotion to the Sacred Heart cannot have, in the general awareness of the Church or in the ordinary awareness of the faithful in the world, the same “central position” that it supposedly occupied for the two past centuries, up to the middle of our own.
In the darkness of our times, which are threatened by the death of both spirit and body, we cry to the incomprehensible God of our history we announce, with the last power of the faith, that we have kept the crucified one as our own fate; we hope that this fate hanging over us individually and socially will end up in salvation.
It is not surprising then that, in the presence of these ultimate questions and of the answers to them which we grasp with all the courage of our existence, devotion to the Sacred Heart no longer attracts us. It sounds too bland, too individualistic, too merely “introspective.” We no longer see why we should translate, even if it were possible, the ultimate answers to the ultimate questions, which are forced upon us and expected from us, into the language of a devotion to the Sacred Heart. We have the impression that this devotion is slowly entering the domain of ways of acting and speaking that belong to a Christian past. These ways existed once, they were lively and good, but they no longer appeal to us. It is like the special veneration of Jesus’ Five Wounds, the Infant of Prague, the Precious Blood, and many other practices of Christian piety, which once captivated and delighted the spirit and heart of Christians.
Rahner responds, however, that, even though secularization may have contributed to the decline of the devotion, in its essence, the devotion to the Sacred Heart emerged in history as a response to secularization.
In some reflections on the relationship between the public revelation of the Gospel and so-called private revelation (particularly interesting in light of the Vatican’s recent document on apparitions and other private revelations, which I wrote about here), Rahner claims that while private revelations add nothing to the divine revelation that was completed in Christ, they can be understood as promptings of the Spirit regarding which aspects of the Gospel may be in need of particular emphasis in a given age, or regarding how, among the many possibilities, Christian life ought to be lived out in that age. The meaning and relevance of a private revelation, however, should be the result of discernment on the part of the Church.
Rahner argues that as it developed historically, the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus emerged as a response to secularization. In particular, he claims that it brought attention to the interiority of faith (which is not the same thing as individualization) at a time when the social supports of Christian faith were in decline. Rahner’s argument parallels the philosopher Charles Taylor’s claim in A Secular Age that secularization has ushered in a transformation of religious faith from a focus on public ritual to personal commitment. Rahner’s point, then, is that devotion to the Sacred Heart has been a public expression of this interiorization of faith.
Rahner likewise hopes that, in contemporary times, devotion to the Sacred Heart can be linked to what he sees as an emerging “universal hope” among Christians. What he means by this is, first, a renewed sense of eschatological hope in the midst of history, and in particular a sense that salvation history does not end with the damnation of the mass of humanity, with only a small few rewarded with eternal bliss. Rahner sees signs of this renewed hope in the increasing acceptance of the view, most often associated with Rahner’s theological rival Hans Urs von Balthasar, that Christians ought to hope for the salvation of all. Second, Rahner sees this universal hope in the belief that Christianity offers a response to the immense suffering of the contemporary world, a sense of hope in the midst of suffering (a theme the recently deceased Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann did much to develop).
I think Rahner’s reasons for believing that devotion to the Sacred Heart could be revived in contemporary times continue to resonate. For one, interest continues to grow in Balthasar’s theology of hope and even more absolute forms of universalism (sometimes referred to as “hard universalism”). I have my doubts about the latter, but even so, I’m interested in a theology of the radical generosity of God’s grace. Linked to this, I think there’s an intense hunger for a theology that rejects the overly moralistic form of Christianity criticized by Cardinal Pierre in favor of a focus on divine love and mercy, but likewise a theology that does not abandon morality, but rather grounds it in the dignity of the human person, which “belongs to the person as such simply because he or she exists and is willed, created, and loved by God” (Dignitas Infinita, 7). The growing network of young, former Catholic traditionalists (even as traditionalist Catholicism continues to receive media attention) is one sign of this. There’s also a hunger for a sense of personal encounter with the person Jesus and a desire to become “missionary disciples,” to use a term that has become widespread in pastoral circles.
Going beyond Rahner’s insight that the devotion to the Sacred Heart offered a new way of expressing Christian faith in response to secularization, Matthew Eggemeier and Peter Fritz (who represent a new generation of Rahnerians, applying Rahner’s thought in new, and sometimes surprising, ways), in their book Send Lazarus: Catholicism and the Crises of Neoliberalism, argue that a contemporary devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus could form the basis for a set of public practices that challenge neoliberalism, the dominant economic and political ideology centered around individualism and self-interest and which undermines our sense of a shared, common good.
In her own reflections on the Sacred Heart devotion, Meghan Clark explains that for her great-grandmother, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was a prominent expression of her faith, and for her grandmother it was a sign of Irish-American Catholic identity. For Clark herself, however, as a child the images of the Sacred Heart in her great-grandmother’s house were “somewhat terrifying,” and even as she grew older, the devotion “always seemed historical but not particularly alive or urgent.” Although I’m somewhat older than Clark, my experience of the devotion may be more typical of younger generations of Catholics—I can, of course, identify images of the Sacred Heart, but I have no memory or experience whatsoever of the devotion.
That may not be promising ground for a revival of the devotion, but on the other hand, the lack of lived experience means there are very few preconceptions of what devotion to the Sacred Heart should look like. Martin points out that it may be helpful to begin with new images of the Sacred Heart that reflect contemporary spiritual needs and which could replace the “kitschy and off-putting” images sometimes seen in churches or grandmothers’ bedrooms. More important than the images, however, will be the concrete ways that Catholics devise to foster the experience of Christ’s infinite love and to live out that love in the world.