“The Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus” Part 1

This year, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus will be celebrated on Friday, June 27. It is a “moveable feast,” which is celebrated on the second Friday after Trinity Sunday. (In those places where Corpus Christi has been transferred to a Sunday, such as it is in the USA, the feast can also be said to be the following Friday). As its date is dependent on the changing date of Easter, it might be observed as early as May 29 or as late as July 2. The feast, which had been celebrated liturgically in parts of France since the second half of the seventeenth century, was extended to the entire Roman Catholic Church by Pope Blessed Pius IX in 1856. In the calendar reform of 1969, the feast was designated a “solemnity,” that is, the highest rank of liturgical observance. Finally, in 2002, Pope St. John Paul II also designated the feast as a day of prayer for the sanctification of priests.

The feast especially grew in popularity following the apparitions of Jesus Christ to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun at Paray-le-Monial, France, between 1673 and 1675. In the first of these apparitions, the Lord invited Sr. Margaret Mary to rest her head on His heart and indicated that He wanted her to make His love known to the world through devotion to His Sacred Heart. In addition to the invitation to receive Holy Communion on the first Fidays of nine consecutive months, and the dedication of an hour of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament on Thursday nights, Jesus directed her to inform her confessor, St. Claude de la Colombiere, S.J., that it was His desire, “that the first Friday after the octave of the Blessed Sacrament [i.e., Corpus Christi] be dedicated to a particular feast to honor my heart, by receiving Communion on that day and making reparation to it by honorable amends, to repair the indignities it received during the time it was exposed on the altars".

On May 25, 1899, in anticipation of the approaching Holy Year (1900), Pope Leo XIII, by means of the encyclical, Annum Sacrum (https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_25051899_annum-sacrum.html) directed the universal Church to join him in consecrating the entire human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the feast day of that year, June 11, explaining,

“…there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another, therefore is it fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to His most Sacred Heart—an act which is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, seeing that whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ Himself.