Sacred Heart

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The Sacred Heart is the Roman Catholic devotion that takes the physical heart of Jesus as the visible sign of his love for humanity, and offers worship to that love through the image of the wounded, burning heart. It is at once an object of meditation and a practice: a way of directing prayer toward the suffering and the tenderness of Christ at the same point.

The devotion has long roots. Medieval writers — Bernard of Clairvaux, the nuns of Helfta, the affective mystics of the Rhineland — already dwelt on the wound in Christ’s side and the heart behind it as the door into his interior life. But the devotion in its modern, organized form belongs to seventeenth-century France. Between 1673 and 1675, a Visitandine nun at Paray-le-Monial, Margaret Mary Alacoque, reported a series of apparitions in which Christ showed her his heart, encircled with thorns and crowned with flame, and asked that it be honored. Her Jesuit confessor, Claude de la Colombière, took the reports seriously and lent them his order’s weight; from there the practice spread, met considerable resistance, and was only gradually authorized. The Church established a liturgical feast and, in 1856, extended it to the whole Latin rite.

What practitioners hold is specific. The heart is not treated as a symbol the devotee has chosen, but as the actual heart of the incarnate God, and the love it represents is understood to be wounded by human indifference; much of the devotion’s emotional charge lies in the idea of reparation — of consoling a love that has been slighted. The visions reported to Alacoque carried promises attached to particular observances, among them communion on the first Friday of nine consecutive months. These claims are tradition-internal: the Church accepts the devotion and has canonized Alacoque, while holding, as it does with all private revelation, that no Catholic is bound to believe the apparitions themselves.

The image is among the most recognizable in Western religious art: a human heart girdled with thorns, pierced, dripping, surmounted by a small cross and ringed with rays or fire, often shown on the breast of Christ as he draws back his robe. Historians of religion have read the devotion as part of a broad Counter-Reformation turn toward the affective and the bodily — a Catholicism that answered Protestant austerity with warmth, blood, and the heart made visible. It later became bound up with social and political loyalties, especially in France, where the heart was taken as an emblem of a Catholic and royalist order against the secular republic, so that a private prayer carried a public meaning its origin did not predict.

The heart as the seat of the self, and devotion organized around it, is not unique to this tradition. The Sufi qalb is the inner heart where God is known and remembered; the hṛdaya of the Upanishads is the heart-cave in which the self is found. The resemblances are real, and worth following. They are not the same thing — each names something exact in its own voice, and the Sacred Heart, within Catholicism, stays the most exact of all: not the heart in general, but this heart, shown to one nun, and asked to be loved back.

→ Related: Rhineland Mysticism