A Brief History of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Before the Pandemic

What’s on the First Friday that people go to mass as if it were a Sunday?” This is a question I often ask myself. 

At the Sacred Heart Parish-Shrine, we celebrate 23 masses on First Fridays in all public schools within our zone, at the City Jail, and other mini parishes, while 14 masses are celebrated on Sundays. The First Friday devotion is indeed a phenomenon among us, Catholics, and I won’t be surprised If someday churchgoers would clamor for anticipated First Friday masses in churches and even in their workplaces.

While in many countries in the West, the devotion has waned, the Filipino Catholics have remained faithful in spreading the devotion with even more intensity here and in many other countries where they work as migrants.

The Sacred Heart in the Old Testament

We can trace back the devotion to the Bible. In the Old Testament, the prophet Jeremiah, amidst the turmoil of war, the looming exile of Judah to Babylon, and the unfaithfulness of God’s people to the covenant, pronounced a prophecy that someday, there will be a "new covenant" [berit hadash]. It will be a covenant not written in stone but in the heart (Jeremiah 30-31). That person whose covenant is written in his heart will no longer fail God and always be faithful to him. For Christians, that heart is the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Sacred Heart in the New Testament

In the New Testament, some passages allude to the heart of Jesus: the  Beloved Disciple in the Gospel of John who rests near to the heart of Jesus (John 13:23); Jesus’s pierced side (close to his heart) from which blood and water flowed (John 19:34); Jesus’s invitation to those who are heavily burdened for “I am meek and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:29).  

The Sacred Heart and the Church Fathers and Mystics

The early Christian writers (or Church Fathers) like saints Augustine, Ambrose, Cyprian, and Jerome saw the Church as born from the pierced heart of Jesus. It was in the Middle Ages that the devotion to the Sacred Heart became widespread, promoted by the Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican, Cistercian, and Carthusian Orders.  Visionaries like saints Mechtild of Hackerborn, Gertrude the Great, and Catherine of Siena spoke of their mystical experiences with Christ’s heart.  Saint Gertrude, for example, had a vision in which she was resting her head on the wounded side of Jesus and hearing the beating of the Divine Heart.

In the sixteenth century, the Jesuit, Salesian, and Eudist fathers began integrating devotion into their spirituality. Saint Francis de Sales, for instance, thought of human hearts and the heart of God conjoined by the crucified heart of Jesus, thus envisioning a world of interconnected hearts.

The Visions of Saint Margaret Mary

The form of the devotion that we practice today is associated with the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, a 17th-century nun from Paray-le-Monial in France. It was Saint Claude de la Colombière, her Jesuit confessor, who propagated her visions.

From 1673-1675, Margaret Mary received a series of “great revelations”— the Lord named her as the “Apostle of his Sacred Heart”;  a mystical exchange of her heart and of the Sacred Heart happened; the Twelve Promises; Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament on Thursday nights; Communion on the first Friday of the month; a yearly feast of the Sacred Heart, the Friday following the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ.  The Act of Reparation, the reciting of devotional prayers for forgiveness to make amends for the outrages committed against God’s love and the Eucharist, became widespread to counter Jansenism (a movement that taught that human beings are already predestined) and the anti-Catholic measures of the French Revolution.

The Feast of the Sacred Heart

With the establishment of the Feast of the Sacred Heart in 1856 by Pope Pius IX, the devotion spread to all areas of the Catholic world. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII consecrated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and that one we use today for the Act of Consecration was based on the prayer which Pope Leo composed.

The Sacred Heart and the Society of the Divine Word

It is in this spiritual atmosphere that the German priest Arnold Janssen founded the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) in 1875. Because of his sincere devotion to the Sacred Heart and his love for the mission, he put up a magazine in Germany, “The Little Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus," to make Catholics aware of the need for missionaries.  That is the reason why the SVD German missionaries in the Philippines named their first parish in Quezon City, our parish-shrine today, in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

To this day, Saint Arnold Janssen’s favorite prayer has become a part of the daily devotion when we say, “May the darkness of sin and the night of unbelief vanish before the light of the Word and the Spirit of Grace. And may the Heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all.”

(Author: Fr. Randolf Flores, SVD)