The Consecration of Our Nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Richard Antall

The Consecration of the Nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

            On November 11 of last year, the U.S. bishops voted to consecrate our nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus to commemorate the 250 years of Independence celebrated this year. On June 11 at a solemn Mass in Orlando, Florida, the consecration took place. I think it is safe to say the response to the consecration is underwhelming. It didn’t even last the sometimes ephemeral 24 hours news cycle.

            Recently at a luncheon of a First Friday Club in Cleveland, I asked the assembled sixty or seventy men if they knew what the bishops had done to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. One man knew. In the same crowd no one seemed to know that Pope Francis had written an encyclical (his last) about the Sacred Heart devotion.

            It’s Cool Hand Luke with a vengeance. The famous line in that movie, given by a vicious warden to break prisoner Paul Newman’s stubborn integrity is, “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” If the secular news does not pick up on something a pope or the bishops say, very little public knowledge of the event or position taken spreads even among Catholics. Catholic media is very specialized, and one could say almost “ghetto-ized,”and doesn’t get out of small pools of audiences.

            This explains why the average Catholic seems to know less and less about certain aspects of Tradition and the magisterium. I have said elsewhere that many middle-class Catholics are more middle-class than Catholics. The bourgeois bienpensants don’t want to get into arguments with their neighbors or with powerful politicians about when human life begins. Despite the constant reminder of the bishops of the primordial importance of the abortion issue in politics, many Catholics turn a deaf ear to the instruction.

            That is very unfortunate, as is this lack of response to the consecration. The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has great potential for infusing, as the bishops said, “the spirit of the Gospel into various communities and departments of life. Is the Sacred Heart devotion a victim of changes of fashion?

            When I was in the seminary, there was talk of the changing shape of “devotions.” I remember priests saying that the images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus no longer “worked” for people. That we had to look to the Bible for a renewed imagery for spirituality. Specifically, the holy cards of the Sacred Heart in common use were condemned for a certain effeminacy. One priest said it looked like Jesus used mascara. This was ignorance not only of art, for there are many different images of the Sacred Heart, including the famous painting in the church of the Gesu in Rome that has Jesus with his heart in his hand, but also of the Biblical resonance of heart.

            In Sacred Scripture there is great deal about the theme of the “heart” not as the organ that pumps blood into our bodies but as a symbol of human response to God and neighbor. In the classic Balz Schneider Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, it is stated that the word for heart in Greek (kardia, but you knew that from “cardiac”) is found 157 times in the New Testament, in all the books but Titus, Philemon, 2-3 Letters of John, and Jude.

            The Dictionary says that the word kardia is used in the sense of the inner person in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the translation St. Paul used in his letters. In the New Testament this meaning is amplified to be “the ‘place’ of the person in which the encounter with God is realized.”

            Applying this interpretation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus could allow us to say that Jesus’ Heart stands for the Person of the God-Man and is a theological symbol of the Incarnation. At the same time, devotion to the Heart of Jesus is the encounter of the believer, “heart to heart” with the Triune God. St. Paul, in his two letters to the Thessalonians, prays that God “strengthen the hearts” of those he is addressing. In other words, deepening and making more decisive their encounter with God in Christ Jesus.

            The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus includes the theme of human ingratitude to Divine Love and the necessity of reparation. Ezekiel (Chapter 36) speaks of God transforming hearts of stone into hearts of flesh (hearts the feel). Psalm 51 prays “create in me a clean heart.” The human heart can oppose and resist God’s grace. Jesus says in Matthew 15:19, “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, acts of adultery, other immoral sexual acts, thefts, false testimonies, and slanderous statements.” St. Paul says that when the Lord comes, he “will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes [intentions] of the heart” (1 Cor 4.5)

            Reparation is about repentance and repentance always implies the will to work to make up for sin and resistance to God’s grace. St. Paul talks about change of heart as a “circumcision of the heart” (Rom 2.29) and prays for the Lord to let the light of “the glory of God in the face of Christ” shine into the hearts of the faithful.

            Segundo Galilea, a priest who was associated with the Theology of Liberation (correctly understood, and not Marxist ideas dressed for church) wrote a book about Latin American spirituality called The Future of Our Past.  In the book he spoke about how the mystical tradition of Spain had found its way to Latin America and still had so much relevance to the people of those countries and beyond. I think the same way about the relevance of the Sacred Heart devotion. I find it surprising that much of what is written about a new saint of the Sacred Heart, Charles de Foucauld (canonized in 2022) neglects his attachment to this devotion. With reason he is represented in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre, Paris.

            The bishops chose well in consecrating our country to the Sacred Heart. It might be good of them to remind our people that we are also in a nation consecrated to the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  However, I think the minimal response to the consecration has to do with the little preparation for the event and the minimal theological reflection on the mystery of the love of the Heart of Jesus in the kerygma. No letter was written for the occasion and not even a pamphlet produced to instruct the faithful. Compare the silence with all the official stirring about “synodality.” Surely Christological reflection about the Sacred Heart is desirable.

            Archbishop Alexander K. Sample, Chairman of the Committee for Religious Liberty of the USCCB, wrote that “This anniversary [of Independence] and consecration will be a great opportunity to promote the beautiful devotion to the Sacred Heart and to encourage the laity to offer their lives of service to God and their country.”

            Great opportunities must be embraced.