The Sacred Heart of Jesus illuminated by the moonOn June 16, 2023, the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The President of the U.S. Conference of Catholic BishopsCardinal Timothy M. Dolan and the Archbishop of Los Angeles have issued a message calling for acts of reparation on the occasion of the Solemnity.
The invitation of the bishops recalls "the love of Christ for us, which is visible in a special way in the image of his pierced heart, and we pray that our own hearts may be conformed to his, calling us to love and respect all his own".
The Episcopal message mentions the homage paid by a baseball team to a group that mocked Christ, the Virgin Mary and consecrated women. This is something that is "not only offensive and painful for Christians around the world; it is blasphemous".
Because of this, the bishops call on Christians to pray the Litany of the Sacred Heart as an act of reparation. The litany can be found in English HEREor in Spanish on the EWTN.
Divine love
In 1956 Pope Pius XII published an encyclical on the cult of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, "The Sacred Heart of Jesus".Haurietis Aquas". In it he mentions "the heavenly riches that the worship of the Sacred Heart infuses in souls: it purifies them, fills them with supernatural consolations and moves them to attain all the virtues".
Pius XII pointed out that "the adorable Heart of Jesus Christ beats with divine as well as human love". And the wound in this Heart inflicted on the Cross is "the living image of that spontaneous love for which God gave his only-begotten Son for the redemption of mankind, and for which Christ loved us all with such ardent love that he immolated himself as a bloody victim on Calvary".
Because of this, the Pope stated in the encyclical that "because the Heart of Christ overflows with divine and human love, and because it is filled with the treasures of all the graces which our Redeemer acquired by the merits of his life, sufferings and death, it is undoubtedly the perennial source of that love which his Spirit communicates to all the members of his Mystical Body."
Joining the Heart of Mary
Pius XII's encyclical ended with an allusion to the Blessed Virgin. The Holy Father warned that "so that devotion to the most august Heart of Jesus may produce more abundant fruits of good in the Christian family and even in the whole of humanity, the faithful should strive to unite to it closely devotion to the Immaculate Heart of the Mother of God".
The divine will willed that "in the work of human redemption, the Blessed Virgin Mary should be inseparably united with Jesus Christ; so much so that our salvation is the fruit of the charity of Jesus Christ and of his sufferings, to which the love and sorrows of his Mother were intimately united".
