Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Catholic Register
June 27, 2025
On the Solemnity Heart of Jesus, we celebrate what Pope Benedict in 2008 called the “center of the faith.”
That might seem a little overstated, if we erroneously understand devotion to the Sacred Heart as something that basically began with Jesus’ apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque 350 years ago.
Pope Benedict, however, understood it far more broadly: The heart of Christ, he declared, “expresses in a simple and authentic way the ‘good news’ of love, summarizing the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption in itself.” He called each of us to find our “center” in Jesus’ Sacred Heart, “to feel not only the beating of his own heart, but more deeply, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible to the senses of faith and yet more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world.”
It’s noteworthy that we don’t have a feast of Jesus’ sacred brain, even though Jesus is the eternal Logos. We don’t honor his hallowed hands, which, despite calluses from hard work in a hidden Nazarene carpentry shop, brought a tender healing touch to so many. There’s no festival of the Lord’s venerable voice, which amplified the word of God made man. There’s no commemoration of the his consecrated feet, which traversed the ancient holy land as he announced the Good News from town to town. There’s no liturgical observation of Jesus’ blessed eyes, which looked on the rich young man with love and were so powerful that, with one glance, they could make Peter weep in the high priest’s courtyard.
While there would be a certain fittingness to honoring all of these parts of Jesus’ sacred anatomy — especially since his head was crowned with thorns, his hands and feet pierced by nails, his eyes bruised and beaten and his voice thoroughly parched on Good Friday out of love for us — Jesus has never asked that we do so. Rather, when he appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, he did so to request that a feast be instituted to honor him under the image and reality of his Sacred Heart.
The Lord’s reason for choosing his heart will always remain, in some way, a great and beautiful mystery, but even with our limited human intellects we know that, according to the language and imagery of the Bible, the heart has always been considered the center of the person, the point where reason, will and emotions converge, the place where one finds his inner unity and direction.
To honor Jesus’ heart means that we give homage to his entire sacred humanity, conscious that Jesus took our own nature to offer it for us, to redeem it, and to make it the sacred dwelling place of God once again. To honor his heart means that we want our humanity to be transformed by his, so that we may come fully alive and thereby give God glory.
Moreover, we don’t have to be poets to grasp that the heart is the bodily organ that most effectively symbolizes love. To adore Jesus’ heart is to venerate his great love for us. When Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary, he exposed his heart and she saw it engulfed in flames and crowned with thorns, a visible sign of the passion with which he burns with love of us and is willing to suffer anything to save us.
Since 2002, the Church has celebrated on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart the World Day of Prayer for the Sanctification of Priests. The patron saint of priests, St. John Vianney, called the priesthood “the love of the heart of Jesus,” because Jesus seeks to continue to love his flock in a particular way through the ministrations of those priests who act in his person. St. John Paul II established the global day of prayer for priests on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart so that priests might be helped by the petitions of all the faithful to seek holiness through modeling their hearts and whole priestly life on the divine and human love flowing from Jesus’ Sacred Heart. Thus it’s very hitting today to pray for the 407,000 priests across the globe, for seminarians with a priestly vocation tomorrow, and in a particular way for priests who are suffering, discouraged or have lost their way.
Last October 24, Pope Francis, in the final encyclical of his pontificate, indicated that he wanted to apply the lessons we learn from Jesus’ Sacred Heart to something other than the ministerial priesthood. Rather he wanted us to see in the love of the Sacred Heart the root of the vocation each of us has to be a missionary.
There is, he wrote in Dilexit Nos, a strong connection between devotion to the Sacred Heart and the missionary dimension fo the Christian life. “The enduring relevance of devotion to the heart of Christ is especially evident in the work of evangelization,” he stated. Mission is “a radiation of the love of the heart of Christ.” When we meet the ardent, crucified love of Jesus, we cannot but burn to share it ourselves, he indicated.
“The flames of love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” he said, “expand through the Church’s missionary outreach, which proclaims the message of God’s love revealed in Christ.” He quoted Saint Vincent de Paul, who taught that “the heart of our Lord … sends us, like [the apostles], to bring fire everywhere.”
To bring fire everywhere, to be a spiritual arsonist, is the vocation of every one of the baptized. In his Sacred Heart, Christ continues to proclaim, “I have come to set the earth on fire and how I wish it were already blazing” (Lk 12:49). The Holy Spirit came down upon the Mary, the apostles and the members of the early Church not as ice-cold noses or lukewarm feet but as tongues of fire, so that we might bring that divine and human fire to the ends of the earth by proclaiming the Gospel.
The fully formed Christian’s greatest desire, he said, is to be a “missionary of souls,” to be able “to speak of Christ, by witness or by word, in such a way that others seek to love him. For a heart that loves, this is not a duty but an irrepressible need.”
Once we have met the burning love of Jesus, Pope Francis underlined, we cannot help but make our own Jeremiah’s admission, “Within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones” (Jer 20:9), or St. Paul’s words, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).
Pope Francis concluded his beautiful encyclical by reminding each of us of our vocation to bring the fire of Jesus’ Sacred Heart to others.
“Jesus is calling you and sending you forth to spread goodness in our world. … Wherever you may be, you can hear his call and realize that he is sending you forth to carry out that mission. He himself told us, ‘I am sending you out’ (Lk 10:3). It is part of our being friends with him. For this friendship to mature, however, it is up to you to let him send you forth on a mission in this world. … Never forget that Jesus is at your side at every step of the way. … He will always be there to encourage and accompany you. He has promised, … ‘For I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Mt 28:20).”
As we celebrate the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the center of our faith, and pray for our priests to be genuinely holy, let us also ask Jesus to make our hearts burn like his.
Filled with the fire of that love, let us seek to bring that fire everywhere, beginning within our homes, parishes and dioceses.
Let us also allow that fire to burn our knees and our wallets as we pray and generously sacrifice for the missions, as we seek to help the Church throughout the world become indeed the “radiation of the love of the heart of Christ.”