June 1-2, 2024
Dear parishioners,
This Friday, June 7, is the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As this feast day always falls in the month of June, the Church has for a long time dedicated June in a special way to devotion to the Sacred Heart. The Church has consistently encouraged three related aspects in this same devotion to the Sacred Heart.
First, in our devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Church encourages us to recognize our sinfulness, and the need to make reparation for our sins. As Pope Pius XI explained in 1928:
But to all these duties[…] we mean that duty of honorable satisfaction or reparation which must be rendered to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. For if the first and foremost thing in Consecration is this, that the creature’s love should be given in return for the love of the Creator, another thing follows from this at once, namely that to the same uncreated Love, if it has been neglected by forgetfulness or violated by offense, some sort of compensation must be rendered for the injury, and this debt is commonly called by the name of reparation.
A second aspect of devotion to the Sacred Heart involves gratitude to Jesus for his great mercy toward us. As Pius XI mentioned above, in recognizing so great a love that Christ continues to pour out on us, the proper response to his love is for us to offer devoted acts of love to him in return. As Pope St. John Paul II explains:
Contemplation of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist will spur the faithful to seek in that Heart the inexhaustible mystery of the priesthood of Christ and of the Church. It will enable them to taste, in communion with their brothers and sisters, the spiritual sweetness of charity at its very source.
Lastly, our devotion to the Sacred Heart leads us to continue to pray for our country and our world, which are so desperately in need of encountering Jesus in a real way and being pulled from the evils which are much too prevalent in our own times. Again, Pope St. John Paul II explains:
Devotion to the Heart of Jesus has given form to the prophetic words recalled by St John: “They shall look on him whom they have pierced” (Jn 19:37; cf. Zec 12:10). It is a contemplative gaze,”which strives to enter deeply into the sentiments of Christ, true God and true man. […]
The Heart of Christ is alive with the action of the Holy Spirit, to whom Jesus attributed the inspiration of his mission (Lk 4:18; cf. Is 61:1) and whose sending he had promised at the Last Supper. It is the Spirit who enables us to grasp the richness of the sign of Christ’s pierced side, from which the Church has sprung (cf. Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, n. 5). […] Through the Holy Spirit, then, the love which permeates the Heart of Jesus is poured out in the hearts of men (cf. Rom 5:5), and moves them to adoration of his “unsearchable riches” (Eph 3:8) and to filial and trusting petition to the Father (cf. Rom 8:15-16) through the Risen One who “always lives to make intercession for us” (Heb 7:25).
There is no time like the present to rediscover the devotion the Sacred Heart… for our own sake, for the sake of our loved ones, and for the sake of the Church and the world!
Blessings,
Fr. Ammanniti
