The Real Presence: The Sacred Heart Is The Holy Eucharist [Catholic/Orthodox Caucus]

The Sacred Heart Is The Holy Eucharist

by Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus goes back to the early Church in the time of Divine Revelation. Like all other true devotion in the Catholic Church, devotions to the Sacred Heart is based on divine revealed truth.

Two passages in Sacred Scripture are the revealed foundations for the Sacred Heart devotion. The first is Christ's invitation to His followers, "Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart." The second revealed foundation is Christ's Sacred Heart being pierced on the cross by the soldier's lance. From the very beginning, the followers of Christ were devoted to the Heart of Jesus. Our focus will be on what we mean when we say the Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist. Then, we shall discuss why this is so and how we can put Sacred Heart devotion into practice.

The Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist

Why do we make this equation? What do we mean when we say the Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist? We begin by recalling the centuries of Church teaching on what the term "Sacred Heart" expresses. The Sacred Heart signifies Christ's love in three ways: God is love, God is loving and God loves with human feeling.

God is love. The Sacred Heart symbolizes the love that is God. From all eternity, God is love. That is the primary meaning of God as a Divine Community and not a single person. The essence of love is to give, and within the Trinity, each of the three Divine Persons from all eternity shares the divine nature that each one possesses. When we say God is love, we are defining God as that Community of three Divine Persons who, from all eternity, each share with the other the fullness of what each one not only has, but of what each one is.

God is loving. God is loving not only by bringing us into being, but by bringing us into being as creatures who are capable of love. God could of made us insects or animals or trees or lofty mountains, but these cannot think and love. When this loving God chose to create other beings, it was only because He is loving that He wanted to share what He as God had from all eternity (love) with beings who would not even exist without His love. From the moment of creation and into the endless reaches of eternity, God will continue loving us. If He were to cease loving us, we would cease to exist! God manifested His love by bringing us into existence and making us creatures who are capable of love.

But God also manifested His by becoming one of us, and, having become one of us, He has remained and will be for all eternity one of us. When the Word became Flesh, It became Flesh not only for a time, but for all eternity. God will remain Incarnate forever. This loving God, who out of love for us became man and died on the Cross to show His love for us, this God became man and remains man, but He remains man on earth.

It is no exaggeration to say that the Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist. The Eucharist is the same Infinite Love who is God and who out of love for us became man and is here on earth. When we receive Him, that same God is within us. Love wants us to be intimate. Love wants us to be near. Love wants us to be close to the one whom it loves. The Holy Eucharist is divine genius!

God loves with human feeling. The third meaning which the Church gives to the Sacred Heart as symbolizing God's love is that God loves not only as God but also as the God-man with human feeling, human emotion, human sensibility and human sensitivity. We creatures of feeling, emotion and sensitivity need to hear this. God in the Holy Eucharist is man indeed, but with all the supreme sensitivity. Christ in the Blessed Sacrament is a sensitive Christ. He feels. St. Margaret Mary tells us that Christ in the Eucharist senses in a way we as hypersensitive human beings can understand.

Wives tell me, "I spend hours cooking the meal and all my husband does is sit down, eat and even ask for more. But he never thanks me!" Or among religious, "Father, you have no idea how much it hurts me to know that when we pass in the corridor, he does not even look at me." How sensitive we are! How we need to know that God became a sensitive human being! When we come to Him in the Blessed Sacrament, He wants us to tell Him how we feel, and He will tell us how He feels. When we come to Church, we should not leave our heart in the car. When Christ came to earth, He did not leave His Heart in heaven.

Why is the Sacred Heart the Holy Eucharist?

It is impossible to identify the Holy Eucharist too closely with Jesus Christ. We should remember He is in the Holy Eucharist not merely with His substance. I have corrected many of my students over the years who tell me "Transubstantiation means that the substance of bread and wine become the substance of Jesus Christ." I reply, "No, transubstantiation means the substance of bread and wine are no longer there. The substance of bread and wine is replaced not only by the substance of Christ's Body and Blood. What replaces the substance of bread and wine is Jesus Christ!" Everything that makes Christ, Christ replaces what had been the substance of bread and wine. The substance of bread and wine become the whole Christ.

Therefore, Christ in the Holy Eucharist is here with His human heart. Is it a living heart? Yes! That is why the revelations our Lord made to St. Margaret Mary about promoting devotion to the Sacred Heart were all made from the Holy Eucharist.

Why do we equate the Sacred Heart with the Holy Eucharist? Because the Holy Eucharist is the whole Christ with His human heart. According to St. Margaret Mary, the Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist. So it follows that devotion to the Sacred Heart is devotion to the Holy Eucharist. It is infinite Love Incarnate living in our midst in the Blessed Sacrament.

Practicing Sacred Heart Devotion

How do we practice devotion to the Sacred Heart? The answer to this question is almost too obvious to express, but it is the most difficult task we have in our life. We are to love Him in the way He has been loving us and in the way He is presently loving us.

First the past. How has God been loving us? He brought us out of nothing into existence, making us human beings with minds to think and wills that can choose. Then, God became man and died out of love for us. We should note how these two words go together: love and death. True love wants to exhaust itself out of love for the one whom it claims to love. That is why God took on a human nature: so that He could manifest to human beings in the strongest language accessible how deeply He loves us. In the person of Jesus Christ, God died out of love. We know that if we love, we will die for the one whom we love; and the death of the body is only a symbol of the constant death of the human spirit, surrendering itself to God’s will.

Next, how is God presently loving us in the Holy Eucharist? By totally giving Himself! If during Mass, I notice the cross on the consecrated Host is not quite straight, I may move the Host a quarter of an inch. That is love allowing Itself to be moved. I am speaking from my heart. At the same time, God is constantly and lovingly pushing, shoving, shifting and nudging us. He wants us to change. He want to move our wills, even if we remain statuesque.

How are we to return this love that Christ had for us and presently has for us? By totally and constantly conforming, submitting and surrendering our lives to Him. This is THE Sacrifice God wants of us during our lives – allowing Him to move our wills. God has given us a free will. Unless we had a free will, we could not love. God never coerces us but invites us to return our love for His selfless love of us. He invites us to do this by conforming, surrendering and sacrificing our wills to His. Not just by some will, but giving up our wills.

What do I mean by “giving up”? I mean just that: giving up! We can give up with our hands, but even smile in doing it. Deep down inside we are still holding on. But we must give up our wills completely and unconditionally. In everything we do we must say, “Lord I will do what You want me to do.” “Not my will, but Yours.” Every moment of our lives is a providential expression of God's love for us, inviting us to respond no matter what the cost is to ourselves.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

The month of June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart by Holy Mother Church.

We the Christians are the true Israel which springs from Christ, for we are carved out of His heart as from a rock.    – St. Justin Martyr (d. 165)

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.    – Matthew 11:29

There is in the Sacred Heart the symbol and express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love in return.   – Pope Leo XIII

The heart has always been seen as the “center” or essence a person (“the heart of the matter,” “you are my heart,” “take it to heart,” etc.) and the wellspring of our emotional lives and love (“you break my heart,” “my heart sings,” etc.) Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is devotion to Jesus Christ Himself, but in the particular ways of meditating on His interior life and on His threefold love – His divine love, His burning love that fed His human will, and His sensible love that affects His interior life. Pope Pius XII of blessed memory writes on this topic in his 1956 encyclical, Haurietis Aquas (On Devotion To The Sacred Heart). Below are a few excerpts which help explain the devotion:

54.  ...the Heart of the Incarnate Word is deservedly and rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of that threefold love with which the divine Redeemer unceasingly loves His eternal Father and all mankind.

55. It is a symbol of that divine love which He shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit but which He, the Word made flesh, alone manifests through a weak and perishable body, since “in Him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily.”

56. It is, besides, the symbol of that burning love which, infused into His soul, enriches the human will of Christ and enlightens and governs its acts by the most perfect knowledge derived both from the beatific vision and that which is directly infused.

57. And finally – and this in a more natural and direct way – it is the symbol also of sensible love, since the body of Jesus Christ, formed by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, possesses full powers of feelings and perception, in fact, more so than any other human body.

58. Since, therefore, Sacred Scripture and the official teaching of the Catholic faith instruct us that all things find their complete harmony and order in the most holy soul of Jesus Christ and that He has manifestly directed His threefold love for the securing of our redemption, it unquestionably follows that we can contemplate and honor the Heart of the divine Redeemer as a symbolic image of His love and a witness of our redemption and, at the same time, as a sort of mystical ladder by which we mount to the embrace of “God our Savior.”

59. Hence His words, actions, commands, miracles, and especially those works which manifest more clearly His love for us – such as the divine institution of the Eucharist, His most bitter sufferings and death, the loving gift of His holy Mother to us, the founding of the Church for us, and finally, the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles and upon us – all these, we say, ought to be looked upon as proofs of His threefold love.

60. Likewise we ought to meditate most lovingly on the beating of His Sacred Heart by which He seemed, as it were, to measure the time of His sojourn on earth until that final moment when, as the Evangelists testify, “crying out with a loud voice ‘It is finished’ and bowing His Head, He yielded up the ghost.” Then it was that His heart ceased to beat and His sensible love was interrupted until the time when, triumphing over death, He rose from the tomb.

61. But after His glorified body had been re-united to the soul of the divine Redeemer, conqueror of death, His most Sacred Heart never ceased, and never will cease, to beat with calm and imperturbable pulsations. Likewise, it will never cease to symbolize the threefold love with which He is bound to His heavenly Father and the entire human race, of which He has every claim to be the mystical Head.

The Two Elements of Devotion to the Sacred Heart:
Consecration and Reparation

We consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart by acknowledging Him as Creator and Redeemer and as having full rights over us as King of Kings, by repenting, and by resolving to serve Him.
We make reparation for the indifference and ingratitude with which He is treated and for leaving Him abandoned by humanity.

To carry out these general goals of consecration and reparation, there are quite specific devotions authorized by the Church.

History of the Devotion

From the earliest days of the Church, “Christ’s open side and the mystery of blood and water were meditated upon, and the Church was beheld issuing from the side of Jesus as Eve came forth from the side of Adam. It is in the eleventh and twelfth centuries that we find the first unmistakable indications of devotion to the Sacred Heart. Through the wound in the side, the wounded Heart was gradually reached, and the wound in the Heart symbolized the wound of love.” (Catholic Encyclopedia)

General devotion to the Sacred Heart, the birthplace of the Church and the font of Love, were popular in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, especially in response to the devotion of St. Gertrude the Great (b. 1256), but specific devotions became even more popularized when St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), a Visitation nun, had a personal revelation involving a series of visions of Christ as she prayed before the Blessed Sacrament. She wrote, “He disclosed to me the marvels of his Love and the inexplicable secrets of his Sacred Heart.” Christ emphasized to her His love and His woundedness caused by Man's indifference to this love.

He promised that, in response to those who consecrate themselves and make reparations to His Sacred Heart:

He will give them all the graces necessary in their state of life.
He will establish peace in their homes.
He will comfort them in all their afflictions.
He will be their secure refuge during life, and above all, in death.
He will bestow abundant blessings upon all their undertakings.
Sinners will find in His Heart the source and infinite ocean of mercy.
Lukewarm souls shall become fervent.
Fervent souls shall quickly mount to high perfection.
He will bless every place in which an image of His Heart is exposed and honored.
He will give to priests the gift of touching the most hardened hearts.
Those who shall promote this devotion shall have their names written in His Heart.
In the excessive mercy of His Heart, His all-powerful love will grant to all those who receive Holy Communion on the First Fridays in nine consecutive months the grace of final perseverance; they shall not die in His disgrace, nor without receiving their sacraments. His divine Heart shall be their safe refuge in this last moment.

The devotions attached to these promises are:

Receiving Communion frequently
First Fridays: going to Confession and receiving the Eucharist on the first Friday of each month for nine consecutive months. Many parishes will offer public First Friday devotions; if they do, you must perform First Fridays publicly. If it isn’t so offered in your parish, you can do this privately, going to Confession, receiving the Eucharist, and offering your prayers for the intention of the Holy Father.
Holy Hour: Eucharistic Adoration for one hour on Thursdays. (“Could you not watch one hour with me?”) Holy Hour can be made alone or as part of a group with formal prayers.
Celebrating of the Feast of the Sacred Heart

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