The Sacred Heart
The heart of Jesus, honored as the chief sign of his love for the Father and for every human being.
What the Sacred Heart means
The Sacred Heart is the heart of Jesus honored as a symbol of his love. The Catechism teaches that Jesus "has loved us all with a human heart," and that his heart, "pierced by our sins and for our salvation," is rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of the love with which he loves the Father and all people (CCC 478). In images the heart is usually shown wounded, recalling the soldier's lance that pierced Christ's side (John 19:34).
Devotion to the heart of Christ grew in medieval monasteries. The Catholic Encyclopedia traces its first clear signs to the eleventh and twelfth centuries and names St. Mechtilde and St. Gertrude among its early witnesses. In the seventeenth century St. John Eudes gave the devotion a liturgical office, and a feast was first celebrated at Rennes in 1670.
Its modern form comes from St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, a Visitation nun at Paray-le-Monial in France, who reported apparitions of Christ between 1673 and 1675. The requests she reported include Communion on the first Friday of each month, the Holy Hour, and a feast on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi. Pius IX extended the feast to the whole Church in 1856, and Leo XIII consecrated all mankind to the Sacred Heart on June 11, 1899.
Pope Francis's 2024 encyclical Dilexit nos stresses that worship is directed to the living Christ, not to a picture of his heart, that no single image is required, and that the heart should not be shown apart from Christ, so that it keeps pointing to a personal relationship with him.
