The Adorableness of Christ's Body and the Devotion to the Sacred Heart

Thesis III: The Sacred Humanity of Christ as a Whole, and Its Several Members — Especially His Sacred Heart — Are Entitled to Divine Adoration (Latria)

This is a well-established theological conclusion. The adorability of Christ’s human nature as a whole rests entirely on its Hypostatic Union with the Logos — and this holds a fortiori for its individual parts: His soul, His Precious Blood, the Five Wounds of His sacred Body, all inseparably united to the Logos just as the whole is.

Adoring the Parts

Devotion to any one of these parts, then, rightly takes the form of latria. Though immediately directed to these separate parts or organs, the formal object — the true motive — of such adoration remains the Godhead itself, the Divine Logos hypostatically united to Christ’s sacred humanity both as a whole and in each of its parts. The Acts of the Council of Nicaea, cited at Ephesus (though their full authenticity is not beyond question), contain this passage: “We confess our Lord Jesus Christ … wholly adorable, even with His body, though not adorable according to His body… For He is wholly God, even with His body, though not according to His body; wholly to be adored, even with His body, though not on account of His body.”¹

The Devotion to the Sacred Heart

On exactly this principle rests the devotion to the Sacred Heart, inaugurated by Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque of Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy (d. 1690). Blessed and nurtured by the Roman Pontiffs, this devotion has spread throughout the Christian world and proven a rich source of grace. Opposed by the Jansenists, it was officially approved in 1765 and quickly became immensely popular. On August 26, 1850, Pope Pius IX raised the Feast of the Sacred Heart to a festival of the Universal Church, and at the dawn of the twentieth century Leo XIII, by a solemn act of consecration performed in every church throughout the world, dedicated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The Jansenist Synod of Pistoia called adoration of the Sacred Heart “novel, erroneous, or at least dangerous.” Pope Pius VI, in his dogmatic Bull Auctorem Fidei (1794), condemned this judgment as “false, rash, pernicious, offensive to pious ears, and injurious to the Apostolic See.”² The same Bull condemned the insinuation that the faithful worship the Heart of Jesus apart from His Godhead as “captious and injurious to the faithful devotees of the Sacred Heart,” who, in the Pope’s own words, adore this organ of Christ’s human body “as the Heart of the Person of the Logos, to whom it is inseparably united.”³

The dogmatic grounds cited in these papal decisions match exactly those given for our Second Thesis above: the Sacred Heart is the material, partial object of latria, never its formal object — we worship it “in itself, but not for its own sake.” The sole formal object and motive of the adoration remains its Divinity, owed to it by the Hypostatic Union.

Why the Heart in Particular?

One might ask: what specific reason leads the Church to single out the Sacred Heart for special devotion above other organs of Christ’s body? Not every dogmatically unobjectionable devotion is recommended for general practice — some, though correct in principle, might still cause scandal or disedification. Whether a given organ of Christ’s body is fit for special worship depends not merely on its bare adorability, but chiefly on whether devotion to it is well suited to manifest Christ’s condescension and love for mankind, and to draw us closer to Him. On this score, no organ of our Savior’s body serves so well as an obiectum manifestativum as the Sacred Heart, regarded as the physical seat of Christ’s theandric love for humanity — in every language, and especially throughout both Testaments of Scripture, the heart is the universal symbol of love.⁴

The Church’s teaching here was misread by Camillus Blasius, an auditor of the Roman Rota, in a shallow 1771 pamphlet, Dissertatio de Festo Cordis Iesu, which claimed the object of our adoration is the symbolic, not the material Heart — which is really to say the Church proposes for our worship an intangible metonymy, a metaphor without substance, an abstract symbol. Can this really be so? True, the Sacred Congregation of Rites, in its 1765 decree instituting the Feast of the Sacred Heart, spoke of the devotion “symbolically renewing the memory of that divine love by which the only-begotten Son of God assumed human nature.” But this phrase must be read in light of the Polish bishops’ original petition, to which the decree was responding: “Behold the object Jesus proposes for our veneration: namely His own sacred Heart — not merely as a symbol of all His inward affections, but as it is in itself.”⁵ Pope Pius VI settled the matter beyond doubt in Auctorem Fidei: “[The faithful] adore it as the Heart of Jesus — that is, the Heart of the Person of the Word, to whom it is inseparably united, in the same way that the bloodless body of Christ, during the three days of death, remained adorable in the tomb without separation from the Godhead.”⁶ It was surely not the “symbolic” Heart that was “inseparably united with the Person of the Logos,” any more than it was some “symbolic” body of the Savior that rested three days in the tomb.⁷

The Church has solemnly approved and liturgically sanctioned the worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, incorporating special prayers into her Breviary and Missal. Catholics are therefore no longer free to reject this devotion as incorrect or inadmissible. Every good Christian will gladly join in adoring the Divine Heart that beats for us with undiminished love, both in Heaven and on our altars. Amid the spiritual afflictions of our own cold and unbelieving age, nothing is so fitting as the ardent petition: “Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us!”

Further Reading

Wilhelm-Scannell, A Manual of Catholic Theology, Vol. II, p. 117, 2nd ed., London 1901 — S. J. Hunter, Outlines of Dogmatic Theology, Vol. II, pp. 407 sqq., 2nd ed. — L. Leroy, De SS. Corde Iesu eiusque Cultu, Liège 1882 — J. Jungmann, Die Andacht zum hl. Herzen Jesu und die Bedenken gegen dieselbe, 2nd ed., Freiburg 1885 — N. Nilles, De Rationibus Festorum SS. Cordis Iesu et Purissimi Cordis Mariae, 2 vols., 5th ed., Regensburg 1885, and The Devotion to the Sacred Heart, tr. W. H. Kent, London 1905 — H. J. Nix, De Cultu SS. Cordis Iesu Notiones quaedam Theologicae, 2nd ed., Augsburg 1886 — W. Humphrey, The One Mediator, pp. 272 sqq., London, n.d. — J. V. Bainvel, La Dévotion au Sacré-Cœur de Jésus: Doctrine, Histoire, 3rd ed., Paris 1911 — J. de Gallifet, The Adorable Heart of Jesus, 3rd ed., London 1908.

Notes