This June we commemorate not only the month of the Sacred Heart, but also the conclusion of our celebration of the 350th anniversary of the manifestations of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, which took place from 1673 to 1675. As Pope Francis noted in announcing his intention to publish an encyclical on the Sacred Heart — Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us”), published in October 2024 — “it will do us great good to meditate on various aspects of the Lord’s love, which can illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal, and say something meaningful to a world that seems to have lost its heart.”

We indeed live in a world that seems to have lost its heart. It can be difficult to think of what we should say to such a world. But the example of Christ moves us to consider that before we can have anything to say to the heartless world, we need to discover what it means to have the heart of Christ.

The great question of previous ages was, “Who is God?” As Christianity became the dominant religious force in the Roman world, the question became, “Who is Jesus Christ?” While I believe that it is still possible, in the right environment and with the right promptings, to move people to care about these questions, undoubtedly the great question of our own era is not “Who is God?” but “Who is man? Who is the human person?”

Outside of revelation we can understand a lot about the human person. But without revelation we also get a lot wrong about the human person. The debate over the identity of man in the public sphere has focused on the reality of sexual differentiation, but in the midst of that debate we seem to have forgotten that society also tells deeper lies about the human person: that our value lies in our economic output, that other people are means to our own happiness, that human worth is quantifiable and disposable, that living in a world run by artificial intelligence is just an inevitable consequence of economic and technological progress.

A New Narrative

So the pope encourages us in Dilexit Nos to contemplate the love of Christ’s heart and to rediscover our own humanity. “In this age of artificial intelligence,” he writes, “we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity” (No. 20). This poetry is not just the poetry we failed to appreciate in high school English class. It is the poetry of everyday life, the events that exist in our hearts just as much as our memories, the moments where we seem to touch something deeper. Pope Francis continues by recalling an episode from his own childhood: “No algorithm will ever be able to capture, for example, the nostalgia that all of us feel, whatever our age, and wherever we live, when we recall how we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home.” (Assuming, of course, that we all made Argentine empanadas with our nonnas.)

Are such touching encounters really enough, though, to reach a world that seems to have lost its heart? Christ’s revelations of his Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary turned the tide of Jansenism. Remembering the love of the heart of Christ restored confidence in the power of Christ’s love to transform the human heart, as well as to be an authentic bearer of love. As many have already noted, the task of the Church today is to help humanity find a new narrative, to tell the story of who we really are and really can be.

That story begins with the immense love of the heart of Christ, and we, especially as priests, can only be convincing tellers of that story if we have encountered and been transformed by the love of his heart.

‘Thoughts of His Heart’

But that love is not merely sentimental. It is incredibly powerful as well. It’s impossible to ignore that Roe v. Wade was overturned on the solemnity of the Sacred Heart three years ago. The introit of the Mass of the Sacred Heart (chosen by St. John Eudes), “Cogitationes,” is from Psalm 33: “The counsel of the Lord stands for ever, / the thoughts of his heart to all generations” (v. 11, RSVCE). In a time of great injustice and evil, the Lord had not forgotten his people.

It is odd, though, to think about the “thoughts of the heart,” rather than of the mind. Perhaps the psalmist wants us to see that the seeming conflict between a God who is all-loving in his heart but allows evil to exist, even while knowing it in his mind, is not such a conflict after all. His plans are united to the love of his heart, which goes out from age to age so that all his plans are truly plans of love.

That is a sign not only of the hope that we should have for the correction of injustice in the world, but of the Lord’s love guiding the events of our lives as well, just as the Lord spoke to the Israelite exiles through Jeremiah: “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer 29:11, RSVCE).

Go to the Tabernacle

It is no accident that the Lord revealed his Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary during Eucharistic adoration. While the Eucharist is at the center of our priestly lives in the celebration of the holy Mass, our love for the Lord’s heart needs to be renewed by prayer with his living, beating Sacred Heart in the Eucharist, both in the Blessed Sacrament exposed in Eucharistic adoration and in the living presence in the tabernacle.

We have all probably told the same joke about the person who tells us, “Father, I went to church, and you weren’t there!” It might be frustrating that the faithful seem to think we do nothing all day long, but the instinct of faith there is not wrong. The faithful should expect to see us at the foot of the altar, fulfilling our most important mission, absorbed in love of the heart of the one who inspired us to give up our lives in imitation of him and in service to his Church.

St. Peter Julian Eymard likewise drew this strong connection between the Lord’s Sacred Heart and his enduring presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar. He knew and communicated on a deep level what it meant for the heart of the priest to be renewed by this encounter with Christ’s heart in the Eucharist. But he also knew the cost of receiving that love. When he was elected superior of his newly founded order against his wishes, he wrote, as recounted in “St. Peter Julian Eymard, The Priest of the Eucharist” by Father Albert Tesniere, SSS: “Divine love, it is said, always enters one’s heart by a fresh wound. It takes pleasure in riddling the heart in order that its heavenly flame may penetrate it through and through. Let us bless the cross which God sends us.”

A Heart Like Christ’s

Our priestly hearts receive many wounds. They are wounded by indifference, by rejection or by our own failures. The priest is a man crucified, a man pierced by the lance of the soldiers in our very hearts. To desire the heart of Christ as a priest is to desire a heart that is pierced. It is also to desire a heart that is eaten, that is consumed by those wanting to grow close to that heart that is the source of all love and compassion.

The good news is that Christ wants us to open our own hearts to his Sacred Heart, to allow each of those wounds to be the place where heavenly flame penetrates it through and through. I remember attending a vocations event as a young man at which a very normal question was asked about whether priests feel lonely because of their celibacy. The usual response to this question is to point out that everyone is lonely at times, regardless of vocation or state in life, and the real question is whether you will find God at work in that loneliness. An elderly priest responded, however, that he had never felt lonely. I suspected he was lying.

I would be inclined to continue in that suspicion if not for this possibility: Perhaps that elderly priest (who, I later learned, had endured many trials in his priesthood) meant that he had experienced the feeling of loneliness like everyone does, but that he had always known himself not to be alone, that he had never succumbed to the despair to which loneliness can lead, because he knew who was really piercing his heart, desiring to riddle it and search it to find the wound needing to be cauterized by the divine flame.

As the pope writes in Dilexit Nos: “The pierced heart of Christ embodies all God’s declarations of love present in the Scriptures. That love is no mere matter of words; rather, the open side of his Son is a source of life for those whom he loves, the fount that quenches the thirst of his people” (No. 101). As priests, we undoubtedly desire to be a source of life. For that to be so, our hearts must be pierced, and our sides must be opened. 

FATHER ROYCE GREGERSON, S.T.L., is a priest of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend and pastor of Our Lady of Good Hope in Fort Wayne, Indiana.