The Sacred Heart

   "The thoughts of His Heart are to all generations: to deliver their souls from death and feed them in famine." Psalm 32: 11.  These words are from the Introit of the Mass today in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, celebrated after the feast of Corpus Christi.

   The Church celebrates Our Lord Jesus Christ many times during the liturgical year. Feasts include His Nativity (Christmas), Circumcision, Epiphany, the Resurrection (Easter), Transfiguration, Ascension, His Holy Name, His Precious Blood, Exaltation of the Cross, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, His Sacred Heart, and His Kingship.

   The Feast of the Sacred Heart, above all, is the feast showing His love for mankind. Because of His charity towards us He assumed a mortal body, gave it up for us and redeemed us.

   The Gospel and Epistle today show us the Sacred Heart clearly. John 19: 31-37, shows us His Heart pierced (opened) with the lance. From St. Augustine: "The Evangelist says...opened (to show us that thereby the door of life was thrown open through which the Sacraments of the Church flow forth." The water and blood which flowed out from the piercing symbolize the Sacraments, which give us a life of grace.

    The chapter from  Divine Intimacy on this feast explains: St. Paul, in his Epistle, Ephesians 3:8-19, urges us to penetrate further into the Heart of Jesus to contemplate His "unsearchable riches" and to enter into "the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God." This divine love from all eternity came to us in the Word made flesh. St. Paul says we must "be rooted and founded in charity." Only thus shall we be able "to know...the charity of Christ which surpasseth all knowledge, that (we) may be filled unto all the fullness of God."

   At Mass today the congregation will join with the priest in making an act of reparation to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus for all the blasphemies, obscenities and insults which continue to wound Our Lord in art, music, plays, movies, TV, and from our own lives.  It begins:

"O Sweet Jesus, Whose overflowing charity for men is requited by so much forgetfulness, negligence, and contempt, behold us prostrate before Thine altar, eager to repair by a special act of homage the cruel indifference and injuries, to which Thy loving Heart is everywhere subject........"

Note: Several  Eucharistic miracles (consecrated hosts which became flesh to dispel  doubts or to prove a miracle) which I have mentioned before, occuring in different centuries, still preserved and examined by doctors and scientists with today's scientific tools, have all been found to be heart tissue and all with the same blood type, AB.  The Eucharist is the Sacrament of Christ's Love.

                                      Sacred Heart of Jesus, Have mercy on us.