Joseph R. Wood.

But first a note from Robert Royal: Note: We're in the final days of our mid-year fundraiser and are still a few thousand short of our goal. I really need one last push from you. We've been pushing ourselves. And I'm happy to report that right after Labor Day, we'll be offering two more exciting TCT Courses: one, on Edith Stein's 'The Science of the Cross' (for info click here), and the other - which I'll be teaching - on Pope Leo XIV and the Augustinian Tradition. And that's just for starters. If you value these and our other initiatives to say nothing of a great column every morning 365 days a year - please, we need you to show it. It's time to bring it all home. Click the button. Be part of the work of The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column.

Today's Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus presents a quandary. As I lamented to our editor, it's too big not to write about, and it's too big to write about.

My impression from a fair number of visits to churches in many places is that, aside from the Cross and images of Holy Mary and St. Joseph, the Sacred Heart is the most widespread image and devotion in the Catholic Church today. (St. Thérèse of Lisieux runs a close second, but my survey isn't rigorous, and who's counting?)

As I write, an especially grand church dedicated to the Sacred Heart is nearby, the Basilica of the University of Notre Dame, helping all on campus keep the devotion in mind.

So much has been written about the devotion, including much by some of the greatest Catholic thinkers of the last few centuries. St. John Henry Newman chose as his motto, Core ad Core Loquitur ("Heart Speaks to Heart"), and composed a beautiful prayer of devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Pope Leo XIII, whose work provides a source of inspiration for Pope Leo XIV, taught in his 1899 Encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Annum Sacrum (Sacred Year):

There is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another, therefore is it fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to His most Sacred Heart - an act which is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, seeing that whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ Himself.

The feast is a relatively recent addition to the Church calendar. The first approval for a local feast was in 1672 by the bishops of France.

The promises of Christ that we associate with the devotion came to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque between 1673 and 1675. So the first official feast preceded her revelations, which accelerated and shaped the devotion's spread.

Local feasts in Poland and Rome came a century later, before the ecclesiastical approval of St. Margaret Mary's writings. Almost another century later (1856), Pope Pius IX placed the feast on the Universal Calendar.

Pope Pius XII recounts this history in his 1956 Encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis Aquas (You Will Draw Waters), marking a century of the feast's universal Western celebration. That encyclical carries a defensive tone. Pius rejects the misgivings of those who would question the devotion.

When I first entered the Church, I might have sympathized with the attitudes Pius opposes. Seeing "anatomically correct" depictions of a heart, it wasn't clear to me what we were adoring.

The Orthodox and Oriental Catholic churches have not followed the widespread Western love of the devotion. Maybe it seems strange to them to worship a human organ, and the Sacred Heart is indeed Christ's human heart.

But Pius explains that Christ's "Heart, more than all the other members of His body, is the natural sign and symbol of His boundless love for the human race." Pius emphasizes that this sign and symbol, rooted scripturally in the full humanity of Christ, is worthy of devotion only when we bear in mind that it points to His divinity. Christ's human heart was the seat of his human emotions and affe...