By Clement Harrold
June 11, 2026
The Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus falls on the third Friday after Pentecost Sunday. Traditionally this Friday was part of the octave of Corpus Christi, thereby highlighting the intimate link between this mystery and the Holy Eucharist.
These days the Sacred Heart is one of the most popular expressions of Catholic piety, and it forms the basis for practices such as the Thursday Eucharistic holy hour and the First Fridays devotion. But what exactly is the Sacred Heart, and why should this particular organ of Christ’s Body enjoy its own special solemnity?
To answer this question, it’s helpful to step back and review how this feast has developed through Church history, beginning with Sacred Scripture.
Biblical Roots
The devotion to the Sacred Heart is grounded in the way that the Bible speaks about the heart. In Scripture, the heart denotes more than just a pump that circulates blood. At a deeper level, the heart expresses the interior life of a human person, as God explains to Samuel: “man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16:7).
The Catechism offers a helpful summary:
2562 Where does prayer come from? Whether prayer is expressed in words or gestures, it is the whole man who prays. But in naming the source of prayer, Scripture speaks sometimes of the soul or the spirit, but most often of the heart (more than a thousand times). According to Scripture, it is the heart that prays. If our heart is far from God, the words of prayer are in vain.
2563 The heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live; according to the Semitic or Biblical expression, the heart is the place “to which I withdraw.” The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God can fathom the human heart and know it fully. The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter, because as image of God we live in relation: it is the place of covenant.
This shows us that, from a biblical perspective, the language of the heart is important. Indeed, the first and greatest commandment is that we love God with everything we have, including our hearts: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:4–5).
In a sense, the whole arc of salvation history is marked by God’s desire to conquer men’s stony hearts. Where sin hardens, grace renews: “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26). In the New Covenant inaugurated by Christ, God’s law is inscribed on our very hearts: “I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (Jer 31:33).
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Jesus Himself adopts the language of the heart over the course of His preaching. Consider what he says during the Feast of Tabernacles:
On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. (John 7:37–39)
In another place, Jesus invites our weary hearts to find rest in His own Sacred Heart:
All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matt 11:27–30)
On the road to Emmaus, Jesus rebukes Cleopas and his companion for being “slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken” (Luke 24:25). Upon realizing His true identity, the disciples exclaim, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).
Finally, we can think of the beloved disciple—traditionally identified as St. John the Evangelist—who at the Last Supper “was lying close to the breast of Jesus” (John 13:23). In the fourth Gospel, the beloved disciple serves as a kind of placeholder for every Christian. Each of us is called to recognize our identity as a beloved disciple of Christ, and each of us is invited, like John, to draw near to His Sacred Heart.
Historical Developments
The devotion to the Sacred Heart arises organically out of Sacred Scripture. Since the Bible clearly teaches us to pay attention to the hearts of men, it logically follows that the heart of Christ, the perfect man, is of the utmost importance.
In the early centuries of Christianity, the Church Fathers frequently reflected on themes surrounding the Sacred Heart, and particularly the piercing of Christ’s side after He expired on the Cross. Over time this led to widespread meditation on the Five Sacred Wounds of Christ, which in turn gave rise to the Sacred Heart devotion around the eleventh century.
For the next few centuries the theology of the Sacred Heart was gradually developed by figures such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), St. Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1240–1298), St. Gertrude the Great (1256–1302), and St. Francis de Sales (1567–1622).
It wasn’t until the seventeenth century, however, that the modern form of the Sacred Heart devotion really took off. St. John Eudes (1601–1680) worked tirelessly to promote both the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. John’s efforts were taken up by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647–1690), a French nun of the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, who received a series of private revelations between 1673 and 1675.
In these visions, Christ revealed His Sacred Heart as a fitting object of devotion and a sign of His endless love for humanity. The visions highlighted the need for Christians to return to the Blessed Sacrament in order to make reparation to the Sacred Heart for all the indifference and ingratitude of sinners.
On one occasion, Jesus conveyed twelve promises to those who observe the First Fridays devotion for nine consecutive months. On another occasion, the Savior appeared to Margaret Mary with His Heart enthroned in flames and surrounded by thorns; the heart bled from where it had been pierced, and it was surmounted by a radiant cross. This image became the basis for our modern iconography of the Sacred Heart.
In 1856, Bl. Pius IX established the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart to be celebrated by the worldwide Church on the Friday after Corpus Christi. Shortly thereafter, a German nun living in Portugal, Bl. Mary of the Divine Heart (1863–1899), petitioned Pope Leo XIII to consecrate the entire world to the Sacred Heart.
In his 1899 encyclical Annum Sacrum, Pope Leo announced his intention to do precisely that. The encyclical was released on May 25, and the consecration took place on June 11. Leo would later describe this as the “great act” of his pontificate. The pontiff also formally approved the Litany of the Sacred Heart, and since this time the Church has observed the whole month of June as a commemoration of the Sacred Heart.
Margaret Mary Alacoque was canonized by Pope Benedict XV in 1920. A couple of decades later, Pope Pius XII instituted the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in 1944. This was originally celebrated on August 22 as part of the octave of the Assumption, but it was later moved by St. Paul VI to the Saturday immediately following the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
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Doctrinal Foundations
When the popes have expounded on the devotion to the Sacred Heart, they have taken care to explain that the devotion arises out of the Church’s theology of the Incarnation. Since Jesus’s human nature is united to His divine nature in the hypostatic union, even His Body is a fitting object of adoration. For this reason it is appropriate for us to venerate the Heart of Christ.
At the same time, it isn’t as if the devotion to the Sacred Heart is an exercise in obsessing over a particular organ of Christ’s body and viewing it in isolation. If it were, then we would expect there to be devotions to the other parts of Christ’s physical make-up, such as the Sacred Ear or the Sacred Toe. The reason these other devotions don’t exist is because the ear and the toe don’t bespeak the human person in the way that the heart does.
As we saw in our overview of the Scriptural material, the heart occupies a unique place in the human body. On a purely biological level, the heart is a barometer of our emotions: fear causes the heart to race; anxiety can cause palpitations in the heart; grief makes our hearts feel heavy; joy, excitement, and sexual arousal quicken our heart rate and even increase our blood pressure.
But this isn’t the only meaning of the heart. The biblical witness is that the physical heart is a sign or symbol of the spiritual heart. Just as the physical heart lies at the center of the human body and gives it life, so the spiritual heart is the hidden center of the human soul that animates the whole person. In this spiritual sense, our heart represents not only our affections and desires, but our truest selves.
This is why the Church embraces the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. As Pope Leo XIII explained in Annum sacrum:
And since 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. (#8)
Pope Leo’s emphasis on the love of Jesus is significant. More than any other bodily organ, the heart symbolizes love. This truth was taken up by Pope Pius XII in Haurietis aquas, written on the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the feast of the Sacred Heart. In that encyclical, Pope Pius distinguishes between the three loves of Christ, each of which is represented in the Sacred Heart.
First, there is the divine love that Jesus, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, has shared with the Father and the Holy Spirit for all eternity. Second, there is the overflow of this divine love into the human soul of Christ. As a human being, Jesus loved with a divine love, and that’s the love we get to share in by virtue of our baptism. Finally, third, there is the human love of Jesus, by which He “possesses full powers of feelings and perception, in fact, more so than any other human body” (#57).
This is a point of tremendous importance. When God became one of us, He didn’t just love us as God; He also loved us as man. Jesus experienced what it is to love in a properly human way, with all of the passion, feeling, and emotion that comes along with that. It was His human love that led Him to withdraw in grief at the death of His kinsman John the Baptist, to shed tears at the tomb of His friend Lazarus, and to weep over the fate of His beloved Jerusalem. As Pius XII reminds us, moreover, Jesus didn’t simply experience human love—He perfected it.
Jesus lived out the fullness of human love, and herein lies the extraordinary richness of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. When we meditate on the pierced heart of Christ, we learn to appreciate first and foremost the boundless love that God has for us sinners. But that is not all. For the Sacred Heart also becomes for us a school of both human and divine love. Through this devotion, we discover the depths of divine love that we are called to participate in, but without in any way foregoing our bodily, human way of loving. Pius XII puts it beautifully:
And so the Heart of our Savior reflects in some way the image of the divine Person of the Word and, at the same time, of His twofold nature, the human and the divine; in it we can consider not only the symbol but, in a sense, the summary of the whole mystery of our redemption. When we adore the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, we adore in it and through it both the uncreated love of the divine Word and also its human love and its other emotions and virtues, since both loves moved our Redeemer to sacrifice Himself for us and for His Spouse, the Universal Church[.] (#86)
Pope Pius goes on to explain that our devotion to the Sacred Heart is what enables us to fulfill the instruction Christ offered to His disciples at the Last Supper: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13:34). We are commanded to love our neighbor as Christ loves us, and we realize how much He loves us by meditating on His Most Sacred Heart.
Timely Lessons
During the time when St. Margaret Mary Alacoque was receiving her visions, the Church was beset by a heretical movement known as Jansenism. Like the ancient Gnostics, the Jansenists held a profoundly negative view of the human body. They also depicted God as a harsh, unforgiving deity who only desires the salvation of a certain subset of the human race.
It was in the midst of this moment of theological and cultural crisis that Christ summoned His Church to enter more deeply into the mystery of His Sacred Heart. This devotion powerfully conveys both the goodness of the human body and the tender love of God, thereby providing a forceful corrective to the errors of Jansenism.
Today the Sacred Heart continues to have plenty to teach us. In his final encyclical, Dilexit nos (“He loved us”), Pope Francis offered an extended meditation “on the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ.” Building on the work of previous popes, Francis reminds us why the heart of the Savior is particularly deserving of our love and devotion:
The heart, too, has the advantage of being immediately recognizable as the profound unifying centre of the body, an expression of the totality of the person, unlike other individual organs. As a part that stands for the whole, we could easily misinterpret it, were we to contemplate it apart from the Lord himself. The image of the heart should lead us to contemplate Christ in all the beauty and richness of his humanity and divinity. (#55)
Pope Francis goes on to argue that today the Church is threatened by “new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality” that fail to recognize the goodness of physical creation:
I must warn that within the Church too, a baneful Jansenist dualism has re-emerged in new forms. This has gained renewed strength in recent decades, but it is a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of “the salvation of the flesh”. (#87)
At the same time, Pope Francis warns against worldly ways of thinking that lead us to lose sight of the Church’s spiritual mission:
I would add that the heart of Christ also frees us from another kind of dualism found in communities and pastors excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes. The result is often a Christianity stripped of the tender consolations of faith, the joy of serving others, the fervour of personal commitment to mission, the beauty of knowing Christ and the profound gratitude born of the friendship he offers and the ultimate meaning he gives to our lives. This too is the expression of an illusory and disembodied otherworldliness. (#88)
The problem with these false gospels, Pope Francis explains, is that they cause our hearts to become hardened and cold: “Once we succumb to these attitudes, so widespread in our day, we tend to lose all desire to be cured of them” (#89). Now more than ever, therefore, the Church finds herself in need of a renewed spirit of devotion to the Sacred Heart. There we shall discover the Love by which and for which we were made, and the fulfillment of all our desires.
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Further Reading
Timothy O’Donnell, Heart of the Redeemer (Ignatius Press, 2017)
Leo XIII, Annum sacrum (1899)
Pius XI, Miserentissimus Redemptor (1928)
Pius XII, Haurietis aquas (1956)
Pope Francis, Dilexit nos (2024)
About Clement Harrold
Clement Harrold earned his master’s degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2024, and his bachelor’s degree in theology, philosophy, and classics from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2021. He is a columnist for The Catholic Herald, and his writings have appeared in First Things, Word on Fire, Catholic Answers Magazine, Church Life Journal, Our Sunday Visitor Magazine, Crisis Magazine, and the Washington Examiner.
