The Sacred Heart as the Antidote to Pride
Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love. Instead of gratitude I receive from most only indifference, by irreverence and sacrilege or the coldness and scorn that men have for me in the sacrament of love.
With these words, Our Lord dignified Saint Sister Margaret-Mary Alacoque, who thereupon became the first recognized practitioner of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. This devotion, thoroughly Catholic, remains something of a mystery to many outside of the Faith, both to the Protestants who treat it as, like many Catholic devotions, idolatrous superstition, as well as to the secular moderns, who dismiss it as another vestige of gruesome Catholic vulgarity. It serves us best, however, in a simultaneous twofold reminder: that of Our Lord’s love for us and that of our own impending mortality.
Historically, Catholics have reserved June as a month held in remembrance and observation of this devotion. Few icons of the Church so perfectly synthesize the love of God with the violence of the fallen world. It is the image of the fleshy heart riven with wounds and impaled by thorns, aflame with love, often depicted inset to His chest or held in His palm, outstretched: a gift for those faithful eager to be His devotee.
Less historically, the fallen world—and particularly, America—has associated June with a month-long celebration of sodomy, homosexuality, and sexual deviance, now paraded under the pretenses of sexual identitarianism. ‘Pride month’ could not be a more appropriate name for their indulgences, taking it from the gay pride movement that prompted the festivals and, more importantly, the disdainful hatred of the natural order that they have contorted, by means of self-indulgence and self-gratification, into an endless proliferation of sexual vice.
There is no synthesis to be found between even the most minor of offenses made in the name of the sexual revolution and the great image of the Sacred Heart. For our part here, we shall instead approach the devotion according to its origin and the content of its image, before analyzing the icon that the secular world has erected against it for the month of June.
St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
So we should turn our attention first to that blessed Saint Margaret-Mary Alacoque, before approaching the image of the Sacred Heart itself.
St. Margaret Mary Alacoque was born the fifth of seven children in 1647, at L’Hautecour, in Burgundy. Upon her father’s passing when she was eight, she was sent to study under the Poor Clares at Charolles, some hundred and eighty miles away. There, according to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, her piety so impressed the religious sisters that she was allowed to take first communion at the age of nine. Two years later, however, she was confined to her bed by a “painful rheumatic affliction” that did not clear up enough for her to regain mobility until she was fifteen. In the mean time, she was sent back home, where one of her sisters “had taken all domestic and business authority out of the hands of the widow Alacoque.”1
Her sister and her sister’s husband ran the place treating Margaret and her mother as servants. In response to this, Margaret developed a strong attachment for the Blessed Sacrament; however, as she “lived some way from the church,” she was unable to leave the house without the express permission of the heads of the house. As Butler states, citing her autobiography, “they would say it was a pretext to meet some boy or other,” which would cause no end of personal grief for Margaret, who would retreat to the garden and “cry and pray for the rest of the day.”2
This sort of behavior in the house continued, compounded by appeals by her relatives to get married, which “she considered not unfavorably for some time.” She was finally disassociated of the idea when, at twenty, she received a vision of Our Lord and, two years later, was finally confirmed into the Faith, and two years after that, at age 24, entered the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial.
Her life with the religious sisters was not without trouble. Margaret-Mary was, by her own accounts, “quiet, slow and clumsy,” even as she was “humble, obedient, simple and frank.” She found discursive meditation extremely difficult, and often fell back on what she referred to as “my divine Master’s way [i.e. ‘prayer of simplicity’].” After being received and taking her vows, she was assigned to assist in the infirmary and remained there under the guidance of a particularly energetic and boisterous Sister Marest for two and a half years.3
It was during this period that she began to receive the private revelations that would eventually reveal her unique devotion to the Sacred Heart.
She was kneeling alone at the grille before the Blessed Sacrament exposed on the altar, and all at once she felt herself, as she says, “invested” by the divine Presence, and hearing our Lord inviting her to take the place which St. John (it was his feast) had occupied at the Last Supper. He then went on speaking, “in so plain and effective a manner as to leave no room for doubt, such were the results that this grace produced in me, who am always afraid of deceiving myself about what I assert to take place interiorly”. He told her that the love of His heart must needs spread and manifest itself to men by means of her, and that he would reveal the treasures of its graces through her, His chosen instrument and the disciple of His Sacred Heart. Then it was as though our Lord took her heart and put it within His own, returning it burning with divine love to her breast.4
Subsequent revelations over the next eighteen months brought into clearer focus exactly what Our Lord intended for this devotion to be. She was given the now familiar image of the human heart encircled with thorns, wounded, and ablaze with fire, topped with the cross, and she was told to make up, as best as she was able, for the “rebuffs given to Him by mankind in return for all His eagerness to do them good.”5 This would include frequent, loving communion, the institution of the First Fridays devotion, and an hour’s vigil on Thursday evenings in memory of Our Lord’s night in Gethsemane. A final revelation within the octave of Corpus Christi, 1675, brought forth to her the now famous utterance, behold the heart which has so loved men.
As is common with private revelations, Our Lord explicitly told her to “do nothing without the approval of those who guide you, in order that, having the authority of obedience, you may not be misled by Satan, who has no power over those who are obedient.”6 This, too, led to numerous crosses to bear. On one hand, there were fellow sisters who did not believe her, which at first included her mother superior, who had forbidden Margaret-Mary from practicing the devotions she had believed she received. On another hand, she again fell very ill, such that her life was in danger; her recovery, however, prompted Mother de Saumaise to relent. On yet another hand, theologians dismissed Margaret-Mary’s visions as “delusions.” At about this time, however, Our Lord again came to her and promised that an “understanding director” was due to arrive at Paray, and to trust the man. It would turn out to be Blessed Claud La Colombiere, who was struck by the imagery and devotions associated with the Sacred Heart and encouraged her to remain firm in her beliefs.7
Over the next six years, St. Alacoque’s devotions became known to local community of nuns. No small amount of resentment and disbelief remained among the sisters at first, particularly after Margaret-Mary was told, by Our Lord, to offer public witness to her revelations before her fellow sisters, with the message that she was “to become the sacrificial victim for the shortcomings of the nuns of her community and for the ingratitude of some to the Sacred Heart.” In 1681, Claud la Colombiere returned to Paray, where he stayed for the last year of his life before passing away from an illness. The following year, Margaret-Mary was made the mistress of novices and assistant superior, her revelations now somewhat more widely known and her devotions to the Sacred Heart accepted by the convent, even if some families of particular novices claimed to be scandalized by what they considered to be reckless innovations.
St. Alacoque died in 1690, having too fallen ill, though the doctor who examined her claimed nothing to be wrong. She was canonized in 1920 by Pope Pius XI.
The Images of the Sacred Heart
The image of the Sacred Heart contains all the visuals commonly associated with Catholicism: blood, the wound, a heart of flesh, the crown of thorns, fire, and of course, the cross above it, in which love triumphed over violence unto death. The heart is depicted as fleshy, muscular, and anatomically correct, with valves protruding from its summit and blood dripping from the wound in its side. The image speaks, in this way, to the human nature of Christ, that which he shared with men when he Incarnated as clothed in their flesh, and which, like them, he shared in their fate of death—if only temporarily. A heart considered removed from the body, whose ventricles still beat but whose valves service no visible arteries, and whose side is rendered open by a wound: all evoke the violence of mortality.
The imagery of flesh shares, however, a living analogue in the Blessed Sacrament. As Catholics, we are taught and know by infallible dogma that the consecrated Host, the Eucharist, is the living body and blood, soul and divinity of Our Lord that is present under the appearances of bread and wine. The reality of God is made superimposed into the place of food and drink, so that, in a manner appropriate to how Our Lord communicates with his creatures, he may reside within us not only abstractly, in the aspects of memory, habit, and prayer, but literally, in the aspect of being materially consumed.
Eucharistic miracles have been documented within the Church for centuries, and more modern ones subjected to scientific scrutiny and testing. Franco Serafini, cardiologist and author of A Cardiologist Examines Jesus, describes in an interview the process by which Italian doctor Odoardo Linoli examined the relics of the Eucharistic miracle at Lanciano, which occurred over thirteen hundred years ago. The story goes that a Basilian monk in the eight century momentarily questioned the divinity of the Eucharist as he celebrated the Mass, only for it to transform into flesh and blood. These relics were saved and have been miraculously preserved, winding up in the care of the Franciscans of Lanciano. In 1970, Dr. Linoli was formally asked by the archdiocese to examine them. According to Serafi,
First of all, he demonstrated that the flesh is myocardial tissue; it is a fragment of the heart. Second, the blood is True Blood. And third, the flesh and blood are human. Fourth, the blood type he discovered separately in flesh and blood is the AB blood type, the rarest in humans. And then also, fifth, the presence of the proteins with an electrophoretic ratio that is similar to that of fresh blood. And six, the presence of minerals in the blood.
Serafi continues by noting that other Eucharistic miracles of similar kind can result in “features that are scientifically unexplainable and irreproducible,” such as those in Tixtla, Mexico and Sokolka, Poland, where the fibers of the Hosts and those of heart tissue “are inexplicably intertwined on a microscopic level.” Of the five miracles he analyzed, Serafi found that “five times out of five,” there was found “the presence of the heart, of myocardial tissue, and of suffering myocardial tissue.”
The Eucharist, then, when God chooses to manifest it as a living part of Himself without the forms of bread and wine, is best presented as Our Lord’s heart that suffered for us on the Cross. What closer connection to the Sacred Heart image given to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque than this, paired with the words he said? Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to testify its love.
The heart and blood testify to Our Lord’s human nature and reminds us of both His conquering of death as well as our own eventual demise. So it is mentioned by the Prophet Ezekiel: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”8 The prophet’s words image the Sacred Heart by referencing the Lamb’s salvific sacrifice with explicit reference to His bodily organ. Consider that it was by the Fall that man’s heart was hardened into stone, rendered inert, and killed by sin; it was by the blood of the Savior, however, that our hearts were made open to life, i.e., supernatural grace, and the triumph over death.
So what then of the wound in His side? This too is found on the image of the Sacred Heart, the place where his side was not merely wounded but, as Scripture tells us, “opened” by the lance of Longinus. This opening parallels the door in the side of Noah’s Arc, compounded by the water that flowed from His side when He was pierced. In this is the water of baptism, for as baptism washes away the sins made in life until that event, so the Flood too washed away the evils of the world before it. Both of these waters have their teleological origin in the side of Our Lord, who, in the manner imaged by Noah, brings the souls of those who come to rest in Him out from the world of sin and into that of beatitude.
This brings us to the ring of thorns. In some depictions, the crown is depicted encircling the heart laterally, as a wreath, while others feature it as if it were a binding cord sunk into the flesh of the muscle.
Our Lord reigns supreme over all of creation. His title of Rex Judeorum, too, demands a crown, as the inheritor of David’s birthright. For this crown to be of thorns, and his first throne to have been a cross marks His perfection in the use of irony in providence: by man was creation broken with the Fall, and by divine mercy was it spared from nullification, and by man again was the Savior’s blood shed, and by divine love was man pulled forth into redemption. The crown of thorns was made with the torturer’s hands to be the bitter humiliation of an innocent man, and yet, as its thorns pierced His skull and lacerated his brow, it became the metonym of the fallen creation.
In life, He bears this crown on his head. The image of the Sacred Heart, however, envelops the vessel of his love with it, highlighting the aspect of Him that bore the pain of this fallen creation and its responsibility the greatest. As excruciating as the physical violence inflicted upon His body was during the hours of His Passion, even these were incomparable to the soulful brutality that He suffered interiorly. The image of this very same crown of thorns encircling His heart, piercing it, draws our attention to that elevated state of suffering.
As for the fire, three things come immediately to mind. The first is that Our Lord’s heart is ablaze with love for His creation, man. Fire and flame are standard metaphors for the love with which men and women may hold for one another, but this itself images the love He held for each of us. This is correlated to the nature of the Divine presence itself, which is repeated in the burning of the bush as God first reveals himself to Moses. It is a flame that burns yet does not consume, a visual metaphor that again speaks to God’s nature. And, the Sacred Heart being the heart not just of God, but of the Incarnate Word and the Sacrificial Lamb, the fire images the burnt offerings of the ancient Hebrew religion, each celebration of which was a premeditation and prelude to the ultimate expression of penitent sacrifice that would take place at Calvary. The fire of the Sacred Heart thus reflects the sacrifice He made for us, the nature of His Being, and the love with which He holds for us.
For the image of the Sacred Heart, it is above all of this, above the heart, above the fire, above the wound and the thorny crown, that Our Lord placed the Cross, as if rising out of the burning, pierced flesh the way it rose out of the hilltop at Golgotha. In most depictions, the Cross stands as if centered inside the furnace of His heart, practically aglow by the heat.
The Cross itself as a gift of His to us in several ways. He bore it for us, for one thing, taking upon Himself not just the Sacrifice man owed but could never pay as a result of sin. His Passion also supplied for us a literal, physical example to follow, realer than any myth or fable that we might draw inspiration from. The historical act rooted our salvation in something lived and experienced beyond the realm of interior fancy; it was a testament to us by He who need never give any testament by necessity. Thus the Cross so positioned within the blaze of the Sacred Heart is only fitting.
The Rainbow, Pride, and Noah’s Typology
Outside of the Church, America’s elite owe their lip service to a different religion: one that worships the sexual revolution and thus honors it during June. The image they hold above their heads is that of the rainbow—a perverted one, even before the absurd triangular attack was inflicted upon it last decade, as the pride flag bears a six-bar coloration rather than seven. As it turns out, the original flag was designed to carry eight colors, as Britannica explains:
Baker saw the rainbow as a natural flag from the sky, so he adopted eight colors for the stripes, each color with its own meaning (hot pink for sex, red for life, orange for healing, yellow for sunlight, green for nature, turquoise for art, indigo for harmony, and violet for spirit).
[…] However, because of production issues, the pink and turquoise stripes were removed and indigo was replaced by basic blue, which resulted in the contemporary six-striped flag (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet). Today this is the most common variant of the rainbow flag, with the red stripe on top, as in a natural rainbow.
The irony could be considered nothing short of cosmic, if one were to put it politely. By the gay movement’s own semiotics, sex and art had to be removed from the symbol of their identity in order to be accepted en masse. That this is the result of ineffective dye or poor materials or some other production problem could be considered the ironic hand of providence at work in the foul designs of perverted men.
The six-bar variation notwithstanding, it’s worth noting too that its original design by Gilbert Baker also did not feature the true colors of the rainbow. Inserting ‘hot pink’ at the apex of the arch, capping an already perfect arrangement of the visible spectrum, highlights the self-aggrandizing nature of the gay pride movement. That it was supposed to symbolize sex—that sex, at least to Gilbert Baker, renowned homosexual artist and drag queen, deserved its place above life, healing, sunlight (whatever that means), nature, art, harmony and spirit—is just the icing on the cake. How fitting, one might say, that they prioritize it above all other things.
Back 1978, they were a bit more honest about their relationship with sex. The alleged Patient Zero of the AIDS epidemic, Gaetan Dugas, was immortalized by Randy Shilts’ And the Band Played On, one of the first popular histories assembled about the AIDS outbreak hysteria in San Francisco. An abundance of literature now exists about both the notion of the AIDS ‘patient zero’ idea, about Dugas’ lifestyle and voracious sodomitical appetite, and the writing of And the Band Played On itself. Naturally, much of it is critical these days, as the zeitgeist of liberal modernity is only equipped to offer defenses of Dugas and scientific debunkings of his status as patient zero. Even if the latter is true, which it seems to be, it hardly exonerates Dugas’ behavior. And how could it? Dugas, like most homosexual men, prioritized sexual indulgence over just about everything else in his life.
The gay pride movement has been very open about this until only fairly recently, when the attempt to form a coalition across the wide sphere of sexual deviancy required not only lesbian admittance, but so-called transgender admittance, too. As rhetoric surrounding ‘gay rights’ marched toward normalcy, especially after 2014’s Obergefel ruling, there was a requirement within the mainstream narrative to present sexual deviancy as significantly less radical and revolutionary than it actually was. It’s probably not a coincidence, then, that language based around sexual identity, its mutability, and the meteoric rise in self-identified transgendered people occurred at the same time. And all this despite the fact that, as TERFs have been pointing out for years, the whole idea of transgenderism renders terms like ‘gay men’ or ‘lesbian women’ nonsensical; to be a lesbian one must first be a woman, and no amount of Louis Vuitton, Channel Rouge, or Thai surgeons can make a man into a woman.
It is well known that the gay pride flag co-opted the rainbow, altering its social ubiquity in order to evoke connotations of sexual vice. As Christians, we know the rainbow’s true meaning: a reminder given to us periodically that God flooded the world once in order to remove the stains of man’s ingratitude and degeneracy from the landscape, and that although He could do it again any time He wished, He chooses continually to honor His agreement with Noah. The gay pride movement adopts this sign with the brazen interest to tempt fate.
Conclusion
In contrast to the imagery of the Sacred Heart, the gay pride flag has no comprehensive view of the world that helps position its wavers within any sense of greater historical or personal narrative. The flag of gay pride exists only as an indicator of a certain set of sexual behaviors and desires. It’s a token designating members of the sodomitical tribe.
Devotion to the Sacred Heart is not mere devotion to a particular image of the Faith. In that image is contained a microcosm of what the Faith consists of, with each element of it a symbol that points to both Our Lord and ourselves by relation to Him. And these are not static symbols, either; they point backwards toward historical events as well as forwards toward the promises of salvation. By attentive contemplation of the Sacred Heart, a man can come to know his place in God’s sight and, more importantly, come into a closer relationship with Him.
One might consider it simple coincidence that June was chosen for the month of gay pride recognition and celebration by the secular West. Perhaps it was, but perhaps, in the interests of the more nefarious forces at work in the world, it wasn’t. Not unlike how the rainbow was chosen to represent the movement because Gilbert Baker by coincidence, allegedly, looked up into the sky and just saw one after meeting with known pederast Harvey Milk, coincidences tend to be a bit rarer than one either expects or hopes. For Baker, the rainbow might have been a coincidence, but for the gay pride movement, carrying the reminder of both God’s wrath and mercy as their totem of sexual vice is a darkly ironic mark of their own doom. The decision to use the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart for the same purpose seems like a parallel phenomenon.
1Butler, Alban, The Lives of the Saints, IV, revised by Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater (Notre Dame: Burnes & Oates, 1956), 134.
2Ibid, 135.
3Ibid.
4Ibid, 136.
5Ibid.
6Ibid, quoting her autobiography.
7Ibid, 137.
8Ezekiel 36:26
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