Homily for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, Year C
I have chosen the way of truth…
I will run in the way of your commandments, because you have enlarged my heart.-Psalm 119 (118) 30, 32
When I was ordained a priest for my abbey in 1990, I chose as my motto, inscribed on my ordination memento, the first statement of this quotation from the great psalm 119 (or 118 for versions based on the Latin Vulgate). Viam veritatis elegi was an assertion of the primacy of the truth in the profession of the orthodox, Catholic faith. When I celebrated my silver jubilee twenty-five years later I chose to expand this motto with the words which follow close on the first: Dilatasti cor meum, “You have enlarged my heart.”
There is no doubt that there is a crisis of truth in the Church today that seems to be intensifying in a dreadful way. Even the proximate rule of faith, the Magisterium, not to mention the normative status of Sacred Scripture and Tradition, seem to be obscured by the words and deeds of those from whom we would never had expected such confusion.
To be sure, the truth has a priority in all our doings. As Scripture attests, “without faith it is impossible to please God.” But love, the quality of a heart enlarged by union with God by grace, is the form, the very life of faith, of our mind’s submission to the truths revealed by the God whose love “has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,” as the apostle Paul, the teacher of the nations, tells us. Indeed, without love, we are warned by the same apostle, even if we had faith to move mountains, it would be to no avail.
For the Christian, virtue is a gift given first of all by the infusion of love, of divine charity, into the heart. Apparent virtues are only materially virtues—that is, they are not really virtues in the strict sense that they would render us and our actions good in a way that makes us achieve our end of union with Christ and eternal salvation.
In the seventeenth century, in an age ravaged by the errors that so wounded the Church at the time of the Protestant movement, and an age just at the beginning of the rationalism that would undermine both Catholic and Protestant belief, the Savior came to us with a supreme remedy for all that. This remedy is the same for our times as for those.
Our Lord Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary, a nun of the Visitation, showing on his open breast his heart, enthroned on flames of love and crowned with thorns, and made his “heartfelt” appeal for love from the hearts of men. He complained most of all of the indifference of Catholics and of clergy and consecrated souls to the immense love he had shown them in his Passion and in his gift of the Most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. He proposed devotion to his Sacred Heart as the remedy for lukewarmness and indifference, and a sure salvation to those who taught and practiced this devotion. He asked for the feast of the Most Sacred Heart, which now graces the Church’s calendar every year at this time.
Every crisis of truth is on a deeper level a crisis of love, of charity grown cold. The only sure solution to this crisis is to fly to our Savior’s open heart, present in the Sacrifice of the Mass and on our altars in the tabernacle, to make his love the norm of our actions and the sure pledge of success in leading those whom we love, our neighbors as ourselves, back to him.
The narrowness of cold hearts, of those whose infidelity is often the fruit of many scandals in the Church, has forced the loving heart of Jesus to enlarge, making it our home, our safe haven, and our strength. Let us be determined that our efforts to promote the truth in our own particular apostolate of explaining and defending the faith be always informed by a loving union with the heart of Christ, burning with love for us.
The practice of the nine first Fridays, the Litany of the Sacred Heart, the enthronement of the image of the heart of Jesus in our homes and other places, holy hours of reparation, works of mercy for the living and the dead, and so many other practices of Catholic piety can be a beginning of a life of union with the Savior’s Heart, and a great defense of the faith we hold so dear.
Yes, Jesus is opening wide his Heart to you and to me. Let us heed his pleas so that our hearts too may be opened wide, enlarged for love!