In this year of Jesus we turn our hearts and mind with renewed love toward Our Divine Redeemer, and in this month of June we think especially of His Sacred Heart. Three encyclicals, among others, have been dedicated to the Sacred Heart. These are Leo XIII’s Annum sacrum, dealing with the consecration of the world to the Sacred Heart; 

Miserentissimus Redemptor of Pius XI, concerned with reparation and expiation as an essential feature of this devotion; and Haurietis aquas of Pius XII, the most scientific theological statement of this devotion which he called “a duty of religion most conducive to Christian perfection.”

Haurietis aquas marked the centenary celebration (1956) of Pius IX’s extension of the Feast of the Sacred Heart to the universal Church. The encyclical refutes several criticisms of devotion to the Sacred Heart and shows that the devotion is solidly grounded in Scripture as well as in the theological traditions of the Church. It teaches that the Church has not based devotion to the Sacred Heart merely on the strength of the private revelations made to St. Margaret Alacoque but on the Word of God, and stresses that the Church has already given official approval to this devotion long before the writings of the saint had been known. When viewed in the light of divine revelation and practiced according to the directions of the Church, this devotion can lead men to a deeper and fuller understanding of the divine plan of salvation. 

Pius XII, in his encyclical on the Sacred Heart, by means of the following citations from Sacred Scripture, shows that the Covenant between God and the Jews was based on love. These passages are rich sources of meditation and can be applied to Jesus and His Most Sacred Heart. 

Deuteronomy 7:7-8 “It was not because you are the largest of all nations that the Lord set His heart on you and chose you, for you are really the smallest of all nations. It was because the Lord loved you and because of his fidelity to the oath He has sword to your fathers, that He brought you out with His strong hand from the place of slavery.” 

Hos. 11:1,3-4 “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. . . . Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of compassion with the bands of love, and I became tothem as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them”

Hos. 14:5-6 “I will be as the dew to Israel; he shall blossom as the lily, he shall strike root at the poplar; his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon.” 

Is. 49:14-16 “But Zion said, ‘The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me. Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold I have graven you on the palms of my hands.” 

Song of Songs 8:6 “Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death. . . . Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it.”

Jer. 31:3,33-34 “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. . . . This is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: 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. . . . they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” 

Then Pius XII turns to the New Testament and speaks of its manifest superiority: “Assuredly, when He who is the Only-begotten of the Father and the Word made flesh ‘full of grace and truth’ had come to men weighed down with many sins and miseries, it was He alone, from that human nature united hypostatically to the divine Person, who could open to the human race the fountain of living water which would irrigate the parched land and transform it into a fruitful and flourishing garden.” 

The excruciating suffering of Jesus upon the cross revealed His perfect love for His Father in Heaven and God’s perfect love for sinful mankind. Pius XII states, “The love which breathes from the Gospel, from the letters of the Apostles and the pages of the Apocalypse, all of which portray the love of the Heart of Jesus Christ, expresses not only divine love but also human sentiments of love. All who profess themselves Catholics accept this without question.” 

The Heart of Jesus is the chief sign and symbol of the threefold love with which the Son of God unceasingly loves his Father and sinful men:

1) the divine love which he shares with the Father and the Holy Spirit;

2) the fiery love infused into his human soul, which enriched the will and governed its acts through “the most perfect knowledge” drawn from the beatific vision and that which was directly infused; 

3) His sensible love, since he possessed complete powers of feelings and perception, “in fact more so than any other human body.” 

“The Heart of Jesus Christ, hypostatically united to the divine Person of the Word, certainly beat with love and with the other emotions; but these, joined to a human will full of divine charity and with the Father and the Holy Spirit, were in such complete unity and agreement that never among these three loves was there any contradiction or disharmony.” 

“Since, therefore, Sacred Scripture and the official teaching of the Catholic faith instruct us that all things find their complete harmony and order in the most holy soul of Jesus Christ, and that he has manifestly directed his threefold love for the securing of our redemption, it unquestionably follows that we can contemplate and honor the Heart of the divine Redeemer as a symbolic image of His love and a witness of our redemption and, at the same time, as a sort of mystical ladder by which we mount to the embrace of ‘God our Savior’.” 

Everything that our Lord did during his sojourn on earth—his journeys, teachings, miracles, etc.—all manifest this threefold love. In addition, Pope Pius singles out those works which show forth most clearly His love for us: the institution of the Eucharist, His suffering and death, the gift of His Mother, the founding of the Church and finally, the sending of the Holy Spirit. Later in the encyclical he speaks of these acts of love in greater detail as gifts which spring from the loving Heart of Jesus

“We ought to meditate most loving on the beating of His Sacred Heart by which He seemed, as it were, to measure the time of His Sojourn on earth until that final moment when, as the Evangelists testify, ‘crying out with a loud voice, “It is finished,” and bowing His head, he yielded up His Spirit.’ Then it was that His heart ceased to beat and His sensible love was interrupted until the time when, triumphing over death, he rose from the tomb. But after His glorified body had been reunited to the soul of the divine Redeemer, conqueror of death, His most Sacred Heart never ceased, and never will cease, to beat with calm imperturbable pulsations. Likewise, it will never cease to symbolize the threefold love with which he is bound to His heavenly Father and the entire human race, of which he has every claim to be the mystical Head.” 

Though Jesus is in heaven now, “He did not cease to remain with His spouse, the Church by means of the burning love with which His Heart beats. For He bears in His hands, feet and side the glorious marks of the wounds which manifest the threefold victory won over the devil, sin and death. He likewise keeps in His Heart, locked as it were in a most precious shrine, the unlimited treasures of His merits, the fruits of that same threefold triumph, which he generously bestows on the redeemed human race.”