The Sacred Heart of Jesus

The feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus falls on the Friday nineteen days after Pentecost, following the octave of Corpus Christi. It venerates the physical heart of Christ as the symbol of his love for humanity, and belongs to a devotion that, while it has medieval roots, took its modern form in seventeenth-century France through the visions reported by the Visitation nun Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial, promoted by her Jesuit director Claude de la Colombiere. The devotion's imagery, a heart crowned with thorns, wounded and aflame, became one of the most widespread in Catholic piety.

The observance spread against considerable resistance from those who thought it novel or close to worshipping a part of the body, and was extended to the whole Latin church only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It carries a strong strand of reparation, prayer offered to make amends for indifference to Christ's love, and is attached to the practice of the First Fridays. The feast has also had a public and political life, in national consecrations and in the architecture of churches such as the basilica of Montmartre in Paris.

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Montmartre that this entry's first article mentions was not built as an ordinary parish church but as a specific act of national penance, funded by public subscription following France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871 and the violent suppression of the Paris Commune that followed, with its promoters explicitly framing the building as reparation for the moral and political failures French Catholics believed had brought national disaster, tying the devotion's own theme of reparation directly to a specific and traumatic national political crisis rather than only to private spiritual practice.

Construction stretched from 1875 into the early twentieth century, and the basilica's prominent hilltop site and continuous exposition of the consecrated host inside it have made it both a major site of ongoing Sacred Heart devotion and a recurring target of political controversy in France, where its origin as a monument tied to a specific conservative Catholic political reading of national defeat has made it, at various points since its construction, a contested symbol for secularist and left-wing critics who see the building's very existence as making a political claim about France's Catholic identity that the country's official secularism does not share.