I originally wrote this two months ago and submitted it to OnePeterFive for the theme in the title. They did not run it from what I can tell.
The Month of the Sacred Heart
This month is dedicated to the Sacred Heart. The Sacred Heart of our Lord is the unifying principle of not only individuals, who must unite to it to order all of the faculties of their souls in obedience to the Father; not only parishes, whose members all must be willing to suffer excruciating pains for their neighbor if they wish to be blessed with eternal reward; not only the Church, which finds in the Sacred Heart of Her Spouse all the remedies of Her troubles being bled out by the wound of St. Longinus’s lance to cleanse Her; but also the nations, the world, and indeed all history.
I will give you a very simple example of the Sacred Heart and how He would heal a single, very deformed soul, but first let us understand what the Sacred Heart really means.
What is the object of this devotion?
Fr. John Croiset was the spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary (17th Century France) who received the great instructions from our Lord which encompass and describe this devotion, although it is ancient and named by many saints before her. In his book on the subject, the good father explains in simple and precise terms, to remove the confusion which people have concerning this devotion, that “the object of this devotion is the immense love of the Son of God, which induced Him to deliver Himself up to death for us and give Himself entirely to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the altar.” Thank God that he makes it so simple. And yet it is good to examine the objections which people make to the devotion.
Objections to the Sacred Heart
It is not surprising that people are often repulsed at images of the Sacred Heart. It is a bright, red organ, on fire, pierced and bleeding, covered in thorns, swollen with opprobrium. It looks ghastly. And after all, were people not so repulsed at the sight of our Lord pierced, bleeding, and muddied upon the Cross? They said in their hearts, “This is not God; this is not our Lord; this is not our King. Give us Barabbas.” And yet this is what has purchased our salvation, and it is the deepest picture of love which can ever exist.
A certain schismatic of the west calls the Sacred Heart devotion, in conjunction with many Catholic devotions and beliefs, “bizarre” and refers to it as “heart worship” which he equates with Nestorianism. Nestorius was a heretic who could not bring himself to call our Lady the Mother of God, and because of this, invented a theological heresy which separated the person of Christ from the person of Jesus, as if Jesus received the Christ at a later date. But Christ is a title, not a separate person. He made two persons where there was only one Divine Person, Who is the same as Jesus Christ. This schismatic believes we are doing the same thing when we separate the Heart of Jesus from the rest of His Body, as if we think that there really is a separation. This is wrong in two ways. The first is that the object of the devotion is the love of Christ, which is not at all separate from His other Divine attributes. This is simply pictured by His Heart. The second is that the actual Heart does exist because He was incarnate, and this Heart is Divine because it is in His Body as a part of it. It completely disproves Nestorianism because there is no separation from the person of Jesus Who has a Body and the person of Christ. They are the same Person. The Heart was formed in time, in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, at the Annunciation. And now it still exists in Heaven and in every Blessed Sacrament upon every altar in the world, or anywhere else that the neglect of men has left it.
God the Father and the Sacred Heart
Now, we love the Sacred Heart because we have not abandoned the True Religion, as has this schismatic from whom I pulled these objections. While it is true that the first glance at the Sacred Heart may be repulsive to worldly men, which we all are, only a little piety and faith in the Church reveals the great beauty of this Heart, swollen and wounded for our sakes.
But is it for our sakes firstly? The Sacred Heart, insofar as it is the love of our Lord, existed from all eternity. In the infinite span of Heaven, God the Father generates God the Son, and from them both proceeds the Holy Ghost. Now the Holy Ghost and the Sacred Heart are very similar. The Holy Ghost, too, is called Love, and is signified by the will (Because love, as Aquinas defines, is willing the good of another), as much as the Son is signified by the intellect. In fact, they are very closely related and meditating on the implications can be extremely rewarding. I now write for you a narrative to show what I mean. This narrative is not strict in a theological sense because it acts as if there was time or other lower concepts acting upon the Trinity, but these must be overlooked. What I write next should be understood as a metaphor.
God the Father generates His Son by looking upon Himself and forming an Image of Himself within His Mind. This Image is perfect because of the perfection of God. But the Father sees something in the Son that inspires love, and that is the Sacred Heart. The Father sees that the Son, from before all eternity, loves the Father and desires to offer Him the perfect sacrifice of love.
Thus proceeds the Holy Ghost. And as St. Thomas says, the Holy Ghost is the principle of all movement. He hovers over Creation, and brings forth all this great world and history for one purpose: The Immaculate Conception, the Sacred Heart, and the Cross, which is that perfect sacrifice of love to God the Father.
You see how the love which the Son holds for us, displayed in the Blessed Sacrament, is so closely united to the love which He has for His Father. What else could inspire Him to do such a thing? Do you not realize, oh you poor Catholic, what terrible sufferings He undergoes this day every moment as He waits in that Tabernacle for the Mass, and then sees us who He loves, and how many of us receive Him unworthily? How many times is He crucified in the bowels of those who receive Him in mortal sin? How many sacrilegious communions are there on any given day, particularly the Lord’s Day?
I weep at communion often when I think upon this. Why does our Lord permit this thing to happen? He displays it before our eyes continually. The only recompense that seems possible to me is from those who receive Him worthily. Because those He loves so much that He is willing to undergo a thousand crucifixions to be united to them, as He would to be united to His Father, from Whom He could never be separated. It seems this state of affairs was arranged entirely to show that fact about the love between Him and His Father.
Therefore, the only thing to do is to receive communion in the way of St. Louis de Montfort. First, of course, one must be in a state of grace, have fasted as much as possible (preferably from at least midnight), and then at communion, unite oneself to our Lady, and ask Her to receive communion through him. Then can God the Son be comforted by His Mother, Who truly is the only One that would ever be worthy to receive communion.
How the Sacred Heart may restore one soul
I suggested above that the Sacred Heart can and will restore all things to Jesus Christ. I promised to give one precise example. That example is one man: Mr. Alexander O’Connor.
Mr. O’Connor is an atheist, an heir of Britain, a vegan, and an intellectual. These are four things working very hard to separate him from our Lord. The first is obvious, as the Scriptures say, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” The second is to say he, being a student of Oxford, is the heir to the polity and the heresy which is the only reason Protestantism ever survived, the lustful schism of Henry VIII. The third is something which people know without understanding, but it is this, that being a vegan he is following the fasts and abstinences of saints and religious of old, but only by the result of a tragic disordering of morals that equates irrational beasts with men who have the image and likeness of God. The fourth is one that people may reject, but there is no doubt that intellectuals, those who focus upon the height of their intellect to ascertain the world around them, are more vulnerable to the most resilient sorts of pride that can damn a soul than are simple souls, as is seen in the case of most of the heresiarchs and their father, the devil.
Mr. O’Connor is a popular atheist speaker who has engaged many people in very fruitful talks about religion, ethics, morality, theology, history, and more. He is a fascinating man to watch, although I hope I have not encouraged anyone to do so, lest he lead them astray. As I write this, he is in the company of such people as Richard Dawkins, Michael Moynihan, and Steven Pinker in Brooklyn, New York, at an event called Dissident Dialogues. I do not really know those people, but the name of the event is probably enough to understand the idea. I recently have watched him speak with Bishop Barron, Mr. Trent Horn, and Mr. Michael Knowles in videos which were recorded over the last three years.
In one of these dialogues, named “Why I am/am not a Christian” where he and Mr. Horn gave alternating explanations of their faith and lack thereof, as the title suggests, Mr. O’Connor said this:
“…if there exists a loving God, non-resistant non-belief would not occur. But in order to deny that premise, we have to accept that God would be willing to allow somebody to desperately search for him, and to do so honestly and openly and non-resistantly, and just hide His face from them. And this is something that I’m often told: that there will be a problem with what I’m doing. When I speak to a Christian, and I’ll say, look, I’m just not convinced of this. I’m sorry, I’ve tried. I’ve looked at the arguments. I’ve been to Church. I’ve prayed. I’ve got a degree in theology. I’ve moved in with Christian housemates and lived with them for a year, to see if maybe in the minutia of daily life I can begin to see the truth and beauty of Christianity, and I’ve experienced precisely nothing in response. Nothing, not once. Sometimes I’m told, oh look, are you really searching? If you really are searching openly, you know, if you would really approach the questions, if you dig a bit deeper, God will finally reveal Himself to you. Maybe He’s got a big plan for you, maybe there’s a reason why He’s keeping you in the dark right now. I feel like I’m kind of being used in that case. It’s lucky for those who don’t have to go through that experience I guess. But what am I doing wrong? What is it that I could be doing wrong, given the history of my experience which I described to you?”
I said above that the Sacred Heart is the unifying principle of all history. That is to say that it makes all history make sense. One of the greatest objections which Mr. O’Connor has raised to a loving God is this: why is it that God would require all of the suffering which is in the world? It is a profound and detailed objection, and he knows the answer to most of it. It can be summed up by the Sacred Heart, that is, God Himself suffered on a cross, and all His Children must suffer to obtain eternal happiness. That is because man has sinned.
The problem of evil and evolution
But Mr. O’Connor has two resilient subsidiaries of this objection which is called the problem of evil (Aquinas calls it the mystery of iniquity). I have passed over the complex details above so that I may focus on these two subsidiaries as examples of how the Sacred Heart plays out. The first is the suffering of beasts. It goes like this:
Why is it that there ought to be billions of years of dark, chaotic destruction, before the beauty of order might appear in the universe? Why is it that there ought to be another couple of billions before the lowest and most degraded life might appear? Why ought there to be hundreds of millions of years then of gross and beastly death and savagery, named “survival of the fittest”, before some near-primates, hairy and irrational, somehow produce the two sinless souls of Adam and Eve and the human race? All this vast timeline is full of worthless chaos, darkness, death, and destruction, and only a bare week has the perfection of Adam and Eve in Paradise, and then history moves right into the murderous, fratricidal tones of fallen humanity after that.
It is a very fair objection, and the answer is in the Sacred Heart. Why? Because our Lord is Truth itself, and He is, as He says, “meek and humble of heart”. Meekness is seen most clearly in how He is silent before His accusers and how even today, every day, He is silent upon the altar as men shuffle in, most of them with hearts far from Him, and many of them to abuse Him again with sacrilegious communions.
The truth is that the evolutionary timeline is a fantasy, and that there is an opposing truthful history which begins about six thousand years ago. This opposing history, which is considered a mere option of belief in the Church today, goes like this:
If God is good and loving, would He not make a perfectly ordered and beautiful world in the blink of an eye or a mere week? And if He did, this theory being common knowledge for two thousand years if not longer, then why would it be that we have such evils in front of us all the time? The answer is simple: God made man to be free, that is, to have an intellect that can ascertain the difference between good and evil, and to have a will that can move towards one or the other. This is what is meant by image and likeness of God, Who also is free. And our first parents, made from nothing to be absolutely perfect, formed at the perfect maturity of adulthood, with all their appetites and faculties in obedience to their intellect, used that intellect to agree with the devil and disobey God. Then, when this intellect disobeys, all the faculties disobey, and now often the will does things which the intellect has not commanded. Furthermore, the appetites clamor for things which neither the will nor the intellect has commanded. The very lowest members of our body act entirely of their own accord, since this was connected to the love of Adam for Eve which he preferred over his love for God, and so “when they perceived themselves to be naked, they sewed together fig leaves, and made themselves aprons.” And again further, the beasts which had obeyed Adam their master, now disobey and do what they will, even killing and destroying men when the opportunity presents itself. What does God do in response? Remember that these beasts are the possession of God and are under the dominion of Adam, and so they, too, have incurred the just punishment of God (Consider that the deception of the devil was done with the cooperation of a beast). And more so, the value of an immortal soul is much higher than that of a beast. That is why God slays what must be at least two animals to clothe Adam and Eve, which blood and horror displays vividly to them the cost of their sin. Presumably He then instructs the son of our first parents to do the same to sacrifice to Him.
The death and suffering of beasts is continually used in history to show men the cost of sin so that they may choose to sin no longer. Hence why Noe, our father, is commanded not only to slay animals but also to eat them. Now I am a butcher myself, and I raise pigs, sheep, and chickens, all of which I have slaughtered and eaten even to the organs. When you cut out a boar’s heart, lungs, and “fries”, as they are called, then you are vividly aware of the fragility of life and the horror of death, and you are humbly struck with the lowness of the material body. Hence why also the Old Testament involved such brutal sacrifices on a regular basis. It is to urge man to prefer the purity of the soul to the lusts of the body.
What can also be seen is how effective it was! Look at Adam and Eve, who did a thousand years of penance and then were released by our Lord on the Holy Sabbath after His death. Look also to Noe, who after receiving these bloodier instructions for the sustenance of growing families, saw a much greater number of his progeny preserved from sin, when before him the world had been so suffused with it that the whole population excepting only eight people were drowned and presumably subsequently damned to hell. And look to the Old Testament law and the sacrifices, which gave us a great number of holy prophets and patriarchs and one Blessed Virgin who merited the salvation of our Lord before seeing Him in the Flesh. It may be that the glorification of a single one of these souls (and certainly that glorious Soul of our Lady) would be well worth the death and suffering of many beasts, if it is worth the suffering of immortal souls in hell. Hence why our Lord would permit it.
All this is easy to understand, for our first parents ate tree fruit, and then the grass of the field. Now, any honest person sees an onion chopped up and frying in a skillet and takes pleasure in the sight, sound, and smell, even if he weeps a bit that it is not an apple. But the same person removes the kidneys from a dead lamb and slices them thin to fry, and, especially if it is the first time, he is hard-pressed to eat it. Now, in this age, we eat more repulsive things than Noe or Moses did, for we eat large cockroaches from the sea and smaller ones from creeks, and the blood we cook and eat as pudding or in a slurry of ground meat that looks like a horror show.
Let us apply ourselves to one of Mr. O’Connor’s examples. He speaks of a deer that is trapped under a fallen tree somewhere in the middle of the woods where no one sees, to die of starvation or thirst. Now, we can imagine this suffering and also that it would be great, but that we can imagine it is all we know about it. We do not know that it actually occurs, even if it seems likely. We also do not know what God does in the interior of an irrational beast. I for one have the experience of observing many beasts being slaughtered, and it seems to me that there is a sort of lack of suffering that comes over them related to their death, curiously enough in the cases where the death no longer seems avoidable or when it is done properly and cleanly. There are implications here which are available to the meditative soul, such as what may occur to us who have been slaughterers if we should ever be graced with the crown of martyrdom. (This is spoken of with many saints, including for example St. James Intercissus, who was taken apart joint by joint in Persia.) But with this imaginary, suffering deer of Mr. O’Connor, is it not remarkable that God has used even a figment or a phantasm (as Thomas Aquinas would call it) in order to prompt Mr. O’Connor’s thinking not only to God and Truth, but also to the great suffering of Creation which receives its perfection in our Lord’s Passion and is modeled by all the martyrs and saints and most perfectly, the Most Sorrowful Mother? All this without harming a single deer, unless it is possible that Mr. O’Connor as an Oxford man spends much time wandering about wild places, as I do, and has seen this thing which God gave him the power to imagine, which I have never encountered myself. (A deer is equipped with significant powers of sense and movement which men lack, making them difficult to approach, and presumably saving them from the slow and loud falling of lumber)
Mr. O’Connor apparently has never had a Catholic say this to him about the purpose of even the accidental suffering of beasts historically (think of the Cataclysm), and this can only be because of the meekness of our Lord, Who right now bears silently with the confusion within the Church so that the Church might be perfected, even at the cost of many millions of crucifixions which He has suffered as a result. This while we complain continually about our sufferings, and He listens amicably and soothes us.
The hiddenness of God
The answer to his second great objection is similar, but the objection is this: Why is it that God remains hidden sometimes to a soul who earnestly seeks Him but cannot find Him? Well, the simple answer is that that soul’s life has not ended yet, as is the case of Mr. O’Connor. And death being a secret of God, there is no way to know if a man who dies even as the most blasphemous and unrepentant sinner, might have a conversion in the moments before death. This has been documented in some cases because of the mystics.
But for a more precise answer in this particular case, let us acknowledge that Mr. O’Connor is referring to himself. And it may be that I am too naive and hopeful, because I am inclined to take Mr. O’Connor at his word. This is not a hasty judgment, mind you. I have watched him some several hours now, in my recreational periods, and I began by suspecting him as a deceptive liar worming his way into the affections of Catholics. It is not an unheard of thing to do. It seems to me that Mr. Jordan Peterson is doing it at this very moment with grave facility. But if you listen to him, he brings this up time and time again, and it really does seem as if he would not be talking in this way to these people, enduring the humiliation of repeated failures in debate, the discomfort of jarring company, even the attentions of even a good Bishop of the Church, if he was not truly seeking the Truth, the Treasury of all Wisdom and Knowledge, which is the Sacred Heart, the King and Center of all hearts, which draws them to Him.
The problem is, of course, that this Irish boy, this heir of St. Patrick and of the persecutions of the English against our people to snuff out their faith, of their faithlessness to Our Lady of La Salette, their failure to cease blasphemy and profanation of holy days, which caused the famines and their exile to the Americas and elsewhere, that this immortal soul that is so close to damnation, happens to be seeking his salvation at a time where there is immense confusion in the Church. And so he cannot find satisfactory answers to his questions. The virtuous Bishop Barron and the wise Mr. Trent Horn do not have the simplicity of their forefathers to answer Mr. O’Connor on some certain questions which he requires.
The Sacred Heart is a simple Image. It is the incarnate human Heart which beats now at the right hand of God the Father and intercedes for such as Mr. O’Connor, who has amazingly not received his answers from the wise of the world. God knows yet if he shall come to the foolish of the world for it (C.f. 1Cor 4:10 and other places), or if his pride should prevent him and cause his damnation. I do doubt that the meekness of the Sacred Heart would allow it to come to him any other way.
And I also say this: What are you doing wrong, Mr. O’Connor? Not as much as what we in the Church are doing wrong. It is our impiety which is preventing ripe bushels of wheat like this from being harvested simply.
God preserve us, St. Nicholas pray for us, and Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us, because we are not so far from the same damnation.