History of the Devotion

The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, though rooted in the earliest Christian contemplation of the wound in Christ's side, took its definitive form through the mystical experiences of a young Visitandine nun in seventeenth-century France.

Margaret Mary Alacoque entered the Monastery of the Visitation at Paray-le-Monial in 1671, at the age of twenty-four. Between 1673 and 1675, she received a series of private revelations in which Our Lord appeared to her and revealed His Heart — burning with love for humanity, yet wounded by ingratitude and indifference.

The first great revelation occurred on the feast of St. John the Evangelist, December 27, 1673. Christ invited Margaret Mary to rest her head upon His Heart, as St. John had done at the Last Supper, and revealed to her the wonders of His love and the desire that these be made known to all the world.

The most significant revelation came in June 1675, during the octave of Corpus Christi. Our Lord appeared to St. Margaret Mary and, showing her His Heart, 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. And in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for Me in this Sacrament of Love.

He asked that a feast of reparation be established on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi — what we now celebrate as the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. He also asked for the practice of Holy Hours on Thursday nights, in memory of His agony in Gethsemane, and for Communion on First Fridays in reparation for sins.

These requests form the core of Sacred Heart devotion as practiced to this day.

The devotion spread slowly at first. Margaret Mary faced significant opposition from within her own community, but found a crucial ally in St. Claude de la Colombière, a Jesuit priest who became her spiritual director in 1675. He recognized the authenticity of her revelations and consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart.

Through the Jesuit order, the devotion gradually spread across Europe. Pope Clement XIII approved the feast in 1765 for Poland and the Archconfraternity of the Sacred Heart in Rome. Pope Pius IX extended it to the universal Church in 1856.

The defining moment came in 1899, when Pope Leo XIII consecrated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart, calling it "the great act" of his pontificate. In 1928, Pius XI issued the encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor, establishing the Act of Reparation. And in 1956, Pius XII published Haurietis Aquas, providing the definitive theological foundation for the devotion.