This Sunday, we celebrate the awesome feast of Corpus Christi. Here are some lines from Fr. John Hardon’s meditation on the connection between this feast and devotion to the Sacred Heart.

The importance of associating the Holy Eucharist with devotion to the Sacred Heart can scarcely be overemphasized. Our instinctive Catholic sense tells us that no devotion is worth cultivation unless it is grounded on the solid dogmas of revelation and its roots go back to the tradition of the Apostolic Church. The question before us, therefore, is whether and to what extent the cultus of the Sacred Heart, actually rests on that sublime mystery of love which the Son of God instituted at the Last Supper when He gave us the Sacrament of the Altar. We begin to suspect that devotion to the Sacred Heart has some relation to the Holy Eucharist when we examine the words of Pope Pius XI:

As formerly Divine Goodness wished to exhibit to the human race, as it came from the Ark of Noe, a sign of the renewed covenant between them . . . so in our own troubled times, while that heresy held sway which is known as Jansenism, the most insidious of all heresies, enemy of the love of God and of filial affection for Him-for this heresy preached that God was not so much to be loved by us as a Father as to be feared as an unrelenting Judge—the most kind Jesus manifested to the nations His Sacred Heart.

At this point it is well to clarify a bit of Church history. Jansenism was really two heresies in one. On its doctrinal side it denied that Christ died for all men, and therefore pictured God very much as John Calvin, who said that, “not all men are created with a similar destiny; but eternal life is foreordained for some, and eternal damnation for others.” Christ did not die on the Cross, then, to save those whom God has arbitrarily decided should be lost.

In the opening paragraph of the first chapter of St Margarete Mary’s memoirs, in answer to the question: “What do we mean by devotion to the Sacred Heart,” we are told:

The particular 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 to give Himself entirely to us in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. The thought of all the ingratitude and all the outrages which He has to receive in this state of immolated victim until the end of time did not prevent Him from operating this prodigy. He preferred to expose Himself each day to the insults and opprobrium of men rather than be prevented from testifying by working the greatest of all miracles to what excess He loved us.

Take these words to our beautiful Adoration chapel and read them slowly. Then thank Our Lord for His unending love for you.