On the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, we celebrate what Pope Benedict in 2008 called the “center of the faith.”
That might seem a little overstated, if we erroneously understand devotion to the Sacred Heart as something that basically began with Jesus’ apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque 350 years ago.
Pope Benedict, however, understood it far more broadly: The Heart of Christ, he declared, “expresses in a simple and authentic way the ‘good news’ of love, summarizing the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption in itself.” He called each of us to find our “center” in Jesus’ Sacred Heart, “to feel not only the beating of his own heart, but more deeply, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible to the senses of faith and yet more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world.”
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