How a medieval nun's wish to trade hearts shaped a Catholic devotion
A Cistercian mystic named Lutgarde, according to the story told of her, was offered any grace she wanted and asked to understand Latin better. The gift left her feeling empty, so she asked to swap it for Christ's heart instead. Tales like hers fed one of Catholicism's best-known devotions, the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The devotion treats the heart of Jesus as an emblem of divine love for humanity. It is practised mainly by Catholics, along with some high church Anglicans and Western Rite Orthodox, and the Latin Church keeps its feast on the third Friday after Pentecost. In art it usually appears as a flaming heart ringed with thorns, topped by a cross and marked by the lance wound; the flames stand for burning love, the thorns and wound for the Passion.
For its first thousand years Christianity shows no sign of such worship. Interest in Christ's wounds grew in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, spurred by Bernard of Clairvaux, Francis of Assisi and returning crusaders, and early traces appear in Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries. Bernard, who died in 1153, wrote that the spear thrust into Christ's side revealed the charity of his heart. The oldest known hymn to it, Summi Regis Cor Aveto, is credited to Herman Joseph of Cologne, who died in 1241.
Lutgarde of Aywieres, a contemporary of Francis, was counted by Thomas Merton among the great forerunners. Mechtilde of Helfta, who died in 1298, reported visions in which Jesus gave her his heart as a refuge, and she claimed that a large book could not hold all the blessings the devotion had brought her. The Franciscan Bonaventure asked who could fail to love a heart so wounded. Through the sixteenth century, though, the practice stayed private and mystical, kept alive by individuals and by orders such as the Dominicans and Carthusians.
Its modern form traces to the French nun Margaret Mary Alacoque, who said she received it from Jesus in apparitions between 1673 and 1675. In the 19th century a Portuguese Good Shepherd sister, Mary of the Divine Heart, asked Pope Leo XIII to consecrate the whole world to the Sacred Heart.
Source: Sacred Heart
