Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - If it is true that the splendid icon of the Heart of Christ has been differently interpreted, oscillating between two extremes of sentimentalistic devotionalism and intellectualistic almost rationalistic, “theological re-reading”, it is also true that the call to the “heart”, in Sacred Scripture refers inescapably to a personal and existential centre, to the nucleus of the person, in which converge those faculties which distinguish it essentially from the rest of creation.
To look at the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” means focussing on the great mystery of His humanity, of His being the perfect, complete man, in view of Whom all things were created and in Whom we were chosen before the creation of the world (cfr. Eph 1,4).
The fact that God chose the Incarnation as a method to manifest himself to mankind, uplifting human nature in this way to a “place of epiphany” of His reality of Love, cannot continue to stir surprise above all in the clear and theologically certain awareness of the permanent presence of Christ dead and risen in the Church, His mystical Body.
Therefore to celebrate the Sacred Heart of Jesus means first of all to call to mind the Incarnation of the eternal Word and at the same time fix our attention on the extraordinary, fascinating humanity of Christ.
Although the difference between the Lord's humanity and our poor humanity remains, because different is the Person on which they insist, there appears nevertheless in all its greatness and attractiveness the path of continual personalisation to which every man and women is called.
In this sense the reference to the “heart” is a call to accept inwardly as a “mystery” in awareness progressively acquired, that we each share in an irreducibility and a constitutive openness to the infinite, documented by needs and evidence which are the most eloquent echo of being “image and likeness of God” (cfr. Jn 1,26-27).
Precisely in this dimension of mystery, while aware of all the limits and sins to which the human exposes, it is necessary to re-understand our heart, our personal and human dimension. It is not today, as from many side people would hold, the cause of dangerous and spreading anthropocentrism. On the contrary we see an every greater “reduction of the human”, reduction of fundamental human needs, cognitive capacities with regard to reality and the truth: philosophical relativism had inevitably affected even the idea of the human person, mortifying human desires and reducing the human person's infinite aspirations.
A creature who fails to understand himself in relation to his Creator, a man who censures his constitutive opening to the infinite and, definitively, his “heart”, his human essence, experiences a radical “distraction from his I” which has nothing to do either with the proper overcoming of egoism, or a correct Christian anthropology.
To look to the “Heart of Jesus” means then to restore value with humility and truth to the wonder of the human which God himself deigned to assume. Particularly on the Day for the Sanctification of Priests, it means to look to the humanity of Christ as a model for every priest «taken from among human beings and is appointed to act on their behalf in relationships with God» (Heb 5,1).
Looking at the humanity of Christ, far from creating sterile sense of guilt for the inevitable inadequacy of all other humanity, should lead us to accept ourselves in our proper human dimension understood as a mystery, as an eloquent sign of constant and faithful presence of the Lord who, also through all our limits, speaks to every person: «Christ does not save us from our humanity, but through it; he does not save us from the world, but came into the world, so that through him the world might be saved (cfr. Gv 3,17)» (Benedict XVI, Message Urbi et Orbi 25 December 2006). (Agenzia Fides 21/6/2007; righe 45, parole 610)
