Devotion to the Eucharistic Heart
of Jesus

by James Monti

“May the Heart of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament be praised, adored and loved with grateful affection, at every moment, in all the tabernacles of the world, even to the end of time”1 — these are the words of one of the most popular devotional invocations associated with Eucharistic adoration. They form what is perhaps the single most widely disseminated expression of what has come to be known as devotion to the “Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.” Although in its current form this aspect of reflection upon the Sacred Heart dates back no further than a century and a half, the underlying concept has its roots in the New Testament.

    The gift of our Lord in the Holy Eucharist and the contemplation of His Sacred Heart have always been inseparably joined across the centuries. It was in the course of the Last Supper that Christ both instituted the Eucharist and revealed the depth of His love for us in His words, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love” (Jn 15:9). The further revelation of the Sacred Heart on Good Friday as epitomized in the piercing of our Lord’s side has likewise been recognized as a manifestation of the Blessed Sacrament. In the third of his Catecheses Saint John Chrysostom (ca. 349-407) sees the effusion of blood and water “flowing from the Master’s side” as figures of the Eucharist and Baptism respectively, adding, “The soldier pierced the Lord’s side . . . and I have found the treasure and made it my own.”2 In the high middle ages the Carthusian Ludolf of Saxony (d. 1370) expresses the same concept of the pierced side of Christ as the wellspring of the Sacraments, taking the idea a step further by specifically mentioning the Heart of the Savior: “. . . let man remember what exceedingly great love Christ has shown us in the opening of His side, in which He has given us an open gate to His Heart. Let man then hasten to enter into the Heart of Christ . . . Let man also consider with what love for us Christ has poured out from His side the sacraments, by which we may enter into eternal life” (Vita Christi, part 2, chapter 64).3 In a similar vein Saint Thomas More (1478-1535) in his Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation observes that when the soldier, “pierced His [Christ’s] holy Heart with a sharp spear” there “issued out the holy blood and water, whereof His holy sacraments have inestimable secret strength” (book 3, chapter 27).4

    In medieval Catholic art and literature the link between the Eucharist and the wound that pierced the Sacred Heart was expressed in various ways. In more than one version of the twelfth to thirteenth century legends of the Holy Grail the latter object with its Eucharistic symbolism as either the chalice of Christ or the plate for the Paschal Lamb at the Last Supper is associated with the relic of the Holy Lance. In a late fifteenth century French Book of Hours (that of “Caillaut and Martineau”) can be seen an illustration depicting our Lord’s bleeding side wound, disembodied, residing in a chalice held by angels. Similarly a pre-Reformation printed holy card from the English Carthusian monastery of Sheen depicts the pierced Sacred Heart with blood flowing from it into a chalice. A late fifteenth century tabernacle of the Aragon region of Spain features the painted figure of Christ as the Man of Sorrows on the tabernacle door pressing with His right hand His pierced side so that His blood streams from the lance wound into a chalice. Moreover a fifteenth-sixteenth century English song, the “Corpus Christi carol,” speaking in rich allegory of Christ as a slain knight, likewise links to the Eucharist the flow of blood and water from the Savior’s side, for it relates that beneath the deathbed of the knight, “there runs a flood/ The one half runs water, the other runs blood”;5 before the bed the Blessed Virgin Mary kneels upon a stone bearing the inscription “Corpus Christi.” The deathbed of the knight, described as adorned with funereal curtains of purple, red and gold, is clearly meant as an allusion to the medieval custom of the Easter Sepulchre, a repository where the Blessed Sacrament was kept and adored from Good Friday to Easter Sunday.

    When in the seventeenth century devotion to the Sacred Heart reached full stature in the private revelations of our Lord to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) the Eucharistic dimension of the devotion came to the fore, with nearly all of the revelations to Saint Margaret occurring while the nun was kneeling before the tabernacle or monstrance or at the altar rail following Holy Communion. It was during the octave of Corpus Christi in 1675 that the third and most decisive of these apparitions took place, with our Lord revealing His Heart to Sister Margaret and asking that reparation be made to Him for widespread indifference to His presence in the “Sacrament of Love.” Among those collaborating with Saint Margaret was the Jesuit Father Jean Croiset who as the author of the first book based upon the message of Paray-le-Monial observed, “. . . the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a more warm-hearted and ardent devotion toward Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, its principal motive being the extreme love which He shows us in this sacrament...”6 As in the Middle Ages so too in the seventeenth century the link between the Sacred Heart and the Eucharist was echoed in Catholic art: a painting of the Mexican artist Juan Correa entitled “Allegory of the Eucharist”, dating from about 1690, draws upon our Lord’s words, “I am the vine. . .” (Jn 15:5), to depict the wounded Christ erect before the cross with a grape vine springing from His pierced side as He presses in His hands a cluster of grapes on the vine, His blood flowing from the grapes into a paten held by the Pope.

    Hence it was after many centuries of reflection upon the Eucharist as a gift of the pierced and loving Heart of our Lord that there arose the particular title and concept of the “Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.” Among the first to speak explicitly of the Sacred Heart in the Eucharist was Saint Margaret Mary’s French contemporary Saint John Eudes (1601-1680) who was to state that “the divine Heart of Jesus is a furnace of love before our gaze in the most holy Sacrament.”7 Soon thereafter the French Benedictine Jean-Paul du Sault (1650-1724) included an invocation “to the divine Heart of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament” among the texts in his five-volume Conversations with Jesus Christ in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar (1701-1703).8 Father Anthony Ginther, a parish priest of Biberbach, Germany (1655-1725), in his writings refers to “the love of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist.”9

    The specific expression “the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus” first appeared around the middle of the nineteenth century, although it remains unresolved as to who was the first to use this phrase. In January 1854, Sophie Prouvier is said to have heard these words in a locution while in prayer before the exposed Blessed Sacrament at a hospital chapel in Besancon, France. Eight months later the bishop of the French diocese of Sainte-Claude granted an indulgence for a prayer to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus composed by Mademoiselle Prouvier, a prayer that was widely circulated thereafter. In 1860, the great nineteenth century apostle of Eucharistic adoration Saint Peter Julian Eymard preached at Tours what is considered the first sermon on devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Christ. The Venerable Pope Pius IX led further impetus to the new devotion in 1868 by granting an indulgence for another prayer to the “Heart of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament” (that quoted above). In 1879 the first confraternity of the Eucharistic Heart of Christ was established, quickly receiving the approbation of Pope Leo XIII. In 1883 the devotion to the Eucharistic Heart was commended by Saint John Bosco and by 1890 it had spread to over thirty countries, with the related literature translated into sixteen languages.

    In the last decade of the nineteenth century advocates of the new Eucharistic Heart devotion began encountering difficulties. The Holy See, concerned as it always has been by the excessive splintering of older devotions into separate new ones, and likewise preoccupied with the rising threat of modernism, issued a series of decisions from 1891 to 1914 that set restrictions on the definition of devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Christ and limited the ways the devotion could be expressed and disseminated (for example, certain images of the “Eucharistic Heart” were prohibited and the term was not allowed to be used liturgically). A statement issued by the Sacred Congregation of Indulgences in January 1908 and subsequently incorporated into the Church’s book of indulgenced prayers, the Raccolta, provided a clarification as to how the Holy See wished the new devotion to be defined:

The worship of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist is not to be understood as being substantially different from that which has long been paid by the Church to the Sacred Heart Itself, but only as a peculiar manifestation of veneration, love, gratitude and submission because of that act of highest love whereby the most loving Heart of Jesus instituted the adorable Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, thus remaining with us even to the end of the world.10

    Yet while the Church was enjoining circumspection in the way devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Christ was understood and observed she was also sanctioning additional prayers to the Eucharist Heart, such as the following for which a plenary indulgence was issued in 1902:

O Eucharistic Heart, O sovereign love of the Lord Jesus, who didst institute this venerable Sacrament in order to remain here below in our midst and to give to our souls Thy Flesh as meat and Thy Blood as heavenly drink; we firmly believe, Lord Jesus, in Thy supreme love which instituted the Holy Eucharist; and here, before this sacred Host, it is most meet that we should adore this love of Thine, that we should praise and exalt it as the great source of life in Thy Church . . . (excerpt)11

    In November 1921 the ban on the liturgical use of the title, “the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus,” was mitigated to the extent that the Congregation of Sacred Rites promulgated a special Mass and Office under this title to be celebrated on the Thursday after the Octave of Corpus Christi by the diocesan clergy of Rome and in any other dioceses that requested permission for it. According to the decree accompanying these texts, the purpose of the new liturgical observance was, “to increase in the souls of the faithful confidence in and desire for the frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist, and to set their hearts more fervently on fire with that divine love which caused our Lord Jesus Christ, in the infinite charity of his Heart, to institute the most Blessed Sacrament.”12

    The devotion found a new advocate in Pope Pius XI (1922-1939), who shortly after ascending to the papacy granted a partial indulgence for the invocation, “Eucharistic Heart of Jesus, furnace of divine charity, give peace to the world” (May 1922).13 In the second of his two encyclicals on the Sacred Heart (Caritate Christi compulsi, May 1932) Pope Pius exhorted the bishops of the world to make the Feast of the Sacred Heart a Eucharistic feast:

Let, therefore, this year the Feast of the Sacred Heart be for the whole Church one of holy rivalry of reparation and supplication. Let the faithful hasten in large numbers to the eucharistic board, hasten to the foot of the altar to adore the Redeemer of the world, under the veils of the Sacrament, that you, Venerable Brethren, will have solemnly exposed that day in all churches, let them pour out to that Merciful Heart that has known all the griefs of the human heart, the fullness of their sorrow, the steadfastness of their faith, the trust of their hope, the ardour of their charity.14

    Pope Pius XII (1939-1958) raised devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus to a new level of prominence by speaking of it in the course of his landmark encyclical on the Sacred Heart, Haurietis aquas, issued in May 1956:

. . . the Divine Eucharist . . . and the priesthood are really gifts of the Sacred Heart of Jesus . . .

Nor will it be easy to grasp the force of that love by which Christ was impelled to give Himself as our spiritual food except by fostering in a special way devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus.

The purpose of this devotion, to use the words of Our Predecessor of happy memory, Leo XIII, is to recall to our minds “that supreme act of love by which Our Redeemer, pouring forth all the riches of His Heart, instituted the adorable sacrament of the Eucharist to remain in our midst to the end of time.”

For “not the smallest portion of His Heart is the Eucharist which He gave us from the overflowing love of His Heart” [St. Albert the Great].15

    Father Francis Larkin, SS.CC., in his classic work Enthronement of the Sacred Heart, explains that “Devotion to the Heart of Jesus is essentially eucharistic” and that “we can truthfully say that the Eucharist contains the Heart of Jesus... It is there we will find it; it is there we honor it.”16 He points out that most of the practices associated with devotion to the Sacred Heart are Eucharistic: the Feast of the Sacred Heart is celebrated liturgically with the Mass; the devotion includes the attendance of Mass and reception of Holy Communion on First Fridays in reparation to the Sacred Heart; and the Sacred Heart devotion of the Thursday night Holy Hour is often carried out in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

    Pope Paul VI took up the task of demonstrating the continued importance of emphasizing the Eucharistic character of devotion to the Sacred Heart in the light of the Second Vatican Council, explaining in a February 1965 apostolic letter on the Sacred Heart:

We especially desire . . . that through a more intense participation in the august Sacrament of the altar, a greater devotion be given to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, whose outstanding gift is the Eucharist. For it is in the sacrifice of the Eucharist that our Savior Himself . . . is immolated and received, whose Heart was opened by the lance of the soldier and from which was poured out on the human race a stream of precious blood and water.17

    When in June 1999 Pope John Paul II commemorated with an apostolic message the one hundredth anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart he joined his predecessors in commending devotion to the Eucharistic Heart of Christ:

Contemplation of the Heart of Jesus in the Eucharist will spur the faithful to seek in that Heart the inexhaustible mystery of the priesthood of Christ and of the Church. It will enable them to taste, in communion with their brothers and sisters, the spiritual sweetness of charity at its very source . . .

. . . The entire devotion to the Heart of Jesus in its every manifestation is profoundly Eucharistic... it is intensified in adoration. It is rooted and finds its summit in participation in Holy Mass, especially Sunday Mass...18

    After two thousand years of Church history the task of continuing on earth the praise of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament has been entrusted to all of us. As the Church celebrates this Jubilee year of our Savior’s birth we are all invited to come before the Sacred Heart of Him who has loved us with an everlasting love (Jer 31:3) present in the Sacrament of His love, that we may converse with Him “heart to Heart” and say with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, “Did not our hearts burn within us while He talked to us . . . ?” (Lk 24:32).

James Monti is the author of The King’s Good Servant But God’s First, published by Ignatius Press.

Endnotes
1    The New Raccolta (English translation - Philadelphia: Peter F. Cunningham & Son, 1887), 188.
2    Catechesis 3, as second reading of Office of Readings for Good Friday, trans. International Committee on English in the Liturgy, in The Office of Readings According to the Roman Rite (Boston: Saint Paul Editions, 1983), 479.
3    Translated from Vita Jesu Christi, ed. A.-C. Bolard et al. (Paris and Rome: Victor Palme, 1865), 676.
4    Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation, ed. Louis Martz and Frank Manley, vol. 12 of Complete Works of St. Thomas More (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), 312-313.
5    ”Down in Yon Forest”, in Percy Dearmer et al., ed., The Oxford Book of Carols (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), 134.
6    Quoted in Fr. Francis Larkin, SS.CC., Enthronement of the Sacred Heart (Pulaski, Wis.: Franciscan Publishers, 1970), p. 67
7    Translated Andre Rayez and Alfred de Bonhome, “Eucharistique (Heart)”, Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, tome 4 (1960): col. 1650.
8    Ibid.
9    Ibid.
10    The Raccolta, ed. Fr. Joseph Christopher and Very Rev. Charles Spence (New York: Benziger Bros., Inc., 1946), 171.
11    Ibid., 178.
12    Quoted in Fr. Jean Bainvel, S.J., Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: The Doctrine and its History (New York: Benziger Bros., 1924), 319.
13    Raccolta (1946 ed.), 173.
14    Text in The Papal Encyclicals, 1903-1939, ed. Sr. Claudia Carlen, IHM (n.p.: McGrath Publishing Co., 1981), 482.
15    Text in The Pope Speaks, 3 (Autumn 1956): 133, 147-148.
16    Larkin, Enthronement, 68.
17    Text in ibid., 275.
18    Message of June 11, 1999, in L’Osservatore Romano, June 23, 1999: 2.

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