06/12/2026
There is a tendency to treat the Sacred Heart as a sentimental image. A glowing heart, some flames, a quiet holy card. The devotion rests on something far more concrete.
In 1986, William Edwards, an anatomic pathologist at the Mayo Clinic, published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled "On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ." Working from the historical and medical evidence, Edwards and his coauthors concluded that Jesus died of hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia, and that the soldier's spear, thrust between the right ribs, likely perforated the right lung and the pericardium, the membrane surrounding the heart. The blood and water that the Gospel of John describes is precisely what such a wound produces.
Put plainly, the heart at the center of this feast is not a metaphor. It is an organ that stopped beating on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem, pierced for love of us.
Six centuries later the devotion took clearer shape. Between 1673 and 1675, in the French town of Paray-le-Monial, Christ appeared to a Visitation nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque, showed her his heart, and said, "Behold this Heart which has so loved men." That single sentence is the core of the whole feast.
The Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus on Friday, June 12. This year it carries a weight it has never carried before. On June 11, during their assembly in Orlando, the bishops of the United States will consecrate the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the first consecration of its kind in the country's history, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The God who orders the cosmos is the same God who let his heart be opened with a spear. That is the claim of this feast, and it is worth sitting with.
Image: stained glass, All Saints Catholic Church, St. Peters, Missouri. Photo by Nheyob via Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC BY-SA http://4.0.