The Sacred Heart and the Church of the Poor

Abstract

her new book A History 0/ God, Karen Armstrong excoriates piety directed at the Sacred Heart of Jesus: Concentrating solelyon Jesus the man, such piety is simply projection which imprisons the Christian in neurotic egotism, she says (1993, 318). Further, she maintains, the Jesus of Sacred Heart devotion is mawkish and sentimental, far cry from the abrasive Jesus of the Gospels: In his whining self-pity, he shows the dangers of concentrating on the heart to the exclusion of the head (317). Armstrong is not alone in her distaste for adoration of the Sacred Heart. Even cursory review of literature conceming the devotion reveals deep-seated antipathy towards it (See, e.g., Gutzwiller 1957). Viewed as maudlin, escapist, and pessimistic, Sacred Heart piety seems the antithesis of Vatican II's clear-eyed, world-affirming optimism. Regarded as exces­ sively individualistic, it seems inimical to concerns for the role of the community in worship and for social and economic justice. And yet, unlike Armstrong, I do not believe that the symbol can or should be so simply dismissed. Rooted in the early centuries of Christian history, it has played part in the prayer and piety of numerous saints and mystics; this alone would seem to call for caution in discarding it. More important, however, is the fact that the symbol continues to flourish; in Latin America in particular, devotion to the Sacred Heart remains an important part of Catholic piety. My thesis in this essay is that the Sacred Heart, reinterpreted, can speak powerfully of the Church's birth from the world's suffering. It can serve as symbol of new ecclesiology based on model Jon Sobrino calls a church of the poor (1984, 125). Perhaps the form that devotion to the Sacred Heart has taken since the seventeenth century, with its litanies and first-Friday Masses, is outmoded; nevertheless, the symbol itself lives. It deserves new articulation rather than simple dismissal. I would like to begin such rearticulation by exploring three themes that have arisen in connection with the Sacred Heart: the patristic notion of the birth of the Church, the medieval focus on the love of Jesus, and the modern concern for reparation for sin. Next, I will raise questions regard