THE PASSION OF THE HEART AND THE HEART OF THE PASSION.

 

In Christ our Lord we can distinguish two passions: the exterior and the interior, that of his Most Sacred Body and that of his Divine Heart. We understand the first easily since, so to speak, it enters our eyes and we can read it written on the torn and bleeding Crucifix; but the other, incomparably more painful and profound, is also for the same reason more unknown and arcane. We could say that this passion of his Heart is at the same time, like the heart of the Passion, that is, the central, the intimate, the most painful, the deepest of the Passion of Christ. It is therefore, according to the expression of Bishop Gay, the Passion of the Heart and the heart of the Passion.

 The devotion to the outer Passion has from the beginning been well known and spread. The numerous and secular Franciscan family has this devotion among the elements of their spirit. Later, our Lord wishing to increase it, he raised up Saint Paul of the Cross who, with his worthy Passionists, has spread it everywhere.

But it was necessary to go one step further. Just as revelation, substantially invariable, has nevertheless been progressing in the succession of the centuries, enriching and clarifying itself with the definitions of the Church; so also, the devotion to the Passion of Christ Our Lord. With the revelations to Santa Margarita Maria I enter a new stage. When Jesus showed him his wounded Heart, he did not intend anything other than to make the world understand that he had suffered much in his Body, but incomparably more he had suffered in his Heart.

The cause of all this noble suffering on earth is always love; and that is why Jesus said in that celebrated apparition: "Behold the Heart that has loved men so much, receiving nothing in exchange from them but ingratitude and contempt!" Here is his love and his pain; Behold, he revealed to the world the secret of his intimate pains. Because she loves she suffers; suffers for the ingratitude of men; he suffers, above all, from the ingratitude of those who should love him the most.

 But even this devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which has spread so much throughout the world, has about two stages; in its evolution it becomes clearer and clearer. The first idea, the first duty that the revelations of Paray-le-Monial aroused, was reparation. He was an outraged, offended God; consequently, man owed, as a duty to the strictest justice, redress these outrages and offenses. Such was the first aspect of devotion to the Sacred Heart; it was a restorative devotion.

So beautiful was the spectacle that the world offered in response to the Divine Heart! Crowds of souls offered themselves as reparative victims to satisfy the outraged rights of divine justice. We’re not multiple religious congregations born in this way whose main purpose is reparation, such as, for example, the Institute of Mary Reparatrix, such as the Religious victims of the Heart of Jesus?

And this stage of the devotion to the Sacred Heart had all its apogee, all its fullness and its most solemn sanction with the encyclical of SS Pius XI, "Miserentissimus Redemptor", in which the central idea is reparation, as is also the New Office and Mass of the Sacred Heart (In this same encyclical the duty of reparation is not only proclaimed, but also the need to console the Sacred Heart is affirmed: even more so, His Holiness explains masterfully how we can effectively console Our Lord, because if our future sins were the cause of his sadness of his mortal sadness, our future consolations were also part to console him, because they were foreseen and for Christ they were as present. And so “to this Sacred Heart whose sins do not cease to hurt of the ungrateful, now we can and must comfort him in a mysterious but real way ...”)

 But little by little a new stage of devotion to the Sacred Heart has been accentuated, higher and more intimate, which involves not a duty of justice but a duty of exquisite charity. If Jesus is outraged, if his heart is wounded, divine justice, majesty, the holiness of God demands reparation. But, if your Heart is wounded, precisely because you love, isn't it the most necessary that there be souls to comfort you?

After the repair, consolation must come, after the repairing souls, the consoling souls; and this is the second stage of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus (In the revelations of Saint Margaret Mary, these two characters of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus are already found when Our Lord asked him to accompany her for an hour on the night of the Thursday to Friday, I indicate to him that they were the two ends of this Holy Hour; appease divine anger and ask for mercy for sinners; and second, soften the bitterness of his abandoned heart)

El deber de la reparación se extiende a todas las almas, porque si todas hemos pecado, todos debemos en cierto grado, reparar por nuestras propias faltas, y aun por las de los demás, a causa de la solidaridad que debe haber entre los cristianos. Pero esta otra misión, la de consolar, supone cierta intimidad.

Si una persona de elevada dignidad es ofendida, por ejemplo, por todo un pueblo, todo el pueblo está obligado, de una manera o de otra a reparar esa ofensa. Pero si al mismo tiempo su corazón se siente herido y necesita consuelo, no lo buscara en todos sino en los más allegados, en los íntimos, en los más amados. ¡Felices las almas a quienes Jesús escoge para que sean su consuelo!

De dos maneras podemos consolar al que sufre, o suprimiendo las causas de su pena-y este modo es propio de Dios que tiene a su servicio la omnipotencia- o compartiendo esas penas, compadeciéndolas, que es un modo más propio de la impotencia humana.

Pero en uno y otro caso necesitamos primeramente conocer esos sufrimientos; ignorándolos, ¿Cómo podríamos compadecerlos o aliviarlos?

Now, in two ways we can also know those intimate pains of the breastplate of Jesus; both are, because we are not dealing with a purely scientific knowledge: one is by ordinary faith, illustrated by the reading of the Holy Gospel and its commentators, deepened by personal meditations and reflections, clarified by the illustrations that Our Lord Jesus Christ usually communicates in the sentence; the other is a knowledge that we could call experimental and that is had when Our Lord makes the soul feel a reflection of its own pains, when it participates in it as a drop from the ocean of bitterness that I carry in His divine Heart (In this experimental way, Our Lord made known to Saint Margaret the internal pains of his divine Heart, "Every night, from Thursday to Friday, I will make you participate in that mortal sadness that I felt good about in the Garden of Olives; this sadness will reduce you, without that you can understand them, to an agony more difficult than death. We could see the same in some privileged souls like Saint Gema Galgani)

An example will better show us the difference between these two knowledge. A person who has the joy of living next to his mother knows that a friend of hers has just lost her. The pain of that loss, the misfortune of being orphaned, the loneliness of an empty home, can undoubtedly be understood by that person putting himself in the place of his friend. But one day she comes to have the misfortune of losing her own mother. What a difference now! He no longer knows that pain from reflections or comparisons, no; He knows it because he is feeling, he knows it without any recourse, in an intimate way, experimentally.

The same happens with the internal pain of the Heart of Christ: we can know them: we can know them, as I said, by reflections and considerations, pondering them, questioning our own hearts, thinking about what we would suffer placed in the same circumstances in which Christ saw himself… But this knowledge, however precious it may be and although it is engendered by grace in the heat of prayer, it is nothing more than a pale image of reality.

More if the soul is generous, if in what is on its part it tries to prepare itself by making great progress on the path of sacrifice, perhaps a day will come when Jesus in a mysterious way will make it drink from his own chalice ...

 Just as Our Lord cannot do more grace in eternity than by participating in his infinite joy; thus, it cannot give us greater proof of greater intimacy. When we want to communicate our secret joys, we doubt that we are looking for a friendly heart; But when we want to entrust our pains, especially the most secret, the most personal, we look for the most trusted friend; and when we have made such a confidence, we have revealed the last secret, we have given the supreme test of friendship.

 So Jesus; When a soul has been made to feel something of its own pain, it can truly say: "I will no longer call you a servant, but a friend, because I have revealed to you the very depth of my Heart ..." Blessed is the soul whom Jesus finds so Forgotten of herself, so generous in sacrifice, so delicate in love, that they make her the Cyrenean of their heart: that soul will truly be the consolation of Jesus!

Whatever it may be, every noble and delicate soul wishes to do what is on its part to console our Lord, and since that experimental knowledge is not in its power to reach, as a free gift that is from God; at least it should be applied by acquiring the one if it is in your possession.

 To help this object we put the following simple reflections to your meditation. May they, fertilized by grace, bring forth in some soul of goodwill even a feeling of compassion that comforts the Heart of Christ, today as never once outraged by friends and strangers!

He himself has let us glimpse: when he agonized in Gethsemane, when he expired on the Cross and in this life of hidden sacrifice, of perpetual immolation that he leads in the Eucharist. Hence three series of considerations: the Heart of Christ in Gethsemane, the Heart of Christ on Calvary, and the Heart of Christ in the Eucharist.

 They are three channels that are available to those who really, from the depths of their hearts, want to enter this sea of ​​infinite pain that suffered for us in this world.

Dear readers, this is the devotion that the enemies of the Church and, consequently, of the Sacred Heart want at all costs to suppress with the supposed “devotion” of Sister Faustina's “divine mercy” in which we find nothing of what they end up to read about the Sacred Heart. The difference between the two is very great since this devotion to the Sacred Heart is born and is rooted in divine revelation or divine Revelation, because in the shadow of this devotion several religious congregations arose whose objectives were those already described above in this article and, finally, by the writings of the Supreme Pontiffs recommending this devotion and the Encyclical of Pius XII "Miserentissimus Redemptor" advising this devotion. Let us not let what is forbidden by Pius XII, such as "divine mercy", take away our devotion to the Sacred Heart, as traditional Catholics we defend our traditional devotions by practicing them in our people and rooting them in our hearts.