What is a devotion? | Devotion To The Sacr

What is a 'devotion'?

It is natural for us as human beings to want to express loyalty in one form or another.

So many people wanted to honour the body of Queen Elizabeth after she died.

Religious believers have particular ways of expressing loyalty to and love for God. In the Christian Gospels, those around Jesus focussed their devotion on Jesus himself; they brought him gifts, attended to his physical needs, knelt before him or anointed his head for example.

Jesus praised those who showed genuine devotion and warned against empty practices; he taught that true devotion must involve the heart (Mk 7:1-30).

For the first Christians then, devotion came to mean cultivating that heart-felt personal loyalty to Jesus as Lord and God (2 Tim 3:13).

Today devotions tend to refer to practices outside the official liturgy and sacraments, such as the Rosary, reading of Scripture, Stations of the Cross, or prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that strengthen and deepen our interior loyalty God, in the sacraments and especially the Holy Eucharist.

St Francis de Sales described devotion as "that spiritual alertness and vivacity which enables us to co-operate with charity promptly and wholeheartedly" and as a "spiritual sugar which sweetens mortifications and makes consolations unharmful."

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ

The physical heart of Jesus is both human and divine. When we say we give our heart to someone, we mean we give our very self; the heart of Jesus represents his total being for us.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is a way of cultivating loyalty to Jesus by honouring this symbol of his personal love for each of us; we can show our love in return and make reparation for the way in which Jesus's love is rejected.

'Jesus ... has loved us all with a human heart. For this reason, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by our sins and for our salvation, is quite rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of that love with which the divine Redeemer continually loves the eternal Father and all human beings without exception.'

Catechism of the Catholic Church 478

Updating this devotion for our times

Before he died in 2005, St Pope John Paul II appealed for the updating of devotion to the Sacred Heart for the New Evangelisation:

"I wish to express my approval and encouragement to all who in any way continue to foster, study and promote devotion to the Heart of Christ in the Church with language and forms adapted to our times, so that it may be transmitted to future generations in the spirit which has always animated it."

He explained why it is so vital:

"The faithful still need to be guided to contemplate adoringly the mystery of Christ, the God-Man, in order to become men and women of interior life, people who feel and live the call to new life, to holiness, to reparation, which is apostolic cooperation in the salvation of the world, people who prepare themselves for the new evangelization, recognizing the Heart of Christ as the heart of the Church: it is urgent for the world to understand that Christianity is the religion of love."

In particular, St Pope John Paul II gave us the feast of Divine Mercy in the year 2000. He showed how this focus on the mercy of the Sacred Heart was necessary for our troubled time, quoting Jesus' words to St Faustina, the Apostle of Divine Mercy:

"Mankind will not find peace until it turns with trust to my mercy".

However there seems to be an even more timely way of answering this saintly pope's request to update the devotion to the Sacred Heart 'with language and forms adapted to our times.'

By honouring the wisdom of Jesus, in our time of unprecedented confusion, we can explain most perfectly how 'Christianity is the religion of love'.

For as the head governs and directs the heart, it is the ordered expression of divine wisdom that governs and directs Jesus' love and provides us with the model of what true love means.

As such, the devotion to the Sacred Head is not a new devotion in itself, but can be seen as the crowning of devotion to the Sacred Heart.