Consonances between the Pontifical Magisterium and the spirituality of Don Guanella. In the encyclical Dilexit nos Pope Francis invites us to embrace the human and divine Heart of Jesus
by Don Gabriele Cantaluppi
RNinety years have passed since June 27, 1935, the eve of the solemnity of the Sacred Heart, when in the episcopal residence of Lugano the dying bishop Aurelio Bacciarini fulfilled his most ardent desire, to consecrate the entire diocese of the Canton of Ticino to the Heart of Christ. His biographer writes: «He was administered Extreme Unction and taken back to his room, while he continued his conversation with God. A little later he broke off his recollection again, made a sign with his hand that he wanted to write and said: Give me the parchment!
The parchment was presented to him. He slowly took his glasses, his fountain pen, and, raising himself a little, wrote, not without difficulty: Aurelius episcopus. For the holy bishop, this consecration meant committing the baptized to follow the lifestyle of Jesus, to receive from him inspiration for their own way of thinking, judging, loving and behaving.
But consecration is not a goal achieved; it is a process that, step by step, leads the believer to ask to have more and more the same feelings of Christ. Its content is the conscious and total renunciation of sin and its seductions, it is the irrevocable entrustment to God. Consecrating oneself to the Heart of Jesus means taking Him as the inspiration of our life and our behavior, because He said: "Learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart"; it is having His Heart and His feelings always before our eyes.
The contemplation of the pierced Heart of Jesus, from which blood and water flow, has given rise to various devotional forms and even to numerous religious families in the Church; even Don Guanella had initially called his religious with the name of Sons of the Sacred Heart. But Pius XII, in the encyclical You will draw the waters of 1956, warned against devotional practices tending to sentimentalism, and at the same time indicated the ways to follow for an authentic renewal of such devotion. Pope Pacelli wrote: "It is in the texts of Sacred Scripture, Tradition and the Liturgy that the faithful must seek to discover the clear and profound sources of the devotion to the Heart of Jesus, if they wish to penetrate its intimate nature and draw growth and nourishment for their religious fervor."
Thanks to the theological and pastoral renewal promoted by the Second Vatican Council, the cult of the Sacred Heart has changed into a spirituality centered on the mystery of Christ, whose pierced Heart is the full revelation of God-Love and, at the same time, a gift of total love, which must be welcomed, reciprocated and radiated with our whole life. One way to give concrete form to this need to reciprocate so much love is the consecration of oneself to the Heart of Jesus. Already Pius XI in the encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor He indicated that personal consecration "among all the practices referring to the cult of the Sacred Heart is without a doubt the principal one" because it teaches that "recognizing that we have received everything from the eternal charity of God, offering ourselves to the Heart of Jesus, to the same eternal Charity we offer ourselves and all our things".
In the encyclical Dilexit nos, on the human and divine love of the Heart of Jesus Christ, published on October 24, 2024, Pope Francis wanted to commemorate the three hundred and fifty years since the first apparitions of Jesus to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, which took place in 1675; in it Christ pointed to his Heart with his hand and invited her to promote its cult. According to the Pope, the heart is the center of the person and it is the heart (and not the mind) where people feel and love. This statement by Francis is echoed by the words of Don Guanella in the operetta In the month of fervor (1884) on devotion to the Sacred Heart: "The life of the heart of man is the life of the whole man. Jesus places His own beating Heart before you so that, looking at it, you may be moved. Jesus opens His side to you so that, entering His Heart, you may live His life and learn to save yourself and others."
Pope Francis' Encyclical also invites us to renew our authentic devotion, recalling that in the Heart of Christ "we encounter the whole Gospel" (n. 89). Even Don Guanella in the aforementioned work adds to each of the meditations a quotation from Sacred Scripture "suitable to show the tenderness of that divine Heart". And it is in His Heart that "we finally recognize ourselves and learn to love" (n. 30), to understand how the Lord speaks through interior emotions. If there is no direct contact, if there is no perception of love, if there is no interior knowledge of the Lord to love and follow Him, there cannot even be a true conversion.
According to Don Guanella, the most evident manifestation of God's fatherhood finds its concrete expression in the Heart of Christ, which embodies and makes God's paternal love both human and divine. Therefore, the "Heart of Jesus is the heart of the Father". And to consecrate oneself to the Heart of Jesus is to "turn one's gaze to Jesus, to lean on the right hand of Jesus", who is present and gives himself totally in the Eucharist: "Our altar of the Sacred Heart is the emporium of divine charity, of that divine charity which is entirely in the holy host, in Jesus in the sacrament, who is there inside, in that little house of the tabernacle. There is really and substantially the Eucharistic Heart and, with the Heart, the blood, the face, the adorable person of the common redeemer and our Lord Jesus Christ" (from a manuscript of 1892). Whoever is nourished by the Eucharist lives all the attitudes of Jesus in relation to the Father and to his brothers: gratitude and thanksgiving, praise to God and reparation for sins, making himself all things to all people to the point of giving himself as food to the people we love, to the point of washing the feet in an attitude of humility and contemplation before the poor, who is also identified with Jesus.