Monday, June 3, 2024
Father Eduardo Barrios
Profile of Father Eduardo Barrios
June 7th is the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the entire month of June is considered a month honoring Jesus.
Let the sixth month of the year be a good time to reflect on the affinity between Ignatian spirit and devotion to the Sacred Heart.
To understand the origins of it all, we must go back to Calvary, where the Evangelist John powerfully reports:
“And a soldier thrust a spear into his side, and immediately blood and water gushed out. The eyewitnesses have spoken, and the testimony is true, and he knows that he speaks the truth, so that ye also may believe” (John 19:33-35). These words made a strong impression on the early Holy Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and they immediately began to lay the foundations of devotion to the Sacred Heart.
For those who would like to learn more about the development of this faith, I recommend this excellent book by Father Guillermo Arias. Eternal Heart (Eternal Heart).
In the 16th century, we meet a devout believer who began writing a book in 1522 in the Catalan town of Manresa, and only finished it after he became a priest in 1541. The author was Ignatius of Loyola. Mental Training.
This prayer manual has proven to be a highly effective means of sanctification. Its effectiveness stems from the fact that it is based almost entirely on the four Gospels, the inspired texts that reveal the heart of Jesus. St. Thomas Aquinas already said: The Heart of Christ We can refer to the Bible.’ Centuries later, in 1956, Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical: Haurietis AquasThere he teaches that this faith is based on the Bible and not on personal revelation, however credible it may be.
Since the word “heart” in a figurative sense refers to one’s inner self, it must be emphasized that whoever lives the Ignatian eremitic life is constantly seeking “an inner knowledge of the Lord who became man for me” (SE, 104). From Jesus’ inner self, that is, from his heart, flows his whole higher, or spiritual, life: his world of thoughts, feelings, emotions, plans. In his heart beats only one burning passion: love for the Father who sent him and love for the people whom he came to save.
Reparation is a feature of this faith and is present in the exercises. The meditator feels challenged to reciprocate such great love. In the discussion he asks himself: “What should I do for Christ?” (SE, 53). In the third stage of meditation the meditator goes a step further and asks himself: “What should I do, what should I suffer for Christ?” (SE, 197).
Two Jesuits who were contemporaries of St. Ignatius made explicit references to the heart of Jesus: St. Peter Canisius, a Doctor of the Church, and St. Francis Borgia, the third Superior General of the Society of Jesus.
Iconographically, this belief also reached its zenith in the 17th century, with the influential figures of Saints such as St. John Eude (+1680) and the French Jesuit Claude La Colombière (+1682), who, as spiritual director of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, gave her permission to reveal mystical experiences and the promises of the Sacred Heart, and also revealed to her that Jesuits should be apostles of the Heart of Jesus.
Skip a century and in 1773, Pope Clement XIV, under pressure from the Bourbons, much to his chagrin, suppressed the Jesuits, only for another Pope, Pius VII, to reinstate them in 1814. The Jesuits rose from the ashes with great vigor, and they enthusiastically once again took up the legacy of St. Claude and St. Margaret Mary.
The results were immediate: in 1844, the spiritual director of a group of Jesuits in formation founded with them the Apostolate of Prayer, a current of spirituality that emphasized faith in the Heart of Jesus. Older Congregations of Mary, which later became known as Communities of Christian Life, also gained momentum.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the 23rd General Chapter of the Society of Jesus (1883) took up with renewed vigor the task of proclaiming in moving terms the richness of the heart of Jesus. Munus suavissimum (A Most Joyful Obligation). From that moment on, the Society of Jesus experienced an unprecedented increase in vocations, reaching 35,000 members in 1965, including priests, friars and religious.
June is a month in which we confront the challenges of a technological society, secularized and assaulted by ideologies of relativism, materialism and hedonism. New pedagogies are needed to continue spreading “the breadth and length and height and depth of the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge” (see Ephesians 3:18-19).
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