Pope Francis takes us through the pastoral roadmap of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

He explained how the popes have spoken of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This began with Leo XIII and continues to the present day.

Saint Pope John Paul II spoke of how real love is rooted in the heart of Jesus: “The Savior’s heart invites us to return to the Father’s love, which is the source of every authentic love.”

Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the heart of Jesus as our center:

Every person needs a ‘center’ for his or her own life, a source of truth and goodness to draw upon in the events, situations, and struggles of daily existence, All of us, when we pause in silence, need to feel not only the beating of our own heart, but deeper still the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible with faith’s senses amd yet much more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world.”

Devotion to the Sacred Heart is necessary to draw us into the divine and human love of God. It needs to be “enriched, deepened, and renewed through meditation, the reading of the Gospel, and growth in spiritual maturity” (Delexit nos 82).

One devotion is linked to the Sacred Heart: Communion on First Fridays. Commenting on this practice, Francis says that this can be good for us today:

Amid the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media, we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist.

We need a renewed love for the Sacred Heart today. It is the “incarnate synthesis of the Gospel” (Delexit nos 90).