Month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

Easter concludes this Sunday with the Church's observance of Pentecost. Because Easter was late this year the season goes well into June. Even so, May remains the month of Mary and June is the month of the Sacred Heart.

Celebrated the Friday after Corpus Christi, this year the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus will be celebrated on 27 June. Typically, the Saturday following the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Roman Catholics observe the obligatory Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. But, in years when the Memorial of Immaculate Heart of Mary occurs on the same day as another oligatory Memorial, both obligatory Memorials become Optional Memorials.

A photo from our living room

Since this year the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary happens on the same day as the Obligatory Memorial of Saint Irenaeus of Lyons, who is a Doctor of the Church, its observance is optional. As a result, the celebrant has the option to celebrate the Memorial Immaculate Heart of Mary or the Memorial of Saint Irenaeus or neither.

It's a joke in our house that all holidays are about love. Yes, we poke fun at the overlyl sentimental view of holidays. I would say that the exception are national holidays all of which have become Veteran's Day. Of course, this does no justice to, say, Labor Day or our more recent national holiday, Juneteenth.

I have been known to say, quoting Jackie Moon, "Hey, ELE!" Indeed, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Memorial His Mother's Immaculate Heart are truly about love. A love so unfathomable that it ultimately lies beyond our comprehension.

Last week Cardinal Francis Leo, Archbishop of Toronto, Canada, issued what I think is a beautiful message for the "Month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus." In addition to urging Catholics to consecrate themselves, their families, and their homes to Jesus' Sacred Heart, His Eminence urges everyone to read Pope Francis final encyclical letter Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ, which he promulgated last October.

Moving into undoubtedly controversial territory, though it should not be for Catholics, Cardinal Leo points out in his message:

Symbols are important as they convey meanings in what they represent, and they point beyond their own reality to something else, someone else. Our very own Catholic symbols help us to deepen our faith and shape our prayer life, not to mention the lives we lead and the choices we make. They are like bridges joining together the material and spiritual worlds, and reveal to us the Gospel truths. They showcase what our values are, what is important to us and how we intend to live our faith. We need to make sure that the symbols we use are consistent with our Catholic faith and not borrowed from ideological fora, promoted by lobby groups and endorsed by political movements. We ought to honour and respect our traditions and not compromise the integrity of the faith by using symbols that are contrary to God’s divine revelation. We do good to use our own symbols to tell our own story without resorting to trendy, misguided and inadequate symbols that do not represent us as Catholics but rather contribute to confusion, distortions and ambiguities about what the Catholic faith truly teaches regarding the human person, human nature, and natural moral law

Given Cardinal Leo's notanda, I am going to write about porneia again. My reason for so doing was a short article by Justin Giboney for Christianity Today: "Sermons with Benefits." It is a good article because Giboney starts with how Christians have too often made caricatures of ourselves in the realm of sexual ethics. But he also points to a recent attempt, a very amatuerish one at that, to insist that Church's sexual ethics have been wrong from the beginning.

On what foundation is such an audiacious claim made? The argument rests on the insistence that the Greek word porneia refers exclusively to prostitution. Let me just say, this would earn a failing grade in any New Testament exegesis class.

What I like best about Giboney's article is that it is not merely academic. In fact, it isn't academic at all. The author outsources the critique of the porneia-only-means-prostituion claim to others who, in the author's view, have countered it adequately. Links to both the claim and the rebuttal are available in the article.

The article is rooted in Giboney's own experience. There is so much Pope Saint John Paul II's theology of the body still has to offer all of us. This week, I repeat love is not sex and sex is not love. I will add, love and sex should go together. Yes, I used the word "should," which is practically blasphemy these days. Without putting too fine a point on it, there are reasons that married people, contra the prevailing narrative, report higher rates of sexual satisfaction.

I know first hand how tempting it is to acquiesce in these matters. Not giving in doesn't mean not caring and lacking understanding or even seeking to further understand and navigate the complexities of human sexuality. It certainly doesn't preclude just encountering each and every person as a person, as someone who bears God's image, and not as a persona, let alone a clinicalized abstraction. In the age of social media, it's easy to think of yourself and others as personae instead of as persons.

It bears noting, too, that for the first full month of his papacy, Pope Leo has but one prayer intention. Unsurprisingly, the Holy Father's intention is very much in tune with June being the month devoted to the Lord's Sacred Heart: "Let us pray that each one of us might find consolation in a personal relationship with Jesus, and from his heart, learn to have compassion on the world."

That's enough for now, I think. I can't help but post Aztec Camara's "Somewhere in My Heart" as our traditio this week.