The decline in the
popularity of the Sacred Heart took place in a world which was increasingly
uncomfortable with the idea of sin. Pius XI, who was like Leo XIII a greater
promoter of the Sacred Heart and social teaching, argued that the decline in
the belief in God and in the sense of sin would have inevitably tragic
consequences for civilization. In Caritate
Christi Compulsi, for example, 1932, he noted that:
The Sacred Heart, Pius XI taught, was a powerful remedy for the problems of the times which were caused by human pride and
avarice. Humanity had to make reparation for the sins which were destroying
peoples, families, states and undermining the foundations of a civilization built upon Christian
faith. Subsequently his
successor, Pope Pius XII, who wrote
the defining theological account of the Sacred Heart ( Haurietius Aquas ) in 1956, had ten
years earlier ( in a radio broadcast to participants in a catechetical congress
in Boston) observed that :
Ultimately, if human
beings are unable to follow the law of God written in their hearts, all hell
will indeed break lose. The heart
is a place wherein the love of God dwells, but it is also where evil lurks.
Evil has its source in
the heart of human beings. If humanity loses its sense of its capacity to be
sinful, then in truth, God help us. As Pius XII and Pius XI argued, if we lose
our sense of sin, humanity will
fall prey to selfishness, pride, lust and ambition in all its deadly
forms. Of course, we must
understand the Sacred Heart as the symbol of God’s love and infinite mercy, but
it is also a symbol which about the way sin can pierce and wound us as
individually and collectively. In the icon we see Christ in all his majesty and
glory- but he still bares the wounds.
The cross is held aloft by Gabriel and Michael is ‘exalted’, but it is
still the cross on which the Lamb of God. proclaimed by John the Baptist,
suffered and died to take our sins away.
A defining
characteristic – perhaps the most important defining characteristic – of modernity was its rejection of
sin. Given this, it is not so
surprising that Pius XII should later write an encyclical which sought
to stress the lasting relevance of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Just like Leo XIII and Pius XI , Pius XII appreciated how important the Sacred Heart was in promoting a sense
of sin in the modern world.
However, by the time of the publication of Haurietis Aquas in 1956 it
was already becoming apparent that the devotion was losing its influence in the
Catholic church – as an important
collection of papers entitled Cor
Salvatoris published in 1954 explored.
By the early 1950s it
is apparent that the Sacred Heart, with its emphasis on human sinfulness in the
face of God’s infinite love, was losing its appeal. There are many reasons for
his, of course, but one of them is undoubtedly that itself ‘sin’ fell out of
favour. Joseph Pieper, for
example, in his book Uber den Begriff de
Sunde, ( On the Concept of Sin)
observed in the1970s that it was a word that was no longer used in
either casual conversations or in more ‘high toned’ settings.
And given that the
Sacred Heart asks us to reflect upon our sinfulness and the sins of the world,
it is not so surprising that as people began to lose their sense of sin,
Catholics began to lose their sense of the heart of Jesus. Talking about sin went out of fashion,
as did the Sacred Heart. But we
cannot understand the Sacred Heart without understanding and acknowledging the
existence of sin. Hence in the
icon we are drawn to contemplate the immaculate heart of the Blessed Virgin –
conceived without sin, and St John who points towards the Lamb of God who takes
away the sins of the world. And of course, at the bottom, we see Adam and Mary
Magdalene who serve to remind us of our sinful nature and our need for
repentance.
The idea of reparation and expiation are
central to the devotion. But in a world which has lost a sense of sin it is not so surprising that the
notion of seeking to repair the damage done by sin and making amends our sins
and the sins of the world has also been lost. If we don’t really think that we have sinned, then
there is nothing to atone for! If
there is no sense of sin, we need not be troubled by guilt. This was, of course, exactly what Nietzsche
anticipated and desired: a world free of sin and guilt. In this regard mad and
sad Nietzsche was ( as Bloom argues ( The
Closing of the American Mind) the true father of modern society. Abandoning the sense of sin would
enable humanity to free itself from the shackles of Judeo-Christian morality. And in banishing sin to the wastebasket of history, religion
would cease to have any relevance to public affairs. When we proclaim the death of God we also bury the notion of
sin. It is in this context we recall that Leo XIII’s encyclical in 1899 on the
Sacred Heart ( Annum Sacrum) emphasized the importance of the devotion as a
means of combating the exclusion of religion from public affairs.
The renewal of the
devotion to the Sacred Heart requires both a bigger, more cosmic idea of the
heart of Jesus -as Teilhard urged - but it also involves renewing our sense of sin. We need both a cosmic sense of the
Heart of Jesus, but we also need a sense of the sinfulness of humanity. It is wholly erroneous to think that
Teilhard was not concerned with the relationship between sin and the Sacred
Heart. His writings show that he
was intensely aware of sin and what it does to our relationship to God and to
our neighbour. But, to narrow the Sacred Heart just into a focus on reparation
and expiation was to miss the bigger picture of the symbol of Divine Love as
the alpha and omega of all creation.
Sinfulness was above all about being wholly self-centred: the Sacred
Heart is telling us to be centred on God.
Sin is about the love of the self. The Sacred Heart is about the love of
God. We are sinful when we put ourselves at the centre of creation: a Christian
is called to put Christ at the centre of her or his life. To follow Christ is to put Christ at
very heart of your existence. Sin is the step we take to put ourselves at the centre:
keep taking that step and we find that we are in a state of mortal sin.
The story of modern
man has been the story of the loss of the sense of sin. Saint John Paul echoed the words of
Pius XII in his encyclical on reconciliation and penance:
18. Over the course of
generations, the Christian mind has gained from the Gospel as it is read in the
ecclesial community a fine sensitivity and an acute perception of the seeds of
death contained in sin, as well as a sensitivity and an acuteness of perception
for identifying them in the thousand guises under which sin shows itself. This
is what is commonly called the sense of sin.
This sense is rooted
in man's moral conscience and is as it were its thermometer. It is linked to
the sense of God, since it derives from man's conscious relationship with God
as his Creator, Lord and Father. Hence, just as it is impossible to eradicate
completely the sense of God or to silence the conscience completely, so the
sense of sin is never completely eliminated.
Nevertheless, it
happens not infrequently in history, for more or less lengthy periods and under
the influence of many different factors, that the moral conscience of many
people becomes seriously clouded. "Have we the right idea of
conscience?"-I asked two years ago in an address to the faithful" Is
it not true that modern man is threatened by an eclipse of conscience? By a
deformation of conscience? By a numbness or 'deadening' of
conscience,"(97) Too many signs indicate that such an eclipse exists in
our time. This is all the more disturbing in that conscience, defined by the
council as "the most secret core and sanctuary of a man,"(98) is
"strictly related to human freedom.... For this reason conscience, to a
great extent, constitutes the basis of man's interior dignity and, at the same
time, of his relationship to God."(99) It is inevitable therefore that in
this situation there is an obscuring also of the sense of sin, which is closely
connected with the moral conscience, the search for truth and the desire to
make a responsible use of freedom. When the conscience is weakened the sense of
God is also obscured, and as a result, with the loss of this decisive inner
point of reference, the sense of sin is lost. This explains why my predecessor
Pius XI, one day declared, in words that have almost become proverbial, that
"the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin."(100)
Why has this happened
in our time. A glance at certain aspects of contemporary culture can help us to
understand the progressive weakening of the sense of sin, precisely because of
the crisis of conscience and crisis of the sense of God already mentioned.
"Secularism"
is by nature and definition a movement of ideas and behavior which advocates a
humanism totally without God, completely centered upon the cult of action and
production and caught up in the heady enthusiasm of consumerism and pleasure
seeking, unconcerned with the danger of "losing one's soul." This
secularism cannot but undermine the sense of sin. At the very most, sin will be
reduced to what offends man. But it is precisely here that we are faced with
the bitter experience which I already alluded to in my first encyclical namely,
that man can build a world without God, but this world will end by turning
against him."(101) In fact, God is the origin and the supreme end of man,
and man carries in himself a divine seed.(102) Hence it is the reality of God
that reveals and illustrates the mystery of man. It is therefore vain to hope
that there will take root a sense of sin against man and against human values,
if there is no sense of offense against God, namely the true sense of sin.
Another reason for the
disappearance of the sense of sin in contemporary society is to be found in the
errors made in evaluating certain findings of the human sciences. Thus on the
basis of certain affirmations of psychology, concern to avoid creating feelings
of guilt or to place limits on freedom leads to a refusal ever to admit any
shortcoming. Through an undue extrapolation of the criteria of the science of
sociology, it finally happens-as I have already said-that all failings are
blamed upon society, and the individual is declared innocent of them. Again, a
certain cultural anthropology so emphasizes the undeniable environmental and
historical conditioning and influences which act upon man, that it reduces his
responsibility to the point of not acknowledging his ability to perform truly
human acts and therefore his ability to sin.
The sense of sin also
easily declines as a result of a system of ethics deriving from a certain
historical relativism. This may take the form of an ethical system which
relativizes the moral norm, denying its absolute and unconditional value, and
as a consequence denying that there can be intrinsically illicit acts
independent of the circumstances in which they are performed by the subject.
Herein lies a real "overthrowing and downfall of moral values," and
"the problem is not so much one of ignorance of Christian ethics,"
but ignorance "rather of the meaning, foundations and criteria of the moral
attitude."(103) Another effect of this ethical turning upside down is
always such an attenuation of the notion of sin as almost to reach the point of
saying that sin does exist, but no one knows who commits it.
Finally the sense of
sin disappears when-as can happen in the education of youth, in the mass media
and even in education within the family-it is wrongly identified with a morbid
feeling of guilt or with the mere transgression of legal norms and precepts. Here
Benedict XVI also argued that sin is the deepest cause of every evil :
But this statement is
not at all uncontroversial, and the word "sin" is not accepted by
many, for it presupposes a religious vision of the world and of man. In effect
this is correct: If we eliminate God from the horizon of the world, we cannot
speak of sin. Just as when the sun is hidden the shadows disappear and the
shadows appear only if the sun is there, so too the eclipse of God necessarily
brings the eclipse of sin.
Thus the meaning of
sin -- which is a different thing from "guilt feelings" as these are
understood in psychology -- is only grasped in discovering the meaning of God.
The "Miserere" Psalm, attributed to David in the context of his twofold
sin of adultery and homicide: "Against you," David says, turning to
God, "against you alone I have sinned" (Psalm 51:6).
God's response to
moral evil is to oppose sin and save the sinner. God does not tolerate evil
because he is Love, Justice, Fidelity; and it is precisely because of this that
he does not wish the death of the sinner, but desires that the sinner covert
and live. God intervenes to save humanity: We see this in the whole history of
the Jewish people, beginning with their liberation from Egypt. God is
determined to deliver his children from slavery to lead them to freedom. And
the worst and most profound slavery is that of sin. This is why God sent his
Son into the world: to free men from the rule of Satan, "origin and cause
of every sin." Here
It is very significant
that Pope Francis has restated this view. Francis argues
that a sense of sin involves a sense of shame. A sinful person is a shameless person. A person without humility and meekness-
the very qualities that Jesus asks us to learn from his heart! As Christians we
must regularly ask our selves if Christ is at the centre of our life. For, where our treasure is, there we
find our heart. This means we must
never lose sense of our own sinfulness, and the sin around us. And this calls
for humility and a sense of shame. Here.
The Sacred Heart stands as a reminder to be
aware of how the human heart can be full of deadly sins that can destroy our
souls and destroy our society. Ours is a society which is all about
success and winning. Hence it has no use for sin. To acknowledge the capacity
which human beings to sin is to recognize that human beings fail- to have a
sense of sin is to have a sense of learning from failure, errors and our
shortcomings. To have a sense of sin is to understand that we have limits. To have a sense of sin is to be able to
feel and express shame: it is to have a sense of regret, and guilt for those
things we have done or failed to do.
Perhaps the most dangerous thing is a
democracy is to have politicians who are shameless. A sense of shame is amongst the first characteristics of
narcissism in individuals, groups and institutions that are so full of themselves
and centred on themselves that they lack the humility necessary to have a sense
of sin and shame. When human
beings are so utterly centered on themselves and can see no cause for shame in
how they live, then they are easily tempted by pride, avarice, lust, envy,
gluttony, wrath and sloth. Look around
our self-centered world: it abounds in sin which destroying our world.
The Sacred Heart asks us to look into our
hearts and contemplate the humble
and gentle heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart urges us to reflect on the wounds
of sin which have been inflicted on our Saviour who loves us, and who desires
that we share in the divine life.
What stops from placing his heart at the centre of our lives? Sin. What
stops us thinking of what Christ did for us? Sin. What stops us thinking of
other people, rather than ‘me’, ‘me’, ‘me’? Sin. What stops us living God with
all our heart and our neighbour as ourself? Sin, it is always sin.
And so in this month of the Sacred Heart we
should remember that although we focus on the heart of Jesus as the great symbol
of God’s infinite love and mercy,
we must remember that sin is a rejection of love. Sin wounds the loving heart
of Jesus, and it wounds the very core of our being. To be devoted to the heart
of Christ is to be active in repairing the damage that sin and above all, the
lack of a sense of sin, does to us and to the world.
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