” ““The experience of love, drawn from the cult of the pierced chest of the Redeemer, protects us from the risk of withdrawing onto ourselves and makes us readier to live for the others”. This was written by the Pope, who, in a letter addressed to father Peter Hans Kolvenbach, general provost of the Company of Jesus, lingered on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which turns 50 this year. Fifty years later, highlighted Benedict XVI as he referred to Pius XII’s encyclical, “Haurietis aquas”, “it is always the Christians’ topical task to keep deepening their relation with the Heart of Jesus, so as to find in themselves confidence in God’s salvific love, so as to welcome it better and better in their lives”. The “mystery of God’s love”, recalled the Pope as he mentioned the subject of his first encyclical, “is not just the content of the cult of and devotion to the Heart of Jesus”, but “the content of any true spirituality and Christian devotion”. “As old as Christianity itself”, this cult has, according to the Holy Father, “unique importance for our faith and our life in love” and “cannot be regarded as a fleeting form of cult or devotion: the worship of God’s love, which has found its historical-devotional expression in the symbol of the ‘pierced heart’, remains a prerequisite for a lively relation with God” (to be continued).
