Fr. Etienne Kern
Pilgrimages to Paray began in 1873, on the same date as the sanctuary of Lourdes and for the same reason: the arrival of the railway. For 150 years, Paray has been an important place of pilgrimage in France. As we prepare to experience a historic celebration that will mark the opening of the Jubilee of the 350th anniversary of the Apparitions, we have the intuition that the shrine is symbolically entering a new stage in its history, of which it seemed important to recall the essential stakes. This is the purpose of my speech on this opening day of the Jubilee of the 350th anniversary of the apparitions of the Sacred Heart to Saint Margaret Mary. Here are the first two major challenges of this Jubilee: I. Getting Devotion to the Sacred Heart Out of the Dead Ends in Which It Has Been Locked II. To unfold a living place, where an intense experience of faith is lived today Next week, we will present the other three issues of the Jubilee III. Rediscovering the topicality of the theme of reparation IV. To deepen the communion that unites the different ecclesial realities attached to the Sacred Heart V. Receiving What God Wants for Our Sanctuary I. Bringing Devotion to the Sacred Heart Out of the Dead Ends in Which It Has Been Trapped As much as the Sacred Heart is widespread, it is little known! In history, this devotion has spread very rapidly, with a fruitfulness perhaps unequalled in the history of the Church, at least in the Latin Church. However, with hindsight, we can see that Paray’s message may have suffered from the means used to make it known. Certainly, what helped to convey the message and devotion was very effective in spreading it – since the whole world knows the Sacred Heart. But this has sometimes become an obstacle to his deep understanding. This was done to the detriment of the depth and accuracy of devotion to the Heart of Jesus. This wide dissemination has not been free of ambiguities, misinterpretations, shortcuts and simplifications. In short, there was a price to pay. And this is perhaps one of the reasons that explain the disaffection of devotion to the Sacred Heart in the second half of the twentieth century, at least in the West.
For us, it is a question of identifying and understanding these reluctances in order to respond to them. The Jubilee is a good occasion for this. – Devotion to the Sacred Heart benefited from the infinite reproductions of statues according to Sulpician art, which enjoyed resounding success in the nineteenth century, but it ended up appearing very dusty and bloody when sensibilities evolved in the twentieth century. Beautiful works of art touch the heart. This is why a call for artistic projects was launched in September by the Sanctuary. The Jubilee is also intended to be a magnificent opportunity to renew the image of the Sacred Heart, as well as the representations of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, in the field of art, through sculpture and painting. This call for projects also concerns the creation of a musical composition for the liturgy. A photo contest is also organized so that everyone can participate in the renewal of our view of the emblematic sites of the Sanctuary, where pilgrims from all over the world come to pray. – The one-sided focus on reparation, itself reduced to its penitential or even victimized dimension, has ended up turning the Sacred Heart into a somewhat morbid doloristic devotion. Of course, reparation is part of parody spirituality, but it is not primary, nor can it be reduced to its penitential dimension. – The devotion to the Sacred Heart has not been unscathed by political recuperation, reducing the Sacred Heart to an emblem or symbol brandished as a standard in the service of certain French political causes.
As Péguy said, everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics! Certainly, in order to be authentic, our devotion to the Heart of Jesus must radiate in our world, in order to establish around us the reign of Christ, or, to use the expression of Saint Pope John Paul II, to build the civilization of love. But without falling into the defence of a political cause, as was too often – and sometimes still is – the struggle of some. This is not the place to go into this question in depth, but we will certainly have to do so. – the didactic presentation of the message of the apparitions in 12 promises in the nineteenth century is not formally false, even if it is marked by its time. It was certainly very effective… But it ends up inducing a very impoverished spiritual dynamic: if I do what Jesus asks of me, I will get what he promises. The drift towards a mercantile and self-interested relationship is almost inevitable. This was certainly not the aim of this forming, but how far we are from a heart that allows itself to be transformed by the burning love that the Lord has for us, a love that calls for a radical response of love. And it is precisely this living and transforming experience that pilgrims here live and that we have to highlight. Saint Margaret Mary © Shrine of the Sacred Heart II. A living place, where an intense experience of faith is lived today Devotion to the Heart of Jesus was not born in Paray. But, historically, it was from the apparitions to St. Margaret Mary that it became incredibly popular and spread throughout the Church. In this sense, Paray is truly a source of devotion. The world and the Church need to know and experience more and more the love of the Heart of Jesus. A better understanding of what happened in Paray – which is still happening there – is essential to rediscover and update devotion to the Sacred Heart. In this sense, the presence today of pilgrims from Spain – especially from Valladolid, where the Sacred Heart appeared to the Jesuit Blessed Bernardino de Hoyos in the eighteenth century – is particularly significant. This jubilee is much more than an original way of commemorating a significant historical event in the history of Catholic spirituality in the seventeenth century.
Paray-le-Monial is more than an essential historical milestone in devotion to the Sacred Heart. We are not here to do archaeology and remember with tears in our eyes and tremolos in our voices the wonders that God wrought here long ago. It is a living place of grace where thousands of pilgrims continue to experience the goodness, consolation and power of the Heart of Jesus, who lifts up, transforms and sends on mission those who encounter him. Our pastoral experience is that there is a powerful grace of place here, intimately linked to the spiritual experience of Margaret Mary: 1. Rest Just as the pilgrims rested for a long time on the Heart of Jesus, so the pilgrims rest here, responding to Jesus’ call: Come to me, all you who labor under the weight of the burden, and I will give you rest, for I am meek and humble of God. There is a grace of rest in God, of placing in his heart all that agitates and worries us: worries, failures, wounds, sins, bereavements, etc. A few weeks ago, a mother confided to me that she had lost her son two years ago and then, a year ago, on the first anniversary of his death, her grandson. “Sometimes I feel like I’m bursting, I can’t take it anymore. Who am I to say this, but I am like the son of man who has no place to lay his head. But when I came here to Paray, I understood that there was in fact a place where I could rest: on the Heart of Jesus. »
2. Consolation
This brings us back to another aspect of the grace of this place: consolation. I was very touched when the pope addressed the rectors of shrines last November during their international meeting at the Vatican. We go to the Sanctuaries to be consoled. How many people go there because they carry a burden, a sorrow, a concern in their minds and bodies! The illness of a loved one, the loss of a family member, so many situations in life are often causes of loneliness and sadness, which are laid on the altar and waiting for a response. Consolation is not an abstract idea, and it is not made up primarily of words, but of a compassionate and tender closeness, which includes pain and suffering. This is God’s style: close, compassionate, and tender. So is the Lord. To console is to make God’s mercy tangible; for this reason, the service of consolation cannot be lacking in our Shrines. In our history, each of us has hard, ugly moments when the Lord has comforted us. Don’t forget that experience. Remembering our own experience of consolation will help us comfort others. And this experience passes through Mary’s motherhood, the Consolata par excellence. May consolation and mercy abound in our Shrines! I received these words in my heart, as if through the Holy Father the Lord had come to confirm the profound call of the Shrine of Paray to be a place of consolation. For this reason, I would like to address an appeal to all those wounded by life, to the lame, paralytic and lepers that our society does not fail to engender. If you’re a little twisted by life, not too much as it should be, a little off the mark, … The Lord is waiting for you especially in Paray, you will find with the Heart of Jesus the rest of your worries, the consolation of your bereavement and the healing of your wounds.
3. The power of the Holy Spirit that flows from the Heart of Jesus
This brings us to a third aspect of Paray’s grace: a heart transformed by the fire of the Holy Spirit. Marguerite-Marie recounts that on December 27, the Lord asked her for her heart. She begged him to take it. She relates: He put it in his adorable one, in which he showed it to me as a little atom that was being consumed in that fiery furnace, whence taking it out like a blazing flame in the shape of a heart, he put it back to me in the place where he had taken it. Just as Margaret Mary had her heart transformed by the power of the fire of the Heart of Jesus, just as her heart was inflamed by being immersed in the heart of Jesus, so our heart is inflamed with love for the Lord and compassion for those who suffer, for the wounded of life. The criterion of authenticity of true devotion to the Sacred Heart is the transformation of our hearts, to enter into the sentiments of the Heart of Jesus, who was touched with compassion before the crowds because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Saint Margaret Mary © Shrine of the Sacred Heart
4. Mercy A fourth aspect of Paray’s grace is the experience of mercy.
Margaret Mary discovered the wonders of her love and the inexplicable secrets of her Sacred Heart (1st apparition) and to what excess he had carried her to love men (2nd apparition); how much this Heart has so loved men that it has spared nothing to the point of consuming itself to testify its love to them (3rd apparition). In the same way, here we have the overwhelming experience that the Lord loves us, especially through the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist. Is it too daring to say that part of the renewal of the sacrament of Confession and the rediscovery of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in France over the last 30 years has passed through Paray? Today, I am announcing to you that the Sisters of the Visitation who have made available the space of their current store and their visiting rooms to open a space of mercy that will open onto the forecourt but also will be directly accessible from the Chapel of the Apparitions. The project is for pilgrims to be able to go to confession, of course, but also to be listened to, accompanied and to benefit from the prayers of the brothers. Dear Visitandine Sisters, thank you for your constant concern that pilgrims are welcomed in your home and for your generous gift. Let us pray that the Lord will grant you many vocations! 5. The Fire of Mission A final aspect of Paray’s grace is missionary fire. There is no intimacy or individualism in true devotion to the Heart of Jesus. Jesus showed his heart to Margaret Mary and said to her: “My divine heart is so passionate with love for men, and for you in particular, that, no longer being able to contain within itself the flames of its ardent charity, it must pour them out through you and manifest itself to them.” Thus, the spiritual experience becomes missionary from the outset: “it must burn!” said the founder of Emmanuel, Pierre Goursat. It is not insignificant to quote Pierre today insofar as the revival and redeployment of the sanctuary of Paray from the 1970s onwards is largely due to his prophetic intuition to come to Paray to experience the national gathering of the Charismatic Renewal and then the summer sessions of the Emmanuel Community. May our hearts burn with love for the Lord and, at the same time, burn with fire, may this love be known and spread in our world marked by indifference and distance from God. The ways in which the love of the Heart of Jesus is proclaimed are very different according to the calls that each of us receives from God. But, in all cases, it is a question of bearing witness with strength and power to this burning fire. It is not possible to evangelize a world that one does not love. In Paray, by entering into the sentiments of the Heart of Jesus, one learns to love men, to love the world as Christ loved men and the world.
A devotion to the Sacred Heart that would withdraw into itself in a plaintive and victimized groan in the face of a world that is no longer Christian would not be authentic. I can only make my own these words of René Voillaume, founder of the Little Brothers of Jesus, who concludes his last book of testament with these prophetic words, in the school of that great saint of the Heart of Jesus, Charles de Foucauld: Perhaps we are going to enter an epoch in the history of the human race that will be the time of compassion, powerless to find solutions to the problems posed. More than ever, we will have to offer ourselves in intercession, in communion with the Lord’s sacrifice, immersing ourselves in his Eucharist to implore the mercy of our Saviour to be poured out on all men. One aspect of this missionary fire is popular piety, which is, in the words of Pope Francis, “the immune system of the Church.” Around the Sacred Heart there was a great popular piety. One of the challenges of the Jubilee is that the shrine should be ever more accessible to all and that it should rightly reconnect with this popular piety. It is a question of giving it its worthy place but also of receiving from it, by listening to the “people”, new ways of spreading the spirituality of the Sacred Heart, without falling into the pitfalls mentioned above.
Paray-le-Monial : Les grands enjeux du Jubilé | ZENIT – Francais