Allocutio at June 2016 Concilium Meeting by Fr. Bede McGregor OP
The Sacred Heart and Legion Spirituality
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The month of June is a good time to reflect once more on the infinite gift of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and its fundamental place in the history and spirituality of the Legion. Prayer to the Sacred Heart has the first place in the little litany in the Tessera. We simply pray every day: ‘Most Sacred Heart of Jesus: Have mercy on us.’ Then perhaps we think of that beautiful apostolate, one of the earliest and most fruitful in Legion history, the enthronement of the Sacred Heart in homes. This apostolate is probably even more necessary and urgent throughout the world today, especially in our western world where marriage and family are facing so many challenges and overwhelming difficulties described so poignantly by Pope Francis in his apostolic letter: ‘The Joy of Love.’ We think too of the Legion promotion of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association which is primarily and essentially a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In a world that is immersed in so many kinds of destructive addictions such as drugs of so many kinds, pornography and perhaps mindless forms of entertainment, there is an urgent need to bring a true devotion to the Sacred Heart into this all-persuasive culture. This places a great challenge to the Legion, while maintaining its traditional ways of spreading this devotion, to devising new ways of enabling people, especially the young, to discover the real meaning of love and the true joy of loving as exemplified in the heart and life of Jesus.
I think it would be good to look to the example of our Founder Frank Duff and his deep devotion to the Sacred Heart. In his bedroom he placed a large picture of the Sacred Heart so that the first thing his eyes looked on when he awoke in the morning and the last thing he saw before he went to sleep was the image of the Sacred Heart. That picture was in his bedroom for more than sixty years.
We remember that he joined the Pioneers in 1914, so when he died in 1980 he would have been a member for 66 years. As we have said, this movement is essentially a special devotion to the Sacred Heart and Bro. Duff would have prayed the pioneer prayer twice a day as is recommended to all members: ‘For thy greater glory and consolation, O Sacred Heart of Jesus; for thy sake to give good example, to practice self-denial, to make reparation to Thee for the sins of intemperance, and for the conversion of excessive drinkers, I will abstain for life from all intoxicating drinks.’ Frank Duff was not a superficial Pioneer because he knew the devastation of excessive drinking of alcohol first hand in innumerable cases and he had a deep devotion to the Sacred Heart. This relation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus would have shaped his very soul and suffused at least implicitly all his relationships with the people he met day in and day out.
This brings us to the central question of the Allocutio. The place of the Sacred Heart in Legion spirituality cannot be reduced to particular practices however formative and fruitful. It must be much more radical. It must be the source of our most profound attitudes and actions; it must be the deepest secret of our souls. So what exactly is this fundamental pillar of Legion spirituality? Let me start with a quotation from the ‘Signs of Contradictions,’ a book by St. John Paul 11: ‘Throughout the description of Genesis the heart can be heard beating. We have before us not a great builder of the world, a demiurge: we stand in the presence of the great Heart.’ God cannot benefit from creation because He already has everything infinitely and perfectly. Everything is for the benefit of creation. In other words, in the depth of all created reality lies the great heart of God. This is especially true of the human person. We exist because we are loved or in other words we exist because we are held in the heart of God. That heart never ceases to be totally focused on every single one of us. This truth is rooted in the only definition of God to be found in the New Testament: God is Love. So in the deepest roots of our being we habitually stand in the presence of the great Heart of God.
These truths become even clearer in the Incarnation. God so loved the world that he sent his Son into the world to emphasise his closeness to us, to share in our very nature, to profoundly identify with us in all things except sin. But what about the consequences of sin? The truly staggering love of God becomes even clearer. As St. Paul tells us: God loved us while we were still sinners. God became man precisely out of love for sinners. The heart of God is riveted on the spiritually sick and terminally ill, on the most despicable of sinners, on the spectacularly evil person. He came to save sinners and that is his own self-definition. The passion, death and Resurrection of Jesus are the supreme evidence of the Good News and the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Divine Forgiveness are the accessible continuation and real presence of the Good News. Let that mind be in you which is the mind and heart of Jesus.
So the Sacred Heart is the most fitting human symbol and human language for entrance into the mystery of God’s love, of his very identity and inner life. The most important truth about the Sacred Heart is that God has first loved us. This is the truth that the Christian and therefore the legionary need to place at the center of their interior life and must become the soul of all their apostolates.
In case I have not managed to give a compelling indication of the meaning of the Sacred Heart for my fellow legionaries let me just quote one of many texts of Sacred Scripture that says all I wanted to say: ‘What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or the sword? No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loves us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels, nor powers nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus Our Lord.’ (Romans: 8:37-39).
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