Our Eucharistic Heart Transplant

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - June 3, 2005

Because of the Incarnation, every part of Jesus' body is sacred.

We have never celebrated the feast of the Lord's sacred brain, however, even though through it the Word-made-flesh taught us the way to salvation.

We have likewise never feted the Lord's sacred hands, full of callouses from the carpenter shop in Nazareth and yet so gentle in reaching out to touch and heal sinners, cure the sick and even raise the dead.

Nor have we given public adoration to Jesus' sacred throat, sacred lips, sacred feet, sacred eyes or any other part of his sacred body, even though each and every part of Jesus' body is worthy of adoration.

The only part of Jesus holy corpus that the Church has adored over time has been Jesus' sacred heart.

This is something that makes the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which the Church universal marks today, particularly special.

Why Jesus' heart - and only his heart? The answer is both simple and profound.

In the Bible, the "heart" refers to the "center" of the person, where reason, will, temperament and tenderness converge. To refer to a person's moral character, the sacred writers routinely describe that person's heart, because there the person finds his unity and interior orientation. The heart is the symbol and synthesis of the person. Therefore to adore Jesus' sacred heart is to worship him in his totality.

But the heart is also the most striking symbol of love. To focus on Jesus' sacred heart is to focus on Jesus as love incarnate. Jesus said as much when he appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1675:"Behold the heart which has so much loved men that it has spared nothing, even exhausting and consuming itself in testimony of its love."

But the heart which St. Margaret Mary beheld was surrounded by a crown of thorns. It was wounded. Thus the image of the sacred heart is not only a symbol of the love that made those sufferings bearable, but also of the sins that cause that heart to be pierced by a lance on Good Friday.

Those sins continue. Jesus told St. Margaret Mary that the reason he asked her to spread throughout the world devotion to his heart was because so many ignore that love or treat it with scorn. He made a particular reference to the way people treat him in the sacrament of the Eucharist. "Instead of gratitude," he told her, "I receive from most only indifference, by irreverence and sacrilege and the coldness and scorn that men have for me in the sacrament of love."

Jesus asked St. Margaret Mary to begin the reparation, inviting her to take St. John's place during the celebration of the Mass, to rest her head on his heart and, not only sense his love, but share in it. She felt the Lord take her heart, put it within his own, and return it burning with divine love into her breast.

Jesus wants, in essence, through the Mass to give us the same type of transplant. He wants us to rest our heart on his as he celebrates in the Upper Room and to receive from him his own heart so that we might love God and others as he loves us.

Through the prophet Ezekiel, God had prophesied, "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezek 36:24). He said he would do this first by "sprinkling clean water" upon us to "cleanse [us] from all [our] uncleanness" (v. 25), which is what happens in the sacrament of baptism.

But that was just "pre-operative" preparation for what the Lord wishes to do in the Eucharist.

When Pope Paul VI in 1970 authorized doctors to examine, with state of the art techniques, the almost 1300-year-old Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano, Italy, we were able to get a glimpse of the connection between the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart.

The doctors determined that the consecrated priest's host that had turned into flesh right after the words of consecration was actually human heart wall (myocardium), cut in a cross section that would be impossible to make even with present day tools.

In working such a miracle, the Lord obviously could have taken on the composition of any human body part, but chose the texture of the human heart, not simply because he was giving us the fullness of his love in this sacrament, but he was also giving us his heart so that we might be able to love like him.

Because of the connection, it's also easy to see, in retrospect, why the Lord, through St. Margaret Mary, asked that the feast of his Sacred Heart be celebrated on Friday right after Corpus Christi and to venerate his heart by receiving Holy Communion on first Fridays.

In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us a heart transplant, so that we might not just worship his sacred heart but receive from him a sacred heart in return.

The Mass is how Jesus fulfills the prayer Catholics have lifted up for centuries: "O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine!"

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.