vii

contentsIntroduction James Martin, S.J.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

The Sacred Heart of Jesus Christopher J. Ruddy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

The AngelusEmilie Griffin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

First FridaysRon Hansen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

The Immaculate Heart of MaryJanice Farnham, R.J.M. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

The Stations of the Cross Therese J. Borchard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

St. JosephPaul Mariani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

Lectio Divina Daniel J. Harrington, S.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Holy Water Ann Wroe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

The RosarySally Cunneen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

The SaintsLawrence S. Cunningham . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

viii

The Miraculous Medal Robert P. Maloney, C.M. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79

Pilgrimage Kevin White, S.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

Litanies William Griffin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Mary Joan Chittister, O.S.B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

The Liturgy of the Hours Elizabeth Collier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

Novenas Dianne Bergant, C.S.A. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Our Lady of Guadalupe Eric Stoltz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129

Relics Melanie McDonagh . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament Brian E. Daley, S.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157

About the Editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

Contents

�

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

C H r i S To p H e r J . ru d d y, thirty-two, is an assistant

professor of theology at the university of St. Thomas in St.

paul, Minnesota. After graduating from yale university in

�993, he worked with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps before

entering Harvard divinity School, where he completed a

master’s degree in theological studies. in 200� he received a

ph.d. in systematic theology from the university of Notre

dame. Today Mr. ruddy and his wife, deborah Wallace, live

with their one-year-old son, peter Augustine, in St. paul.

Seventy-two times a minute, 4,320 times an hour,

�03,680 times a day, almost 38 million times a

year—over 2.6 billion times in the course of an aver-

age life. Fist sized, the human heart beats powerfully

and durably. it must be sturdy enough to contract

and send fresh blood throughout the entire body,

elastic enough to collect spent, deoxygenated blood.

Too much hardness or softness of heart, and one

dies. only a healthy heart—strong and supple—can

give and receive lifeblood.

devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has suffered

cardiac arrest in recent decades. it has been dismissed

as superstitious in its apparent guarantee of salvation

to those who practice it, as masochistic in its empha-

sis on making reparation for Jesus’ own suffering. its

popular iconography is—to put it generously—sac-

charine, kitschy, effeminate, somehow ethereal and

grotesque at once. This decline of devotion is all

the more striking because of its preeminence in the

first half of the twentieth century, when so many

Catholic families had a picture of Jesus and his

Sacred Heart displayed in their homes, and when

Thursday-night holy hours and First Fridays prolif-

erated in parishes.

Like many forms of heart disease, such atrophy

could have been prevented through a healthy diet—in

2

Christopher J. ruddy

this case, Scripture and tradition. The heart is a power-

ful metaphor in the Bible, what Karl rahner, S.J., has

called a “primordial word.” it signifies the wellspring

of life, the totality of one’s being. The prophet ezekiel,

for instance, records God’s promise to change israel’s

“heart of stone” into a “heart of flesh,” while John’s

Gospel gives the heart its most profound scriptural

expression: Jesus’ heart is the source of living water,

of rest for the Beloved disciple, of the church and its

sacraments, of doubting Thomas’s faith.

devotion to the Sacred Heart began to flourish

in the Middle Ages through a renewed attentiveness

to Jesus’ humanity and his passion. its golden age,

though, was the seventeenth century, when Francis

de Sales, Jane de Chantal, and what was called the

“French School” offered a tender, compassionate spiri-

tuality that helped to renew the church and counter

Jansenism’s severity and sectarianism. From �673 to

�675 at the Visitation convent of paray-le-Monial,

Margaret Mary Alacoque received a series of four

revelations from Christ about his heart. it was here

that the devotion reached its enduring form: personal

3

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

consecration to the Sacred Heart, the observance

of an hour of prayer on Thursday night between

eleven o’clock and midnight as a way of sharing in

Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane, and the reception

of communion on the first Friday of the month as

reparation for the indignities inflicted upon the sac-

rament by those indifferent and ungrateful. This last

revelation would evolve into a belief that salvation

was assured to those who received communion on

the first Fridays of nine consecutive months.

The Sacred Heart was later enlisted in combat

against the French revolution, Communism, and

threats to family life. pope pius iX made it a feast of

the universal church in �856, and Leo Xiii conse-

crated the entire world to the Sacred Heart in �899.

The devotion reached its magisterial peak in pius

Xii’s �956 encyclical Haurietis Aquas (“you Shall

draw Waters”), which emphasized God’s passionate

love for humanity.

i believe that the deepest meaning of the devotion,

however, is glimpsed in a poet who does not even

mention it: dante Alighieri. At the dark bottom of

4

Christopher J. ruddy

hell, Satan is frozen in ice up to his chest, crying tears

and drooling bloody foam, his six wings bellowing

cold wind upward. Wedged into the inverted apex

of the underworld, he is locked in his own resent-

ment, impotent and utterly alone. Hell, the Inferno

makes clear, is not fire, but ice: cold, crabbed isola-

tion. paradise is pure communion, illuminated and

warmed by the love that moves the sun and the other

stars.

i did not grow up with any devotion to the Sacred

Heart, and it is only in the last few years, as i have

struggled with vocation and the demands of family

life, that the practice has spoken to my own heart:

the fearful heart that paralyzes me when i think of

the future, rendering me unable to open myself in

trust to God; the cramped heart that refuses to admit

my wife and infant son but clings to my own pre-

rogatives, choosing to watch peter out of the corner

of my eye as i read the morning newspaper rather

than get on the floor and play with him; the oblivi-

ous heart that holds forth at dinner on the recording

history of the Beatles’ Abbey Road but forgets to ask

5

The Sacred Heart of Jesus

awake my soul

e d i t e d b y J a m e s M a r t i n , S . J .

Contemporary Catholics on Traditional Devotions

Martin

awake m

y soul

introduces the practice of devotions to a new

generation of the faithful. The essays in this enlighten-ing collection celebrate the traditional Catholic devo-tions—those sensual, physical, time-honored forms of piety that have sustained generations of believers. Contemporary men and women are finding in the devotions what earlier generations found—comfort in times of trial, models of discipleship, encouragement to care for others, and ways to draw closer to Jesus in prayer and worship.

The twenty contributors to Awake My Soul—which include Ron Hansen, Joan Chittester, Lawrence Cunningham, and Paul Mariani—share their delight in this rediscovery of their Catholic heritage. Awake My Soul shows how the great tradition of Catholic prayer can help all of us to regain a sense of the profound mystery at the center of our Catholic faith and to discover new depths of meaning in our prayer lives.

Religion/Catholic $11.95

james martin, s.j., is associate editor of America magazine, the national Catholic weekly. His books include Searching for God at Ground Zero and In Good Company.

awake my soul