Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Wrote Leo XIII in Annum Sacrum “When the Church, in the days immediately succeeding her institution was oppressed beneath the yoke of the Caesars, a young emperor saw in the heavens a cross, which became at once the happy omen and cause of the glorious victory that soon followed. And now, today, behold another blessed and heavenly token is offered to our sight—the most Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a cross rising from it and shining forth with dazzling splendor amidst flames of love. In that Sacred Heart all our hopes should be placed, and from it the salvation of men is to be confidently sought.”

He officially recommended devotion to the Sacred Heart as a remedy for the creeping secularism of our times. The Sacred Heart had, of course, been venerated for some time before that, and not just as a pious private devotion.

During the French Revolution, peasants and nobles of the Vendée region united in the Spring of 1793 to fight against the draft and for king and local rule (not the machinations of far-away Paris), their priests, and their Faith. They stopped cowering under the tyranny of secularism, sat up, and did something about it. All this you can read about in Simon Schama’s Citizens or Tilly’s The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964). Too poor for or uninterested in uniforms, their only mark was a badge of the Sacred Heart.

Again in Spain in the 1930s, this badge of the Sacred Heart showed up. A Catholic volunteer wrote home of the atrocities committed against Catholics, destruction of churches and shrines, rapes and murders, and he recalls seeing so many Catholics marching to defend their homes and their faith. And wearing a badge of the Sacred Heart. (See Francis McCullagh, In Franco’s Spain. London.: Burns Oates & Washbourne Ltd., 1937).

Said Christ to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque: Even a little love from them in return—and I should regard all that I have done for them as next to nothing, and look for a way of doing still more. But no; all my eager efforts for their welfare meet with nothing but coldness and dislike. Do me the kindness, then—you, at least—of making up for all their ingratitude, as far as you can. (See Timothy O’Donnell, Heart of the Redeemer. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992).

Interested in a restoration of Christian Culture? I’ve been making these badges for nine years and happy to make more for anyone ready to wear his heart on his sleeve. Drop me a line on the main page here.