27-07-2025
The Sacred Heart picture, once ubiquitous in Irish Catholic homes, has a fascinating history
Last month, thousands gathered at
Knock Shrine in Mayo
for a ceremony in which Archbishop of
Armagh Eamon Martin
consecrated Ireland to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
It was the culmination of what was termed an 'All-Ireland Sacred Heart Crusade' begun several months earlier. For some, this event evoked memories of an Ireland long-since gone.
The Sacred Heart picture, with its glowing lamp, once ubiquitous in Irish Catholic homes, is nowadays more likely to be encountered as a prop for a locally produced John B Keane play, and yet it has a fascinating history.
Although it has strong medieval roots, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is usually associated with a series of visions experienced by a French nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690).
The devotion spread quickly and had reached Dublin by the mid-18th century, with a confraternity to the Sacred Heart established there by 1797.
It was the 19th century, however, that truly universalised the image. Devotions to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, printed in Dublin in 1851, encouraged readers to 'place a picture of the adorable heart of your Saviour ... in some conspicuous place, so that the sight of it may inspire you to love him'.
The beatification of Margaret Mary Alacoque in 1864 added further impetus to the devotion. By 1876, the Dublin firm JJ Lalor was advertising Sacred Heart medals in the Nation newspaper, and the Irish Messenger of the Sacred Heart (still in print) was launched in 1888, reaching a circulation of about 250,000 by 1920.
Its editor, Fr James Cullen SJ, recommended that on New Year's Day, families should dedicate their homes to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and 'affix their signatures to the certificate of consecration, periodically renewing this commitment'.
Aloysius O'Kelly's well-known 1883 painting, Mass in a Connemara Cabin, clearly shows a cheap print of the Sacred Heart on the cabin wall.
The image was frequently invoked for protection. Small paper images of the Sacred Heart with a cross were circulated in Marseilles during a time of plague in 1720 with the words 'Arrête! Le Coeur de Jésus est là!' ('Stop! The Heart of Jesus is here!').
During the first World War, it was claimed that Irish and English Catholic soldiers 'put more trust in the Sacred Heart than in surgeons and nurses'. This was so much the case that the Jesuits, the great promoters of the devotion, cautioned that the Sacred Heart badge 'should not be worn as a charm or talisman to preserve the wearer from bullets and shrapnel'. It hardly worked.
Counter-revolutionary forces in the Spanish civil war continued to wear Sacred Heart badges called detentebalas ('stop bullets').
From the outset, the image had a political edge. During the French Revolution, it was adopted as a royalist symbol (Sr Alacoque had been instructed to tell the French monarch to offer the whole nation to the Sacred Heart) and it became an important symbol for monarchist and integrist Catholicism in the later 19th century, which rejected liberalism and 'modern error'.
The language of the Sacred Heart, which embraced that of Christ's kingship, had particular resonance when Pius IX, the king-pope besieged on all sides, lost the papal states at the time of Italy's Risorgimento. In 1733, a Spanish priest-visionary claimed that Jesus had declared, 'I will reign in Spain and with more veneration than elsewhere'.
In the 1930s, the Sacred Heart image was co-opted in the war against republican forces, which was presented as a 'crusade'. In 1938, the Spanish writer Antonio María Pérez de Olaguer warned of the threat of unbridled communism, noting 'while centuries have passed ... the wheel of the Crusades keeps turning'.
Returning to that ceremony in Knock last month, the use of the term 'crusade' in association with the Sacred Heart devotion in 2025 is both unfortunate and unsettling.
When Ireland was first consecrated to the Sacred Heart in 1873, the Tuam Herald newspaper declared, 'In the midst of heretical Europe this Island of Saints, true to its name, rises up from insidious persecutions to proclaim its triumph and thanksgiving'.
One of the more conservative US Catholic newspapers reported interviewing an attendee at Knock last month, who said, 'we have been through so much over the past few years ... with ... all this secularism eating up the soul of Ireland'.
Clearly, for some, when it comes to 19th-century 'crusades' against the modern world, it's still all to play for.
I tend to prefer the simpler historical examples of heartfelt devotion: the Sacred Heart hung in the cowhouse; in shop windows on Corpus Christi; or hearing of Tim Smythe, an athlete from Feakle, Co Clare, who won the 5,000m against France in 1931 and 'afterwards sent in a thanksgiving to the Messenger of the Sacred Heart for having been successful in it'.
Surely we've had more than enough 'crusades' in our history.
Salvador Ryan is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at St Patrick's College, Maynooth
