A hymn to the Sacred Heart should fill us with spiritual joy, but how we winced in my childhood parish when our old Irish priest chose it. Until yesterday I’d forgotten the words, but as soon as I typed “Sweet Heart of Jesus” into my browser I was back in the 1970s: an altar boy yawning under the baldacchino – now unforgivably demolished – while the choir swooped up and down the stave. It’s that sort of hymn. Here’s the chorus:
Sweet heart of Jesus, we implore. O make us love thee more and more.
On the words “Jesus” and “love” the melody reaches the top of the octave and stays there. Outstays its welcome, indeed, if the organist slows down for dramatic effect and the singers are gasping for oxygen. So we winced. But affectionately, the way you do when your tipsy uncle stumbles through an oft-told family anecdote. Even 40 years ago, “Sweet Heart of Jesus” was a relic of pre-conciliar Catholicism. You wouldn’t have heard it in most parishes, but our priest – though willing to say the New Mass – resisted the cultural revolution that was supposed to accompany the liturgical changes. Young practising Catholics today, with their love of Eucharistic Adoration and the Latin Mass, have no idea how brutally the ancient devotions were swept away. Thanks to our priest, our parish escaped the Seventies blitz. The Eighties were a different matter: the equivalent of today’s Chinese bulldozers moved in. “Sweet Heart of Jesus” was heard no more. I doubt it was much missed. My parents, born in the 1920s, thought of it as belonging to their parents. They were ready for the vernacular Mass. It was my grandmothers, May Benbow (born 1898) and Mary Thompson (born 1908), who missed the old ways – not so much the Latin but the spirituality. Both had a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. So did their friends. My parents’ friends were mostly Catholic, too, but when they heard the words “Sacred Heart”, they probably thought of a parish or a school. This sidelining of the Sacred Heart was a loss to the Church, I now realise. And when I say “now”, I mean in the past 24 hours. Last week there was a Twitter fight after the American Jesuit Fr James Martin urged “LGBT” Catholics to celebrate June as “Pride month”. I wish he’d stop doing this. Gay Catholics shouldn’t be nagged into rebranding themselves as LGBT; Pride and the rainbow flag belong to secular ideology. One Catholic reminded Fr Martin that June is dedicated to the Sacred Heart. I didn’t know that, but then I knew very little about the topic. So I went to Wikipedia, which is good on these things. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus wasn’t invented by some overwrought 19th-century nun, as I might have guessed. It arose (says Wiki) out of the medieval cult of the Holy Wounds and a new focus on Christ’s humanity. That’s why the Eastern Orthodox have doubts about it: they think it smacks of Nestorianism, the heresy that separated the human and divine natures of Christ. Those “kitsch” 19th-century statues of the Sacred Heart represent a devotion that was already 500 years old. But you can discover the history for yourselves. My mind is drifting back to that hymn. The poetry is painfully uninspired; the ideas painfully beautiful.
