Friday after the second Sunday after Pentecost
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Solemnity
The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus is a solemnity of the Lord, kept on the Friday after the second Sunday after Pentecost. That Friday is also the Friday after Corpus Christi when Corpus Christi is kept on Thursday. The day looks at the love of Christ through the sign of his heart, pierced on the Cross, from which blood and water flowed.
Devotion to the heart of Jesus is older than the modern feast. It became a universal solemnity through the revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in seventeenth-century France and through the promotion of St. Claude de la Colombière and later popes. Pope Pius IX extended the feast, and Pope Pius XI raised it and consecrated the human race to the Sacred Heart. The First Friday practice, Holy Hours, and enthronement of the image in the home all belong to this devotion. They are means of prayer, not a mechanical guarantee.
The liturgical texts speak of the heart as the symbol of Christ’s human love and of the divine love that assumed that heart. The Church is not worshiping an organ in isolation. She is adoring the Person of the Son, whose love is visible in the Incarnation and the Passion. The vestments are white.
Because the date depends on Easter, it slides through May and June. June is traditionally called the month of the Sacred Heart in popular Catholic piety, even in years when the solemnity falls near the end of the month.
How Catholics keep this
- Attend Mass if you can. The day is not a holy day of obligation in the United States, but it is a solemnity.
- Pray the Litany of the Sacred Heart or a short act of consecration.
- Read John 19:31–37, the piercing of the side.
- If you keep First Fridays, let this solemnity reset the intention: reparation and trust, not anxiety about a count of months.