The Catechetical Saints
Part 3

God's very being is LOVE.
(Catechism #221)

 

            St. Francis never tired of proclaiming it.   He exhorted the faithful in the LOVE that is God to love one another.   He spent long nights weeping that LOVE is not loved!    As he lay dying, he asked that St. John’s account of the Passion be read to him so that he could recall one last time on earth the redeeming depths of God’s love:  

The human heart is converted by looking on Him
whom our sins have pierced.  (#1432)  

            It was for this reason that St. Clare taught her Sisters to meditate constantly on the Passion of Christ, to keep their spiritual gaze fixed on Jesus Crucified, to align their wills with the redemptive FIAT! of the Son of God.

 
The whole prayer of Jesus
is contained in the loving adherence of His human Heart
to the mystery of the will of the Father. (#2603)

            While devotion to the Sacred Heart was only in the first stages of development in the 13th century, awareness of the infinite treasures of the love of Christ was deeply rooted in early Franciscan spirituality.  In fact, it was to the writings of the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure, that the Church turned when composing the Office for the Feast of the Sacred Heart.  He who bids us to run to the Fountain which is Christ reminds us that the Church venerates and honors the Heart of Jesus because

(this) Sacred Heart,
pierced by our sins and for our salvation,
is quite rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of that love
with which the divine Redeemer continually loves
the eternal Father and all human beings without exception.  (#478)

 

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