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While many are familiar with the various consecrations of the world to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in response to the requests at Fatima, few know that the entire human race has been consecrated to the Sacred Heart on multiple occasions.
St. John Paul II provides a succinct narration of these consecrations in a letter he wrote in 1999:
The 100th anniversary of the Consecration of the Human Race to the Divine Heart of Jesus, prescribed for the whole Church by my Predecessor Leo XIII in the Encyclical Letter Annum sacrum and carried out on June 11, 1899, prompts us first of all to give thanks to “him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father” (Rv 1:5-6).
He then explains how this consecration was renewed repeatedly by many popes since:
The value of what took place on 11 June 1899 was authoritatively confirmed in the writings of my Predecessors, who offered doctrinal reflections on the devotion to the Sacred Heart and mandated the periodic renewal of the act of consecration. Among these I am pleased to recall the holy successor of Leo XIII, Pope Pius X, who directed in 1906 that the consecration be renewed every year; Pope Pius XI of revered memory, who recalled it in his Encyclicals Quas primas, in the context of the Holy Year of 1925, and in Miserentissimus Redemptor; his successor, the Servant of God Pius XII, who treated it in his Encyclicals Summi Pontificatus and Haurietis aquas.
The Servant of God Paul VI, then, in the light of the Second Vatican Council, wished to make reference to it in his Apostolic Epistle Investigabiles divitias and in his Letter Diserti interpretes, addressed on 25 May 1965 to Major Superiors of institutes named after the Heart of Jesus.
St. John Paul II went so far as to say, “The consecration of the human race in 1899 represents an extraordinarily important step on the Church’s journey and it is still good to renew it every year on the feast of the Sacred Heart.”
Civilization of love
One of the reasons why St. John Paul II believed so much in the consecration to the Sacred Heart was that a devotion to Jesus’ divine Heart would lead to a “civilization of love”:
I have often urged the faithful to persevere in the practice of this devotion, which “contains a message which in our day has an extraordinary timeliness,” because “an unending spring of life, giving hope to every person, has streamed precisely from the Heart of God’s Son, who died on the Cross. From the Heart of Christ crucified is born the new humanity redeemed from sin. The man of the year 2000 needs Christ’s Heart to know God and to know himself; he needs it to build the civilization of love.
May we look tenderly at Jesus’ Heart and let his Heart inform our hearts.
And today we celebrate...