thecatholicthing.org
2023-06-01
In 1856, Pope Pius IX established the Feast of the Sacred Heart for the universal Church. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical, Annum Sacrum, declaring that, in the "principal church of every town and village," the faithful of the whole world should be solemnly consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Leo desired that the unified devotion of the Church to the Sacred Heart of Jesus would be a powerful reminder, to the faithful themselves and the world at large, of Christ's kingship over all creation - a kingship he holds both by right as the Son of God and by virtue of the terrible price he paid to redeem it.
Also among the reasons given by Pope Leo for exhorting the Church to this consecration was his abiding concern over rising godlessness, particularly among Christian nations. He saw religion being increasingly excluded from public life, a "sort of wall being raised between the Church and civil society."
Such disregard for the authority of sacred and divine law in public life, Leo wrote, "almost tends to the removal of the Christian faith from our midst, and, if that were possible, of the banishment of God Himself from the earth." He went on to describe a state of affairs which bears an uncanny resemblance to our own turbulent and anxious times: