Last weekend we enjoyed ourselves immensely at a lovely out of town wedding. The wedding itself took place in the chapel of a Jesuit university, but the chapel had suffered one of those tragic "renovations" in which everything tending to call the mind to devotion had been stripped away. There were, of course, no statues. Moreover, the tabernacle had not only been shunted away far to one side, but its location and significance were further obscured by rows of chairs placed with their backs toward the tabernacle.
Fortunately, the iconoclasts' hammer had spared the chapel's glorious stained glass. I noted with great emotion that the window which, in pre-renovation days, would have overlooked the main altar (the altar was now a plain table in the chapel's crossing), depicted the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We have considered elsewhere how, for centuries, devotion to the Sacred Heart had been a focus of the Society of Jesus. We have also seen that, by 1974, the Jesuits had officially abandoned the devotion in favor of the pursuit of social justice.
Surveying the desolation resulting from a program of demolition deliberately carried out by the very religious order He had personally selected to spread devotion to His Sacred Heart, the Sacred Heart seemed to plead with special poignancy:
“Behold this heart which, notwithstanding the burning love for men with which it is consumed and exhausted, meets with no other return from most Christians than sacrilege, contempt, indifference and ingratitude, even in the sacrament of my love (the Eucharist). But what pierces my heart most deeply is that I am subjected to these insults by persons especially consecrated to my service.”
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