The Month of the Sacred Heart
The Church gives a particular devotion to every month of the year, and in June, she gives it to the Heart of Jesus. It is no accident that this same month holds the two feasts that stand at the centre of everything we do here: the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the very next day, the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Heart that Our Lady asks us to love at Fatima is not in competition with the Heart of her Son. It is the surest road to Him.
Most of us have seen the image without ever stopping to read it. A man, robed in red, points quietly to His own chest. The Heart is exposed, crowned with thorns, pierced, wrapped in flame, and surmounted by a small cross. It hangs in presbyteries and over kitchen doors and in the front rooms of houses where it has watched three generations come and go. It is so familiar that we have stopped seeing it.
And yet that picture is not an ornament. It is a proclamation, and it proclaims one thing only: He loved us.
Why does the Church set June aside for the Sacred Heart?
The custom emerged around the feast itself. In 2026, the Solemnity of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus fell on Friday the 12th of June, nineteen days after Pentecost and at the close of the great Easter cycle that runs through the Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi. A feast as great as that one casts a shadow forward and back across the whole month, and so the entire month came to be consecrated to the Heart it celebrates.
The devotion is older than the feast. It is as old as Calvary. When the soldier’s lance opened the side of the dead Christ, Saint John was watching, and he never forgot it: “one of the soldiers with a spear opened his side, and immediately there came out blood and water” (John 19:34). The Fathers of the Church saw the whole sacramental life of the Church flowing from that wound (the water of Holy Baptism, the blood of the Holy Eucharist), drawn from a Heart that had stopped beating for love of us.
What does “devotion to the Sacred Heart” actually mean?
We are quick to file it under sentiment, the religion of holy cards and warm feelings. But the devotion is far more concrete than that. To venerate the Sacred Heart is to adore the physical, beating Heart of the God-made-man, and through that Heart to adore the love it stands for: a love at once divine and entirely human, the love of someone who grew tired, who wept at a graveside, who looked at the rich young man and loved him.
Our Lord Himself pointed to His Heart as the place where the weary are to go: “Learn of me, because I am meek and humble of heart” (Matthew 11:29). The devotion is, before anything else, an invitation to go there.
A nun behind a grille, and a furnace of love
The modern form of the devotion was given to the Church through a hidden French nun. Between 1673 and 1675, in the Visitation convent at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, Our Lord appeared repeatedly to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. He showed her His Heart: living, wounded, ringed with thorns and ablaze with fire. He asked, through her, that His love be returned with love, and that reparation be made for the coldness and ingratitude He receives in return.
She was not believed at first. It took a saintly Jesuit, Saint Claude de la Colombière, to recognise the apparitions as genuine and to defend her. Last year, the universal Church marked the 350th anniversary of those revelations, a reminder that what was entrusted to one obscure religious order has become the possession of the whole Catholic world.
The Great Promise
Among the things Our Lord asked at Paray-le-Monial, one has shaped Catholic practice ever since: the devotion of the Nine First Fridays. According to the tradition handed down from Saint Margaret Mary, Our Lord promised the grace of final perseverance to those who receive Holy Communion on the first Friday of nine consecutive months: that His Heart would be their refuge in their last hour, and that they would not depart this life without the sacraments and His friendship.
Like all such promises attached to private revelation, the Church proposes it for our devotion rather than imposing it as doctrine. But generations of Catholics have taken Our Lord at His word, and worn a path to the altar rail on the first Friday of the month that has not gone cold in three and a half centuries.
The Popes have said it before us
This is not a private enthusiasm of the pious. The Church’s chief shepherds have placed the whole weight of the papacy behind it.
In 1899, Pope Leo XIII, in Annum Sacrum, consecrated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart, an act he called the greatest of his pontificate. In 1956, Pope Pius XII devoted a whole encyclical, Haurietis Aquas, to the subject, tracing the devotion through Scripture and the Fathers and insisting it was no relic of a sentimental age but a remedy precisely suited to a cold one.
Two Popes, half a century apart, saying the same thing in different words. The diagnosis does not change, because the human heart does not change, and neither does the Heart that made it.
The two Hearts
Here is where the Sacred Heart touches everything we do at Australia Needs Fatima.
The month closes its two great feasts back-to-back. On Friday, the Sacred Heart of Jesus. On the Saturday, the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Church sets them side by side on purpose. They are not rivals. They are a Son and His Mother.
When Our Lady appeared at Fatima in 1917, she did not draw attention to herself. On the 13th of June that year (the second apparition), she showed the three children her own Heart, encircled with thorns, and told them that God wished to establish in the world devotion to her Immaculate Heart. But the thorns around Mary’s Heart are the same thorns that crown the Heart of her Son, and the purpose of the one devotion is to lead souls to the other. The Immaculate Heart is the refuge; the Sacred Heart is the home.
You can see the symmetry in the calendar itself. To the Sacred Heart, Our Lord attached the First Fridays. To the Immaculate Heart, Our Lady at Fatima attached the First Saturdays: Confession, Holy Communion, the Rosary and fifteen minutes of meditation, offered in reparation. Friday and Saturday. The Heart of the Son and the Heart of the Mother, one day after the other, every month of the year. To keep both is to let Mary do exactly what she came to do: take you by the hand and present you to Jesus.
What you can do this month
The devotion is not abstract. It has always come with things to do.
- Keep the First Fridays. If you have never begun the Nine, the next first Friday is the place to start. Confession beforehand, Holy Communion on the day.
- Pray the Litany of the Sacred Heart, alone or with your family, on the days of June that remain.
- Enthrone the Sacred Heart in your home. The image above the door is not a decoration. It is a declaration of whose house this is. Many families set aside an evening to bless the image and formally place their household under His protection.
- Make an act of reparation. Our Lord’s complaint at Paray-le-Monial was of indifference, of love unreturned. A few quiet minutes before the tabernacle, offered for the coldness of the world, is the heart of this devotion.
- Pray the Rosary daily. Our Lady asked for it at Fatima more often than she asked for anything else, and it is the surest way to let the Mother’s Heart lead you to the Son’s.
And keep the bridge in view. The First Saturday that follows hard on the heels of these June feasts falls on the 4th of July. Mark it now.
A world that has lost its heart
Ours is an age that has lost its heart. Not its feelings; there are feelings enough, loud and everywhere. What it has lost is any sense of where its centre lies, and so it spends itself on a hundred substitutes that cannot love it back.
The remedy the Church holds out is almost embarrassingly simple. There is a Heart that is not a substitute. It was opened on a Friday afternoon and has never closed since. June is the month she asks us to go and stand in front of it, and, standing there, to let Our Lady lead us the last few steps, as she has been trying to do since 1917.
A prayer for the month
O Jesus, divine Saviour, deign to cast a look of mercy upon Your children, who assemble in the same spirit of faith, reparation, and love, and come to deplore their own infidelities, and those of all poor sinners, their brethren.
May we touch Your divine Heart by the unanimous and solemn promises we are about to make and obtain mercy for ourselves, for the world, and for all who are so unhappy as not to love You.
We all promise that for the future:
For the forgetfulness and ingratitude of men we will console you O Lord
for the way You are deserted in Your holy tabernacle,
For the crimes of sinners, for the hatred of the impious,
For the blasphemies uttered against You,
For the sacrileges that profane Your Sacrament of Love,
For the outrages against Your divinity,
For the injuries of which You are the adorable Victim,
For the coldness of the greater part of your children,
For the contempt of your loving invitation,
For the infidelity of those who called themselves Your friends,
For the abuse of Your grace,
For our own unfaithfulness,
For the incomprehensible hardness of our hearts,
For our long delay in loving You,
For our tepidity in Your holy service,
For Your bitter sadness at the loss of souls,
For Your long waiting at the door of our hearts,
For the heartless scorn that grieves You,
For Your loving sighs,
For Your loving tears,
For Your loving imprisonment,
For Your loving death,
We will console you, O Lord let us pray O Jesus! divine Saviour, from whose Heart comes forth this bitter complaint, “I looked for one that would comfort me, and I found none”, graciously accept the feeble consolation we offer You, and aid us so powerfully by your grace, that we may, for the time to come, shun more and more all that can displease You, and prove ourselves in everything, and everywhere, and forever Your most faithful and devoted servants.
We ask it through Your Sacred Heart, O Lord, who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit one God, world without end. Amen
Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us.
Last updated: 27 June 2026 10:32