Heart of My Heart
Scattery Island, in the mouth of the Shannon River, was a famous ecclesiastical site for a thousand years. It is noted in the history books that Pope Innocent VI (of Avignon) appointed a bishop there in 1359, who “was not accepted by the local clergy”. But, Innocent VI had more success with establishing a mass “honoring the mystery of the Sacred Heart” in 1353 about three hundred years before the great apparition of the Sacred Heart to St. Margaret Mary in 1673. From her, the devotion spread and when she was declared Blessed by Pope Pius IX in 1864, the Sacred Heart began to take a central place in the peoples’ sense of God. People took to it like fish thrown back in the water.
Seven years later in November 1871, Fr. Patrick Byrne, established a little wooden church in South Camden with the blessing of Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley and called it Sacred Heart. It was the first one to bear that lovely name in the Diocese of Newark, which at the time included all of New Jersey. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII concentrated the whole world to the Sacred Heart.
From any point of view, the heart is a most extraordinary piece of creation, not only in its organic reality, but in the depth of its metaphoric meanings as well. As Pope Paul John II said, “If the human heart is an unfathomable mystery known only to God, how much more sublime is the heart of Christ”.
Talk about heart! On June 6, 2005, I was invited by my friend, Master Padraig Greene to come over for a cup of coffee. We had just participated in mass at his church of the Holy Trinity in Ballinalee, County Longford. I went. I had coffee. He had sherry. Our conversation was interrupted at least six times by a phone ringing which he picked up and answered enthusiastically himself. People were calling him to congratulate him. It was his 105th birthday.
Later I was thinking of that fist-sized pound of matter that is his heart,
which has been beating in his body since June 6th, 1900 and before that in
the womb of his mother. That would be in the previous century. It has been
beating seventy-two times a minute for all of his 105 years and, God be praised;
it has pumped, about seventy-seven million gallons of blood through that trim
body of his in the course of his lifetime. Awestruck I was as I gazed at him
and listened to his splendid conversation. Awed by his energy, awed by the
endurance of his great heart. Great Heart! Sacred Heart! What a perfect name
for that which holds the energy and the burning love of Christ in all creation.
