The consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a call to a personal and social practice of religion and a re-dedication of the country to the Christian ideals.
The United States celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence. The people of the American colonies wished freedom of rule and just representation. Its leaders inscribed in the Declaration a vision of all men created equally by God with freedom. It was a vision based on a political philosophy which arose within a Christian culture and a religious people. This understanding has been eroded significantly by many causes, especially widespread materialism and growing atheism and relativism propagated in education and the world of entertainment.
We must ask ourselves again: What is man? And what does it mean to be free? These are questions which must be pondered and afterwards discussed and taught. The bishops of our country have wisely chosen to dedicate the United States to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is only through prayer and turning our gaze to Jesus Christ that we can fully answer these questions and this great nation can regain its soul.
The Vatican II Constitution Gaudium et spes is an important source for the teaching of the Catholic Church on the human person, the family, society, justice, and the common good. In this great document we are reminded that in Christ the riddles of human sorrow and death find meaning. (n. 22)
Christians have always looked to Christ to understand what it means to be fully a man, and to understand the true meaning of love. In Gaudium et spes we read: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.” (n. 22)
Our nation faces very serious challenges in education, marriage, employment, and immigration; the grave problems of drug abuse, mental health crisis, and violence as well as foreign affairs. Study and reflection on Christian anthropology and the principles of social justice, recently outlined in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas of Pope Leo XIV, offers necessary truths and valuable criteria for our society. But furthermore the Church invites men and women to know Jesus Christ and his love, and to discover in his life the deepest truth about the person and his vocation as a son of God and a member of God’s family.
The 250th anniversary of the United States is an invitation to conversion in the personal lives of its citizens and to conversion as an institution to its most sacred values of love for God, freedom, and respect for each person’s pursuit of happiness. The consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is a call to a personal and social practice of religion and a re-dedication of the country to the Christian ideals.
The question of what man is leads to another question: what does it mean to love? The Christian finds the deepest answer in Jesus. The Constitution Gaudium et spescontinues: “This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” (n. 24)
The saints in general and St. John Paul II in particular developed this formulation of the virtue of charity and taught us by their example how to make ourselves a gift to others.
Earlier, St. John Henry Newman pointed out that love for men begins with love of individual men. He teaches that we should first concentrate our love on individuals and then it can expand. “There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffusive as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally. And many there are, who, without bringing forward any theory, yet consider practically that the love of many is something superior to the love of one or two; and neglect the charities of private life, while busy in the schemes of an expansive benevolence, or of effecting a general union and conciliation among Christians. Now I shall here maintain, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour’s pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate an intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us.” (Love of Relations and Friends, PPS 2)
Love is not a general feeling towards all men; it is respect and understanding of others, and service to them lived out in the family, work, and immediate surroundings, and in turn within smaller and larger communities, and then the nation. Newman presents friendship as an important test of virtue. Alexis de Tocqueville, that perceptive French observer of the American experiment, warned that democracy’s greatest internal danger was not tyranny imposed from without but the slow erosion of civic virtue from within. Without virtue in its citizens, he observed, self-government inevitably decays into either the soft despotism of an all-providing state or the hard despotism of faction. A democracy can only flourish when its citizens are virtuous; otherwise the government becomes a tyranny.
A robust Christian anthropology and understanding of human friendship can restore this nation to its original values.
To dedicate an institution to someone is to give that person a special role in the life of that institution, whether as inspiration or as source of assistance. In 1792, Bishop John Carroll dedicated the United States to the Virgin Mary. Then in 1959, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle consecrated the country to Mary’s Immaculate Heart. The Virgin Mary always leads us to her Son, and today the Church looks to Christ, the Son of God, as both the inspiration and the source of assistance for our nation. Since the 17th century, beginning with the apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, God himself asked for devotion to his Sacred Heart. There is no better occasion than this 250th anniversary of our beloved country to respond to that request — and this is the reason for today’s consecration of the nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a consecration in which we joyfully join the bishops.
