“‘GOD is LOVE.’ (John 4:8). His great occupation is to love. He loves from eternity to eternity.” “God loves, but He wishes to be loved; Love has need of a return, and if the very bosom of the Divinity, the Father, and the Word and the Holy Ghost give such a perfect return that They love each other with the same love which is Their essence and Their being, in like manner God wishes to find outside Himself a reciprocity, relative indeed and proportioned to the created being, but nevertheless real. The creature has received everything from God and is bound to return everything to God; it is what it is only by God; it should employ its whole being for God.” (From Book of Infinite Love by Mother Louise Margaret).
This is the very essence of the devotion to the Sacred Heart and indeed of all religion: to believe that God is Love, to believe that He loves all men, and to love Him in return with our whole heart—which of course includes that we love our fellowmen for the love of Him.
God is Love and He is immutable; He always acts by Love, the history of His dealings with man can be summed up in one word—‘Love.’ On the other hand, the history of man is one long story of ingratitude, of refusal to love, often even of hatred of everything good. Yet even when man’s wickedness went to the extreme, God, Who is love, overwhelmed it with love. When our first parents, created by God, endowed with a superabundance of His favors, and even made participators in His own divine nature, rejected God and the whole supernatural order, God’s reply was the Incarnation. The message of the Word Incarnate was a message of love; His life was a life of love; and having enunciated and explained by word and example the great mystery of the Love of God, He displayed His mangled body, nailed to the Cross, with His Sacred Heart pierced by a lance, as the final proof of the greatness of God’s love for men and His divine claim to. be loved in return.
Could man ever again doubt of God’s love or refuse to return it? Alas, in the course of centuries man’s love for God grew cold, the crucifix lost its significance for him, he scarcely believed even that God loved him, not to speak of striving to love God in return. The reply of Our Savior was to make a new revelation of love through St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Our divine Savior made this new revelation of love, not by words alone, but by displaying His Sacred Heart surmounted by a cross, surrounded with a crown of thorns, still showing the wound which was made by the lance, and burning with love for man like a mighty furnace that would consume the world, thus giving a living epitome of His life of love for man, and renewing His divine claim to be loved in return.
Although this devotion of love, the devotion to the Sacred Heart, has been propagated in every part of the world, not only is His loving appeal ignored by the multitude, but new depths of ingratitude and iniquity have been sounded, and the world in our time is turning completely from God. Once again it is by love that Jesus wishes to conquer. He selects another member of the order of the Visitation, Mother Louise Margaret, to be the bearer of His message of love to the priests of the world and through them to the faithful. New efforts are required on the part of His faithful servants to offset the tremendous activity of the powers of Hell in these last ages. “I wish to conquer hatred by love. I will send my priests to diffuse love over the earth. I have given them My Heart in order that they may see the treasures of love that are in God, that, having drawn for themselves, they may draw for the world. Tell them to go and dispense everywhere the treasure of love.” ‘My priest is My other self, I love him, but he must be holy. Nineteen centuries ago, twelve men changed the world, they were not men merely, but they were priests. Now, once more, twelve men could change the world.’
This article is taken from a chapter in The Sacred Heart and the Priesthood by Mother Louise Margaret Claret de la Touche, which is available from TAN Books.
