By IHE Graduate Scholar Molly Egilsrud, MA, MPhil
Each June, the Church draws our attention and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This year, there is an added poignancy: Pope Francis’s October encyclical Dilexit Nos on this devotion proved to be the final teaching of his pontificate. The late Pontiff encouraged the Church to embrace Christ’s personal love for us in imitation of the many great saints devoted to the Sacred Heart. Among these saints is a figure some might find surprising: John Henry Newman.
Well-known as an erudite Oxford Don, Newman is often thought of as a man of the head rather than the heart. A closer look at his life shows nothing could be further from the truth. Pope Francis points to a meditation of Newman, which includes the saint’s own ode to the Sacred Heart: “My God, my Saviour, I adore Thy Sacred Heart, for that heart is the seat and source of all Thy tenderest human affections for us sinners. It is the instrument and organ of Thy love. . . . It was on fire through zeal, that the glory of God might be manifested in and by us.”1 Although the former Anglican did not embrace this devotion until his Catholic conversion, the Sacred Heart he describes here represents his abiding belief and trust in the personal love of Christ for him.
Newman always believed that God spoke directly to the heart. This conviction in Christ’s personal love and communication to the heart of each person can be clearly seen in his dramatic conversion to Catholicism. When I visited Littlemore, Newman’s country retreat outside Oxford, with the IHE’s England pilgrimage, I was shocked to learn that Newman knew only a handful of Catholics prior to his conversion. A friend had converted the year before, and he had met several more on a brief trip to Rome years prior, but the future saint had few human examples to lead him on. Instead, Newman’s personal love for Christ led him to withdraw from his comfortable place in Oxford to Littlemore to diligently and zealously seek the truth about Christ’s church. Now Newman’s conversion may seem fait accompli, but at the time it was a radical renunciation of worldly respect, dependent on a traveling Passionist priest who did not even know Newman’s intention to convert until he arrived at Littlemore, soaked in rain, on October 9, 1845.
As a Catholic, Newman’s trust in this personal love of Christ led him through the many difficulties of founding the Oratory, serving his poor community in Birmingham, and founding schools and eventually a university. Later, as a cardinal, his motto and crest revealed this conviction. As his episcopal motto, he chose Cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart), a line from a letter of Saint Francis De Sales, one of the great devotees of the Sacred Heart. His crest, which he inherited from his father, included no fewer than four hearts. In Saint John Henry Newman, we find a glorious example of what we can do when we know eum qui dilexit nos (Rom 8:7).
- Meditations III, XIV, para. 2. ↩︎
