OUR LADY OF THE SACRED HEART: THE PART SHE PLAYS IN CHRIST’S MISSION TO THE WORLD

J. F. McMahon, MSC
Centenary Mass, Kensington, 1974

We spent the first day of our Provincial Chapter on one topic – the charism of our Father Founder, the charism or gift of God to Father Chevalier. It was a gift he got from God, it was a gift to him personally, something which he alone possessed, but he passed it on to future generations, to the members of the Societies which he founded.

The one thing that has come home to us very much in our prayerful reflection on this whole idea of charism is that it exists in one person, belongs to that person, and doesn’t exist again in the same form at all; but it can survive in other people. We asked ourselves what signs can we see today, still existing, still strong, of the original charism that belonged to Father Chevalier, and lives on or doesn’t live on, in the people who became members of his Congregation and Society. If it is not there, if it can’t be seen and found in us, then we have lost it.

By working together in small groups, we tried to discover that presence of the Founder today in the Church and in the Congregation. And after each of the eight groups had come back to the central meeting to record the findings, we discovered that there was a remarkable agreement. Each group used different words, different phrasing, different approaches, but substantially we could see, in all honesty, present in members today the same sort of charism that was present in Father Chevalier and has been handed down since his time. This was arrived at, not from a knowledge of Father Chevalier’s writings, but from what we could find in people today.

If we could summarize what fifty people said in a few sentences, it would come to something like this: that today Missionaries of the Sacred Heart want to bring people to the love of God; that the means to do this, to present Christ under the aspect of his love and the love of his Father, was to be through devotion to the Sacred Heart and to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, and to do this with courage, with conviction, confidence, zeal, optimism; and to show that the love of God manifested in the Heart of Christ is a remedy for the evils of this day, as it was the remedy for the evils of another day. Finally, that the Missionary of the Sacred Heart is an active missionary in a Society which is missionary, and that it can welcome, take in, embrace all types and classes of people.

Then the delegates were asked to state what they considered the outstanding events in our history over a hundred years that helped to preserve this charism in people, that helped to spread this charism to all parts of the world. The first three things listed were:

1. the vocation that came very early in the history of the Society, to go out and be a missionary society;
2. the foundation of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, and
3. the spreading of that devotion by the means popular in that day of the Archconfraternity of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.

It is in this sort of context, then, that I should like to express on behalf of the members of the ‘other’ Congregation Father Chevalier founded, a little before yours, that our Congregations, on this your foundation day, are one in a bond of friendship and the sharing of a common charism, not only in a common Founder; and that if we have kept this charism, you certainly have.

It is most gratifying to think that the Marian dimension of Father Founder’s charism and our living out of that charism today is not some historical thing in the past. It is with us, and the Marian dimension of it is there also. It is a matter of history that Father Chevalier gave to the Church that part of his charism that concerns the Mother of God.

It began as we all know with the theology of Mary Immaculate. He was no professional theologian, but he was theologian in his heart, in his spirit and in his spiritual life, and he perhaps understood more than a lot of professional theologians, even if technically he didn’t have their expertise. So he began with the theology of Mary Immaculate.

He was aware very much that the greatness and the importance of Mary lies in the fact that she conceived Christ. That before it was possible for all God’s loving plan to take effect – to become possible even – she was first of all redeemed by Christ in advance, the only one so privileged. And it was because of that unique greatness, I think, that Father Chevalier realised that if he was to bring men back to an understanding of God’s love, then he would have to do it along the same sort of pattern that God did it in the first place, when salvation and the love of God was first brought into the world in the Person of Jesus.

If there was to be a new redemption, if there was to be another announcing of the Good News, and especially the good news that God loves, then you can’t go wrong if you do it along the same sort of lines and with the same sort of pattern, and link your apostolate with Mary and her place in the salvation of all men.

We share with him, I suggest, that appreciation and understanding of Mary because of the vital part she played in her Son’s mission in the world, and the vital part she has always played in Father Chevalier’s mission in the world – a mission that makes it possible for us to believe and hope in a Saviour and Redeemer, a mission that makes it possible for men today to believe in the love of God and the love of his Son.

Nobody could have co-operated more closely with Jesus, nobody could have understood better what he was trying to do, what he was involved-in. Nobody loved what he loved as much as Mary.

I suppose that from time to time as we study the story of Mary’s life, we’re inclined to restrict our understanding of her to the part she played in the history of her Son’s mission; the role she plays in the Gospel – all those familiar scenes that come back to us in extracts from time to time and in our own reading: her position at Bethlehem and in the Temple, at Cana, or by the Cross, and at Pentecost.

Perhaps we could overlook her continuing work, just as we forget sometimes, I’m afraid, the continuing mission of her Son in the world. He is the Risen Christ in the world now. If we don’t believe that we just don’t understand Christianity. And I suggest that if we don’t understand that Mary is with him in the world and working in the world with him through her power especially over the Heart of her Son, then we don’t really understand Christianity, let alone what our own vocation is.

So his closest co-operator continues her mission in the Church, and has a place in the mission of each religious who owes his or her place in the Church to Father Chevalier.

If, then, we understand our own vocation, our own call from God through him, through the Congregation, we must see it as a continuation of Christ’s work in the world, and a continuation of Father Chevalier’s work in the world. And it’s simply just not possible to separate Mary from the apostolic work that we do today, because she couldn’t be separated from the work he did then.

And of course Father Chevalier moved from his devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in the sense of her Immaculate Conception, to something different, something new, something that would express in a more heartfelt way an explanation of Mary’s part in her Son’s mission.

Today, as we look back over one hundred years, it is Our Lady of the Sacred Heart that is in a special way commemorated because our attention is directed towards the love-relationship between her and her Son. And since love is the greatest of all the Christian virtues and the strongest of all motivations, and the only satisfying explanation for all that the two of them did together, and are still doing together, we go today to the very heart really of how the mystery of God’s love for men finds expression in this way; and as far as we are concerned personally, finds expression in our vocation and in the Congregations to which we belong.

The Meaning of the Title “Our Lady of the Sacred Heart”

When Father Founder, then, gave us this title and gave it to the Church as well, he left us something that should be a continuing reminder of the way in which God’s Good News came to the world in the first place – through a Mother and a Son who love each other in a way we are called to imitate.

Somehow she seems to have acted that out in the history of your own Congregation and of our Congregation. It is rather striking to remember that it was devotion to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart that preceded Missionaries of the Sacred Heart in many parts of the world. They followed because she was there first.

No Daughter of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, no Missionary of the Sacred Heart, understands his vocation properly, then, to continue this vitally important saving work in the world, unless he understands that the one closest to Our Lord in his saving work, the one who understood best what he did, was the only perfect co-operator – we all try to do our little bit but we all fall very short – the one who was dearest and closest to him as he was to her.

This is what is in our minds and hearts tonight. And we must never make the mistake of looking upon this as something in the past. We must see this happening here and now.

And tomorrow perhaps, when you get a much more public demonstration, outside your own family as it were, of the impact that this has had on the Church at large and on people, then we must see Mary as the Church sees her, as the first of God’s children who has herself attained the goal already that God in his love offers to all men. He preserved her from all sin in order to make this possible. He rescues us from sin, so that for us too, it can become a reality.

Father Chevalier and the Marian Charism

Our Founder, then, was caught up in this incredibly rich, beautiful interflow of love between the Incarnate Lord and his Mother. He was schooled and taught by Christ. He came to a vivid realisation of her loveliness and importance.

And he was also schooled by Mary. He learnt a lot there. His heart under her tutelage expanded with love for Christ that led him to send his missionaries throughout the world. And don’t forget, we wouldn’t have a vocation unless he had done that.

His whole life was dominated by the presence and the action of both Jesus and Mary. Their love-dialogue was open to admit him in a special way.

I suppose our prayer should be that we will somehow find a place in his charism, his own gift which came from the heart of Christ and is linked with the heart of his Mother.

Let us ask God tonight for strength to persevere in such a tremendous call from him – there can’t be any doubt about it. Let us also thank God for our vocation and our call, because in his Providence it apparently looks as though that is where our salvation lies.

Let us above all thank him for being admitted into that other Trinity – of Mary, and her Son, and Father Founder.