Jesus, Mercy Incarnate

(b) The Liturgical Feasts It was Jesus Christ Himself who requested, through St. Margaret Mary, the establishment of the annual Feast of the Sacred Heart. In His fourth great apparition to her (1675), He said: Behold this Heart that has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to show them its love. And in return I receive from most men only ingratitude, by their irreverences and sacrileges, and by the coldness and contempt which they show to Me in this Sacrament of love.... This is why I ask that the first Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi shall be kept as a special Feast in honor of My Heart, that on that day Communion shall be offered as a special act of reparation for the indignities committed. And I promise that My Heart will pour out abundantly the power of its love upon those who pay it... honor. 40 We should notice here that the Lord Jesus was quite specific in desiring that this feast be a special act of “reparation,” in other words, on the basis of Christ’s merits, a special return and offering of love to Him to make up for the denial and betrayal of His love implied by our sins. Like the traditional images of the Sacred Heart, therefore, the Feast is a special call from the wounded Heart of Jesus to “return love for love:” to love Him back, in reparation for all that His Heart has suffered from the sins of thankless men and women. 41 The liturgical Feast of The Divine Mercy, however, which the Vatican has already approved for the bishops of Poland, is a feast of the Heart of Jesus with a different focus. It falls on the Sunday after Easter, which is the Octave Day of Easter. As we know from The Apostolic Constitutions , and the writings of St. Augustine and St. Gregory Nazianzen, this day was always kept as a special feast by the ancient Church. 42 It was known by them as “the Sunday in White” (Dominica in Albis) because those newly baptized at Easter wore their white baptismal robes up through that day. St. 119 The Sacred Heart and The Divine Mercy