Homily for the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (B)

When I was a candidate seminarian, my ministry placement was with Hospice of Saint Joseph County. I was assigned to visit a couple of patients in a local nursing home who were in a vegetative state, suffering from the end stages of MS.

This ministry was very challenging to me on a personal and spiritual level. I found myself confronting, perhaps for the first time, my own fears about illness and death, and struggling with faith in the midst of such terrible and senseless suffering.

Hospice work was also challenging to my developing sense of ministry. What exactly was I supposed to do – what could I do for these people I was visiting? Even kind conversation and supportive words seemed impossible and pointless.

I remember bringing all of these issues to a conversation with my spiritual director.

Fr. Paul Doyle listened attentively to everything I had to say, and when I finished by asking for his insight and advice about how to best serve these people, he leaned back in his chair and said: “Brother, I just try to go in there and love ‘em.”

This was not exactly the kind of advice I had been hoping for or expecting – and yet I certainly knew, even then, the tremendous wisdom in this insight.

I think it’s the very same wisdom that inspired our Holy Father to announce a Year of the Priest to commemorate the 150th anniversary of St. John Vianney’s death – and, specifically to commence this yearlong celebration, today, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.


It is precisely in the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to whom we priests and seminarians of Holy Cross are particularly dedicated, that all priests find both the source and model of their ministry to God’s holy people.

Conformed as we are, by ordination, to Christ the Head and Shepherd, we must be filled with the same passionate love, the same self-sacrificing zeal that we contemplate and experience in the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Pierced by an awareness of our own sinfulness, and by feelings of helplessness in the face of suffering we cannot alleviate, our hearts, like the Heart of Christ must become a fountain of mercy and love, and of the sacramental grace that we have the privilege of administering.

This Year of the Priest we begin today, and this Provincial Chapter that gathers us here in discernment and prayer, these graced moments have the chance, if we let them, of deepening our commitment; of renewing within us the heart of Jesus Christ.

Like St. John Vianney we should ask those we serve to pray for us – that we might love them as they deserve: with "the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge." And we should strive to follow ever more closely the example of our own blessed founder, who exhorts us still:

“Let us enter into the Sacred Heart of Jesus, especially those of us honored to be priests and charged with bringing others into His heart. Let us celebrate the Sacred Mysteries within the heart of Jesus; let us recite our Office there; let us hear the confessions of our penitents there; and let us proclaim God’s Word there. Let us fulfill all our duties in the Sacred Heart of Jesus and He will permeate the work of our ministry with the most abundant blessings.”