My Heart for Yours: A review of Sacred Heart: His Reign Has No End

From time immemorial, the heart has been the organ of the divine. While the head processes information, the heart gives life to the body by sending blood to every cell that needs nourishment, just as God distributes His divine life through the sacraments.

It is only right that the human heart of Jesus is a source of devotion, as the epicenter of the blood He shed for the world. While this has always been part of Catholic belief and history, specific devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

Sacred Heart: His Reign Has No End is a beautiful new documentary that dramatizes Alacoque’s mystical experience and how this private revelation has changed the lives of millions. If you need the love of the Savior, maybe His Heart can help you as well.

Alacoque was a French nun whose childhood was marked by illness, financial strain, and much suffering. After entering the convent, she began to experience visions of Jesus expressing sadness over the ingratitude and sinfulness of humanity. He wanted Alacoque to convey the overflowing love He had for sinners and thus bring them back into communion with Him.

To this end, he taught her devotion to His Sacred Heart, showing his central organ on fire with love for humanity. This image and her writings became the impetus for the First Fridays devotion and the Feast of the Sacred Heart (the second Friday after Trinity Sunday).

The structure of Sacred Heart is like another classic in the genre of “saint biopic of Jesus devotion”: Love and Mercy: Faustina. The story of Alacoque is dramatized through actors, inter-spliced with various interviews about the saint and the Sacred Heart in general. The story section is straightforward, with minimal dialogue. Instead, it is used mostly as a backdrop to spoken exposition about the mystical visions.

The stories of common people whose lives have been changed after starting devotions to the Sacred Heart are more immediate and powerful.

There’s a young woman who lived a fast life filled with money, career, and distractions, who then learns to slow down and accept her faith. There’s a couple who initially did not share the Catholic faith, but grew closer in their twilight years after discovering the Sacred Heart.

My favorite is a drug dealer who, like St. Moses the Black, has a radical conversion after encountering Christ’s burning love for him despite his long rap sheet. In Matthew 7, Christ says you will know the truth of His followers “by their fruits,” and Alacoque’s visions have certainly produced a beautiful and bountiful cornucopia of grace.

Central to Alacoque’s visions was the idea of replacing one’s own heart with the heart of Jesus, an image drawn from the prophet Ezekiel: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.” Jesus revealed this concept in a gorgeous but somewhat shocking way by literally ripping open his chest to show his own beating heart wrapped in a red glow, then putting his own heart into Alacoque’s body.

The film explores the story of a World War I veteran—a visual artist—who used his traumatic experiences of death to paint Jesus with an exposed side. It might seem grotesque to a modern audience, but it highlights the radical love of Christ for his people, that he is willing repeatedly to “break his Body” for the sake of his Church. Every time we consume the Eucharist, we consume his precious body, which was sacrificed for our sake.

The film moves at a deliberate pace and is sometimes repetitive, but always focuses on the truth that Christ is alive today and has the power to change lives.

While not the type of film to see as light evening entertainment, Sacred Heart is an excellent and inviting reflection, as we enter the month of the Sacred Heart, on this wondrous devotion. Paired with Eucharistic adoration afterwards, this is a beautiful and edifying way to spend an afternoon in June.