Imagine a crown of thorns surrounding your heart, pressing in on it, piercing it, and causing an almost unbearable pain. Most parents can imagine this. Maybe your child has lost or abandoned the faith or been sick or injured, or maybe he is going through some mental health or physical struggles. All of these things tear at our hearts just like an actual thorn would.
Now imagine these thorns around the heart of our Lord.
Throughout the month of June—a month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus—the Church asks us to ponder the beauty of His Sacred Heart. Jesus Himself told us that He wants us to venerate His Sacred Heart. In 1673, He appeared to Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque and told her, “My Sacred Heart is so intense in its love for men, and for you in particular, that not being able to contain within it the flames of its ardent charity, they must be transmitted through all means.”
Christ appeared to Sister Margaret Mary with His heart on fire outside His chest and surrounded by a crown of thorns. That crown of thorns, of course, reminds us of Good Friday when those who mocked, tortured, and killed Him also pressed a crown of two-inch-long thorns into His precious head. The pain must have been excruciating.
As we enter June, let us take time to contemplate the immense love Christ has for all of us and think about the actions we can take to please His heart. And let us pay special attention to the thorns surrounding it and to our role in the pain we and the evils of the world cause Him, for the evils that tear at Christ’s heart should also tear at our own.
Abortion is one of the greatest evils imaginable. Christ’s precious heart—a heart that loves us more than we can ever fathom—longs for us to care for and protect the vulnerable and to treat them as He would. When we take the life of one of His beloved children, Jesus’ heart is filled with sorrow, just as it was on the day He was crucified.
St. Claude de La Colombière once wrote of Christ’s suffering on Good Friday:
His heart is full of bitter sorrow; every violent passion is unleashed against him and all nature is in turmoil, yet amid all this confusion, all these temptations, his heart remains firmly directed to God.
Because we know well the words Jesus spoke and the laws of the Church, we know that His heart aches when His children choose to ignore His teachings. And so His suffering is not limited to just Good Friday.
Imagine the bitter sorrow He must experience when He watches abortionists tear the limbs from a baby’s torso or when a scared or misguided mother takes a pill that will kill the child within her.
We can imagine that those thorns pierce His heart every time an innocent child’s heart stops beating.
The only way to protect His Sacred Heart and to give Him the love that He deserves is to protect the people whom He has helped create, the people He holds boundless love for. We cannot show proper love to Jesus if we are destroying His creations or if we advocate for their destruction.
So during the month when we venerate Christ’s Sacred Heart, I challenge you to take action. Think about what you can do to protect the heart of Christ by protecting His vulnerable children. What can you do to keep the thorns from causing Him pain?
Will you pray in front of Planned Parenthood? Will you donate to or volunteer at a pregnancy help center? Will you courageously talk about the evils of abortion? Will you support—emotionally or financially—a single mom in your parish? Will you pray for an end to the horrors of abortion?
St. John Henry Newman once wrote,
O make my heart beat with Thy Heart. Purify it of all that is earthly, all that is proud and sensual, all that is hard and cruel, of all perversity, of all disorder, of all deadness. So fill it with Thee, that neither the events of the day nor the circumstances of the time may have power to ruffle it; but that in Thy love and Thy fear it may have peace.
When we sacrifice children at the altar of convenience and stop their beating hearts, we wound Christ’s Sacred Heart and drive those thorns deeper. Until we fill our hearts with Christ’s love and allow that love to permeate our words and actions, we will flounder in a material world devoid of love, devoid of hope, and devoid of joy. And until we purify our hearts of all that is cruel and perverse, peace will be just an illusion.
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We need to gross out the public and show/explain to the ignorant what an abortion actually does to the life within; we have social media now and ultrasounds from every angle – use the modern tools to change the hearts of billions.
I read a long time ago that you cannot reason with a person who did not arrive at his/her position through reason. When you meet a pro-abortion woman who yells “my body my choice” you can explain till you are blue in the face that it is not her body, that high school biology would demonstrate that, and they still shout “my body my choice.
The militant pro-abortionists want sex without responsibility, and facts and reason have noting to do with it for them.
I do not know the answer. We all had high hopes after Dobbs, but now with mail-order abortion drugs the numbers are as bad as ever. I keep praying.
Where were you when Jesus died for you? That was two thousand years ago. You didn’t exist, except in the mind of God. He knew you. He loved you and had done so from all eternity.
That night in the garden when, in His divinity, He saw all the horror and torture that would soon be inflicted upon Him, He, in His humanity, asked the Father if this chalice could be removed from Him. (It would be difficult to believe He was fully human if He hadn’t.)
Yet in His divinity He saw what eternity would be like without you. That was more horrifying to Him than anything the Romans were about to do to Him. He resolved to do whatever it took to have you with Him forever. You are precious to Him.
When they came looking for Jesus to arrest Him He boldly announced “I am He” with a divine resolve the strength of which caused them to fall to the ground. It was His love for you that put such power in that announcement.
Two thousand years went by and you arrived in the material world in your mother’s womb. Did God then decide that He really didn’t care about you for the next nine months? Did He decide that He would resume loving you only after you were born? Did God do that?
No He didn’t. There is no nine-month gap in God’s eternal love for you.
Every abortion kills someone precious to God.
Whatever we fail to do for the least of His brethren we fail to do for Jesus, the One Who loved us — before we were even born — like no other has or ever will.
harry, please see my reply below.
Meditating on what an abortion means to God I can appreciate Susan Ciancio’s identification with wounding Christ’s heart. After all, all life is created through him. All life is created for him.
My thoughts generally wander around the mystery of Man created in his own image. Isn’t it then equivalent to a killing of him? He frequently reveals himself as a babe in arms, as he did with the visions of St Anthony of Padua, a child appearing on the altar to St Maria Faustina. Smiling at the priest disappearing when the Eucharist is consumed. What image of tenderness and pure love surpasses a smiling infant. Yet we murder them with ferocity, fiercely opposing anyone who seeks to endanger their right to slaughter their own infants, to render a woman’s woman the most dangerous place for an infant to be. Diabolic.
If we contemplate the mystery of eternity, Man made in God’s image possesses an eternal lifetime. Life the great gift Love the greater in Ps 63. If pure love is rejected, murdered at random in the womb moreso than on battlefields, pestilence, earthquakes what repulsion must affect God at Judgment?
To render a woman’s [womb] the most dangerous place for an infant to be. To add to the correction of my mistype some decades past a group of Spanish psychiatrists made a study which indicated that the infant learns love and its expression while in the womb from its mother. That ill sentiment toward the prenatal infant precipitates bad behavior.
Please publicize this youtube video from Dr. Anthony Levatino M.D. Gynecologist Obstetrician and former abortionist detailing the horrors of abortion procedures, including the pill, at the different stages of pregnancy. Show it especially to young women who are not told in school the true details of abortion at the different stages; in this video age this is a most effective way to combat the killings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hqoLEhrGmQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZDhM5Gwhk&t=269s
Thank you for this wonderful meditation. The verity of this should move a cold heart: “When they came looking for Jesus to arrest Him He boldly announced ‘I am He’ with a divine resolve the strength of which caused them to fall to the ground. It was His love for you that put such power in that announcement.”
Only an innocent person can boldly pronounce, as Jesus did, ‘I am He’ with a divine resolve the strength of which caused falls to the ground.
His breath, carrying the utterance of His word, surely did blast the soldiers with unearthly force. Just so, the tone of the beloved baby’s voice will do to his beloved mother when God introduces them one day.
Thank you, meiron. God bless you.