John Eudes preached the mercy of the Sacred Heart to combat 17th century French Jansenism which had spread to many corners of the Church, including the seminaries. Jansenism included a number of heresies, a very negative view of the human person, and a moral rigorism that tended toward scrupulosity, an unhealthy and unreasonable fear that God would condemn a soul to hell for the smallest infraction.
In our modern day, moral rigorism is not the scourge it once was. However, the opposite vice, seems to be operant: moral laxity—the belief that nothing we do could result in damnation—an indifference to sin. Pope St. John Paul II lamented the loss of the sense of sin which leads to complicity in it.
John Eudes preached a middle road, the Catholic road: that a total love and trust in the merciful heart of Jesus leads us to repent, to seek freedom from sin trusting that our Good and Loving God wants to see us thrive in the spiritual life. “Let us therefore give ourselves to God,” says St. John Eudes, “with a great desire to begin to live thus, and beg Him to destroy in us the life of the world of sin, and to establish His life within us.”
“Our wish, our object, our chief preoccupation,” he says “must be to form Jesus in ourselves, to make his spirit, his devotion, his affections, his desire, and his disposition live and reign there.”
In his treatise on the Sacred Heart, St. John Eudes gives us a marvelous summary of the life of the Christian: “There will be no true life for you except in Jesus Christ for he is the source of true life. He must be both the source and purpose of your life. You are one with Jesus as the body is one with the head; you must then have one breath with him, one soul, one life, one will, one mind, one heart. And he must be your breath, heart, love, life, your all.”
May St. John Eudes help us to repent of sin, to trust in the Lord’s mercy, to live and love in union with His most sacred Heart, the furnace of All Love, for the glory of God and salvation of souls.
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For the return of all who have wandered from the Sacraments, for those who do not believe in God and for those whose love for God has grown tepid, and for all those who sadly suffer from scrupulosity, for a trust in the Mercy of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
That the young students of our school beginning classes this week may know the love of Christ in their families, that each school family may seek to practice right religion to the honor of God.
That the mercy of the Sacred Heart may bring peace to all those who suffer: for the sick and diseased, for those undergoing surgery this week, for the destitute and despairing, for all victims of war, violence, and abuse, and for those who will die today and the consolation of their families.
For the repose of the souls of our beloved dead, for all of the poor souls in purgatory, and for N., for whom this mass is offered.
O God, who know that our life in this present age is subject to suffering and need, hear the prayers of those who cry to you and receive the prayers of those who believe in you. Through Christ our Lord.
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