Pope Speaks about Sacred Heart of Jesus

Pope Benedict recently spoke about the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He
encourages Christians to pause to listen to the beat of their own hearts,
and even "more deeply, the beating of a trustworthy presence...of Christ".
As we prepare for Sydney, be sure to stop and listen. Draw near to the
Heart of Jesus and discover a true pilgrim's heart! This Heart loves the
Father and trusts in His care. We ask Jesus to help us to do the same!
To find out more about the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the "traditional
offering prayer" to which the Holy Father refers, check out the
Apostleship of Prayer website: www.apostleshipofprayer.org. Below is the
Holy Father's address. Yours, Fr. Will

"Dear Brothers and Sisters,
On this Sunday, the first day of June, I would like to note that this
month is traditionally dedicated to the Heart of Christ, a symbol of the
Christian faith that is dear to the faithful, to the mystics and to
theologians because it expresses in a simple and authentic way the "glad
tidings" of love, summarizing the mystery of the Incarnation and the
Redemption in itself.

Friday we celebrated the solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the
third and final of the feasts that follow Easter, after the Most Holy
Trinity and Corpus Christi. This succession of feasts brings to mind a
movement toward the center: a movement of the Spirit that is guided by
God himself. From the infinite horizon of his love, in fact, God desired
to enter into the limits of history and the human condition, he took on
a body and a heart; thus we can contemplate and meet the infinite in the
finite, the mystery of the invisible and ineffable human heart of Jesus,
the Nazarene.

In my first encyclical on the theme of love, the point of departure was
the gaze turned toward Christ's pierced side, of which John speaks in
his Gospel(cf. John19:37; "Deus Caritas Est," 12). And this center of
the faith is also the font of the hope in which we have been saved, the
hope that I made the object of my second encyclical. Every person needs
a "center" in his life, a source of truth and goodness to draw from in
the flux of the different situations of everyday life and its toil.
Every one of us, when he pauses for a moment of silence, needs to feel
not only the beating of his own heart, but more deeply, the beating of a
trustworthy presence, perceptible to the senses of faith and yet more
real: the presence of Christ, heart of the world.

And so I invite everyone to renew his devotion to the Sacred Heart of
Christ in the month of June, making use of the traditional prayer of the
offering of the day and keeping in mind the intentions that I have
proposed to the whole Church. Along with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the
liturgy invites us to venerate the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Let us
always entrust ourselves to her with great confidence.

Once again I would like to invoke the Virgin's maternal intercession for
the people of China and Myanmar, stricken by natural disasters, and for
those who are dealing with the many situations of suffering, of sickness
and material and spiritual misery that mark the journey of humanity."