Sacred Heart Enthronement
If you would like to have the Sacred Heart of Jesus enthroned in your home, the process is very simple. Have an image of the Sacred Heart blessed. Once it is blessed, contact Don and Karen Slegers (320-983-6293) or St. Mary’s parish office (320-983-3255). There are also sign-up sheets in the church entries of St. Mary’s, Milaca and St. Louis, Foreston.
​Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the symbol of God’s infinite love for the human race. Divine love is different than human love in at least two ways. First, God does not love us because of what we do; rather, He loves us because of who He is. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as expiation for our sins (1 John 4:10). This means that no sin, no matter how large or ugly or embarrassing, can make God stop loving us. Second, Divine Love imparts a responsibility to human persons to love God in return. You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind (Matthew 22:37).
This means we have the capacity to succeed or fail in our response to God. In this arena, habitual success is called virtue and habitual failure, or sin, is called vice. Virtue leads to God in heaven; vice, if unrepented, leads to absence of God in hell. God desires no one to slide along the way of vice and provides many graces to aid souls in doing good and avoiding evil. We often receive these graces more effectively when we have a visible reminder of God’s infinite love for each of us. Perhaps the best such reminder is the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Sacred Heart devotion is intimately related to devotion to the Eucharist: it is a most effective means of living always in the company of Jesus whom we receive in Holy Communion. It consists of an ardent love for the Lord in the Eucharist with grief at seeing Him so little honored, and it includes acts of reparation for the contempt and offenses committed against Him. Our devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is an extended act of love for Him who shows us the greatest possible love by offering His Body and Blood for us in the Eucharistic sacrifice. It is the contemplation of the profound mystery that in Jesus, God loves us with a human heart.
What is Home Enthronement?
Since 2017, we launched an effort to promote prayer in the homes and among the families of our parishes through the celebration of the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart. Praying together as a family affords great protection against all that is going on in the world these days threatening the peace and tranquility of family life. The Enthronement of an image of the Sacred Heart prominently in the home manifests the family’s desire to have Christ rule the hearts and minds of the members of the family or household, providing an extension of the protection we receive in our participation in Mass and frequent reception of Holy Communion. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus reminds us that God loves us with a human heart, and we are given the model of how to fulfill our obligations to one another in Christian charity.
A blessed image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is used in the Enthronement ceremony which is led by the head of the family or fellow parishioners who have been trained to conduct the Enthronements. The Enthronement ceremony itself only takes about 15 minutes of time.
​
