The Mystery of Easter*
Substance and Foundation of Devotion to the Sacred
Heart
Excerpt from: Joseph Ratzinger, Behold The Pierced One, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 1986.
1. The Crisis in Devotion to the Sacred Heart In the Age of Liturgical
Reform
Although the encyclical Haurietis aquas was written at
a time when devotion to the Sacred Heart was still alive in the forms of the
nineteenth century, a crisis in this kind of devotion was already clearly detectable.
More and more, the spirituality of the liturgical movement was dominating the
Church’s spiritual climate in Central Europe; this spirituality, drawing its
nourishment from the classical shape of the Roman liturgy, deliberately turned
its back on the emotionalistic piety of the nineteenth century and its
symbolism. It saw its model in the strict form of the Roman orationes, in which
feeling is restrained and there is an extreme sobriety of expression, free of
all subjectivity.
Along with this went a theological cast of mind which wanted
to steer entirely by Scripture nd the Fathers, fashioning itself equally strictly
according to the objective structural laws of the Christian edifice. The more emotional
emphases of modern times were to be subordinated once more within this
objective form. This meant, first and foremost, that Marian piety as well as those
modern forms of prayer of a christological stamp, the Stations of the Cross and
devotion to the Sacred Heart, had to retire into the background or else look
for new modes of expression.
