Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE The Sacred Heart of Jesus is one of the most recognizable images in Catholic devotional life, yet for many modern Catholics it has become wallpaper — a picture above a doorframe whose meaning has faded into familiarity. 'The Glories of the Sacred Heart,' published by TAN Books, sets out to recover that meaning. The book is a devotional and theological treatment of the Heart of Jesus as both symbol and reality: the physical heart of the incarnate Son of God, wounded in death, offered in love, and now the inexhaustible source of mercy available to every soul. Drawing on the tradition of reparative devotion that runs from Margaret Mary Alacoque through the Jesuit apostolate of the nineteenth century, the text addresses Catholics who sense that their prayer life has grown thin and who want a concrete, historically grounded object around which to organize their interior life. It is suited equally to private devotion and to parish formation programs focused on the renewal of Eucharistic and affective piety. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The book affirms the unity of body and soul in its central argument that Christ's physical heart is the proper sign of his love — not a metaphor substituted for something more spiritual, but a real organ that has bled and now reigns. This grounding in the Incarnation respects the Catholic anthropological claim that the body is not incidental to the person but constitutive of it. - **Fallen**: The text addresses the human heart's habitual turning away from love it has already received — ingratitude, distraction, tepidity in prayer — as the specific wound that devotion to the Sacred Heart is designed to heal. This is not generic sin-talk; it targets the particular disorder of affective coldness, which Aquinas would locate in a failure of the concupiscible appetite to respond rightly to the highest good. - **Redeemed**: Reparation is the book's operative category of redemption. The reader is invited not merely to receive mercy passively but to offer, in union with Christ's own self-gift, a response of love that participates in the restoration of right order. This is a specifically Thomistic shape of redemption: grace does not bypass nature but elevates it, so the wounded heart becomes the instrument of its own healing. - **Justice (adoration)**: The book trains the virtue of adoration in the technical sense Aquinas gives it in the Secunda Secundae — the act of the will that renders to God what is supremely due. By presenting the Sacred Heart as the concentrated locus of divine love made visible, it gives the reader a concrete anchor for that act rather than leaving adoration as a vague aspiration. - **Prudence (docility)**: The devotional tradition the book transmits is explicitly received, not invented. Its posture is one of docility to a form of prayer tested over centuries, which corresponds to the integral part of prudence Aquinas calls docilitas — the willingness to be taught by those who have gone before. SECTION THREE The nineteenth-century Jesuit literature documented by de Guibert[^1] shows that works like Arthur Vermeersch's 'Pratique et doctrine de la devotion au Sacre-Coeur' (1906) — revised through seven editions — and the devotional florilegia of Toussaint Dufau occupied precisely the same pastoral niche this TAN volume fills: systematic doctrinal grounding for an affective devotion that might otherwise float free of theology.[^2] Royo Marin's bibliographical survey of Sacred Heart titles within the Alphonsian school confirms that this devotion had parallel expression across religious families, with figures like Lamballe and anonymous compilers contributing texts that united contemplative theology with accessible piety.[^3] 'The Glories of the Sacred Heart' stands in that same tradition of integration, offering the modern Catholic reader what those earlier compilations offered their audiences: a structured argument that love for the Heart of Jesus is not sentiment but the most precise theological act the creature can perform. ## References [^1]: de Guibert, J. (1964). *The spirituality of the Society of Jesus: A historical study* (Paul Doyle, S.J., Trans.). Institute of Jesuit Sources. (Referencing Vermeersch, A., *Pratique et doctrine de la devotion au Sacre-Coeur*, Tournai, 1906, noted in the Jesuit spiritual literature survey.) [^2]: de Guibert, J. (1964). *The spirituality of the Society of Jesus*. Institute of Jesuit Sources. (Referencing Dufau, T., *Beautés de l'âme contemplées dans le Coeur de Jésus*, Gand, 1863.) [^3]: Royo Marin, A. (1962). *Teologia de la perfeccion cristiana* (4th ed.). Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. (Referencing *El Sagrado Corazón de Jesús*, 1920, within the Alphonsian-school bibliography.)
✓ Strengths
- ✓Centers the Sacred Heart as a concrete object of devotion rather than an abstract theological category, giving the reader a specific focus for affective prayer and interior growth.
- ✓Situates devotion to the Heart of Jesus within the tradition of reparation, helping the reader understand suffering and self-offering as participation in Christ's own redemptive act.
- ✓Trains the virtue of adoration by presenting the Sacred Heart as the supreme emblem of God's love for humanity, orienting the soul's highest desires toward their proper object.
- ✓Supports the formation of a regular devotional life — promises associated with the Sacred Heart give concrete shape to the practice of prayer and fidelity across time.
- ✓Engages the affective dimension of the person, addressing the heart's capacity for love and its tendency toward distraction, which corresponds to Aquinas's account of the passions as ordered or disordered toward the good.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The devotional genre can encourage affective consolation as the primary measure of spiritual progress; readers formed in drier temperaments or in the apophatic tradition (John of the Cross) may need supplementary guidance on navigating aridity.