Sacred Heart of Jesus, FEAST OF, a modern festival of the Roman Catholic Church. Its origin is traced to a vision which is recorded of a French Visitation nun named Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647–90), who lived at Paray-le-Monial (q.v.). This devotion was gradually propagated in France, approved by Clement XIII. in 1765, and extended to the whole church in 1856, Sister Marguerite Marie being beatified in 1864. The festival is held on the Friday (in England on the Sunday) after the octave of Corpus Christi. Of many churches dedicated to the Sacred Heart by far the most splendid is that erected on Montmartre, the highest point of Paris, in 1874–91, at a cost of nearly a million sterling. The faithful worship the heart of Jesus, considered 'not as mere flesh, but as united to the divinity;' and the heart is chosen because it is a symbol of charity and of the inner life. The heart of the Blessed Virgin, on the same principle, is venerated by the Roman Church.—There is a cloistered order of nuns of the Sacré Cœur, which was founded at Paris in 1800 by Fr. Varin and Mme. Barat, approved in 1826, and has very numerous houses in Europe, America, and Australasia. The chief of these in England is at Roehampton, in Ireland at Roscrea. Its members teach the higher branches of girls' education.
See Bongauid, Histoire de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie (5th ed. 1880); and Nilles, De Rationibus Festorum Sacratissimi Cordis (1875).