The Month of June Is Dedicated To...

The Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.
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How do we serve God faithfully? We serve Him only as faithfully as we serve Him lovingly, by giving ourselves to the needs of everyone whom God puts into our lives. No one reaches heaven automatically. Heaven must be dearly paid for. The price of reaching heaven is the practice of selfless love here on earth.
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That is why God puts into our lives so many occasions for loving people who obviously do not love us, or giving ourselves to people who have never given themselves to us. How desperately we need, especially in today’s world, to learn that God became man in order to suffer and die out of love for us on the Cross.
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That is what devotion to the Sacred Heart is all about. It is the practice of selfless love toward selfish people. It is giving ourselves to persons that do not give themselves to us. In all of our lives, God has placed selfish persons who may be physically close to us, but spiritually are strangers and even enemies. That is why God places unkind, unjust, even cruel people into our lives. By loving them, we show something of the kind of love that God expects of His followers.
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Devotion of the Sacred Heart is the solution to the gravest problem in the modern world today. How can we give ourselves to those who do not love us, who even positively hate us? We can love them, with the help of divine grace, by following the example of Jesus Christ, who died on the Cross out of love for a sin-laden human race. - Fr. Hardon

Photo:  Altar of the Sacred Heart in Notre Dame, Montreal, Quebec to which I felt irresistibly drawn when I first visited the church.  It was before this image of Christ appearing to St. Margaret Mary that my conversion 'began' in the summer of 1971.  Not sure what I was doing, I lit a candle and asked the Sacred Heart of Jesus to "be patient with me because I can't give it (sin) up just yet."  The following spring I returned to the Church after another call from the Sacred Heart.
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A very efficacious prayer is this one: "Sacred Heart of Jesus I place all my trust in you."  Your salvation may depend upon it.
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My loving Jesus, out of the grateful love I bear you, and to make reparation for my unfaithfulness to grace, I give You my heart, and I consecrate myself wholly to You; and with Your help I purpose to sin no more. Amen. (Raccolta, n. 260)