Like many Catholics growing up in the 1990s, Tiffany McGoey didn’t have an image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in her home . But about seven years ago she decided she wanted one. 

“When I found one that I loved, I showed my husband, and he said, ‘Oh my goodness, that is the picture that my grandmother had in her home,’” McGoey, 42, told the Register. 

Yet while the Sacred Heart devotion, which emphasizes Christ’s boundless love for every person, may have largely skipped a generation or two, the McGoeys have a lot of company now in the Archdiocese of New Orleans. 

This past weekend, McGoey helped distribute 750 images of the Sacred Heart to parishioners at Mary, Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Mandeville, Louisiana, where she serves as co-director of Evangelization, Engagement & Adult Formation. 

Church-goers snatched up the images of Jesus on their way out of Sunday Mass — so much so that the parish ran out. 

“It really seemed to touch people,” said Karen Baker, director of Parish Operations & Stewardship at Mary, Queen of Peace. 

The batch was part of 30,000 images the Archdiocese of New Orleans provided to parishes to promote devotion to the Sacred Heart, a focal point in the month of June. The colorful 8 ½-by-10-inch images, which depict Christ pointing to his pierced heart, are available free of charge at churches with the hope that they’ll reach every household in the archdiocese. 

The distribution is one of several evangelization efforts under way in connection with Archbishop James Checchio’s consecration of the Archdiocese of New Orleans to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on June 14  at St. Louis Cathedral in the city’s French Quarter. 

While the consecration at the cathedral was the main event, archdiocesan officials say they don’t want to just leave it there. 

“We wanted it to hit the home,” said Father Andrew Gutierrez, coordinator of pastoral formation at the archdiocese’s Notre Dame Seminary, who is also helping coordinate the archdiocese’s Sacred Heart program. “And home enthronements with the Sacred Heart are such an already made part of the devotion that it was easy to say, ‘We've got to do this.’” 

Archbishop Checchio told the Register he is hoping this renewed devotion to the Sacred Heart leads to an increase in Mass attendance, praying of the Rosary, vocations to the priesthood, and evangelistic outreach. 

“We're going to have people who are searching for something, people who are yearning for something, people who have drifted away, people who have been turned away for different reasons. So, we're going to be like the Father who runs out to greet people — He brings them, and welcomes them,” Archbishop Checchio said. 

A Heart that Heals 

The New Orleans consecration coincides with  the U.S. bishops’ recent consecration of the nation to the Sacred Heart, which took place at the recent  United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) meeting in Orlando on June 11. Other dioceses, such as Gary, Indiana, and Lincoln, Nebraska, have also followed suit with their own local consecrations. 

Archbishop Checchio, who has only recently been appointed to New Orleans, told the Register he heard about the national consecration during his work on the USCCB’s administrative committee and he decided to offer a similar consecration specifically for his new archdiocese — he became coadjutor in November 2025 and archbishop this past February. 

The Sacred Heart of Jesus offers a proper image of God’s love for human beings and for the love they are supposed to have for Him and for one another, the archbishop said, noting that authentic love requires both accepting and giving. 

“The heart has to receive blood, a healthy heart, and then it sends it out. So the heart has to be elastic and strong. And if it's damaged, if it's too soft or too hard, by different things, that's when we die,” Archbishop Checchio said. 

“Our spiritual hearts are the same way,” he said. “We have to be able to receive God's love, we have to be able to receive His mercy and His healing. Then we have to be able to share it.” 

When he arrived in New Orleans last fall, he told the Register, he noticed how much affection local Catholics have for their Church, even through scandal and bankruptcy. During the past year, the archdiocese has agreed to pay $305 million to several hundred victims of sex abuse by archdiocesan employees, many of them priests, and has used bankruptcy and the selling of Church assets to deal with the financial crisis. 

“They’re loyal,” the archbishop said of New Orleans Catholics. “Even with what they’ve been through, it still exists. We need to respond to that.” 

He said devotion to the Sacred Heart offers healing, with an invitation to unite the wounds of the hearts of human beings to the wounds of Jesus. 

It’s also an invitation to spread God’s love, he said. 

“The heart has to be able to share it, our spiritual hearts, with others. So if we're not receiving his love properly, then it's hard for us to share his love. And that's his final commandment to us – ‘love one another as I have loved you’,” Archbishop Checchio said, referring to John 13:34. 

Share the Love 

The Archdiocese of New Orleans prepared for the consecration through a kind of novena of Sundays — nine weeks in a row of special prayers during Sunday Masses. 

In the aftermath of the consecration, the archdiocese is beginning a new round of prayers at Sunday Masses over the next nine weeks, leading up to Welcome Home Sunday on Aug. 15 and 16, during which the archbishop is asking each parishioner to invite at least one person to Sunday Mass who ordinarily doesn’t go. 

He isn’t exempting himself, though he told the Register he hasn’t yet decided who he’s going to invite. 

But he already has one in the can. In early February, he said, two Louisiana state troopers picked him up and drove him to a Mardi Gras event, about a week and a half before Ash Wednesday. They started talking, and the archbishop learned that one of the troopers is a Catholic but hadn’t been going to church. 

“And I talked to him about why he should,” Archbishop Checchio told the Register. 

Last week, he said, a woman at an event told him that the trooper, who is dating her neighbor’s daughter, had followed the archbishop’s advice. 

“[The trooper] took you somewhere and came back and said, ‘The archbishop told me I have to start going to Mass,’” the woman told Archbishop Checchio. “And he started going to Mass.” 

And now, the woman said, the neighbor’s daughter is also going to Mass, with the trooper. 

A Constant Reminder 

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is rooted in the Scriptural account of a soldier piercing Christ’s heart in the aftermath of the Crucifixion. Popularized by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in the 17th century, the devotion has been promoted by several Popes, with the late Pope Francis dedicating his 2024 encyclical, Dilexit Nos, to the Sacred Heart. 

Sacred Heart-related practices include the First Friday devotion and “enthroning” an image of the Sacred Heart in a home or a community to acknowledge Christ’s kingship. 

Matthew Caire, head of school at Archbishop Rummel High School, which serves about 650 boys in grades 8 through 12 in Metairie, Louisiana, told the Register that he plans to have an image of the Sacred Heart installed in every classroom come beginning of school in mid-August. Caire has already enthroned an image of the Sacred Heart in a hallway in August 2024. 

“We have seen brotherhood amongst our students continue to deepen and grow year after year. So certainly the focus on the Sacred Heart is at least a part of that,” Caire told the Register. 

Father Robert Cooper, pastor of Mary, Queen of Peace, told the Register that parishioners came up to him after Sunday Mass this past weekend to discuss the Sacred Heart, including one man in his 20s who said, “You know, Father, at times I don't even love myself. But God loves me.” 

“So I think it was a beautiful thing to reawaken people's identity,” Father Cooper said. 

Baker, 66, who helped coordinate distribution of Sacred Heart images at Mary, Queen of Peace, said she got one for herself, and that she plans to frame it and put it in a prominent spot so her six grandchildren will notice it when they visit. 

She said she currently says morning prayer before the image in her bedroom, looking into the eyes of Jesus that lead “to the soul and to the heart.” 

“It's a reminder, a physical reminder that you look at Christ and you look at Jesus, the heart of His humanity and His divinity, and that's what we're called to imitate,” Baker said. 

McGoey said that Sacred Heart image that adorns her home helps her and her family remember that Christ loves them, “no matter what the circumstances are that we are enduring at the time.” By spreading the devotion, she hopes that others might experience something similar. 

“If just one person experienced the love of Christ this weekend, that it was all worth it,” McGoey said. “The hope is that everyone at least knows that Christ loves them unconditionally and that we can share that love with one another.”