In a sense, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus begins when our Savior’s heart was pierced with a lance and blood and water flowed out. Yet it was not until the 11th and 12th centuries that devotion to the Sacred Heart began to take shape and develop in the Benedictine and Cistercian monasteries, thanks to some familiar saints. 

• St. Bernard of Clairvaux inspired many to see the Heart of Christ as a cause of our love of God. St. Bonaventure had a deep devotion to the Sacred Heart, too. So did St. Francis of Assisi and St. Gertrude.
• The 17th century began the major developments in the growth of devotion to the Sacred Heart. St. Francis de Sales helped promote this devotion through his spiritual writings centered on the “heart-to-heart” connection between God and humanity and by co-founding the Order of the Visitation of Holy Mary, the religious community to which St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, “Apostle of the Sacred Heart,” later belonged.
• St. John Eudes, ardent founder of devotion to the hearts of Jesus and Mary, wrote the book The Sacred Heart of Jesus and promoted the first feast of the Sacred Heart, celebrated in Rennes, France, on Aug. 31, 1670.
• The devotion spread universally in the Church when Jesus appeared to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque on June 16, 1675, during the octave of Corpus Christi. Jesus asked that the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart be celebrated on the Friday after the Corpus Christi octave “in reparation for the ingratitude of men for the sacrifice that Christ had made for them.” And he gave 12 promises concerning his Sacred Heart.
• By 1856, Blessed Pius IX made it a universal feast for the Church and consecrated the entire human race to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In 1899, Leo XIII urged everyone’s devotion and personal consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus with his encyclical Annum Sacrum.
• Since then, popes have written encyclicals promoting the Sacred Heart and universal and individual consecration, including Pope Francis’ Dilexit Nos in 2024.