According to this report in the New York Times, Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, wants to fight a culture war with a Catholic flag: “I want a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag,” she is heard to say in a recording, “because I have to look across the lagoon at the Pride flag for the next month.”
But Ms. Alito said that after she suggested the Sacred Heart of Jesus flag as a retort to the symbol for L.G.B.T.Q. rights, her husband said, “Oh, please, don’t put up a flag.”
She said that she had agreed, for now, but that she had told him that “when you are free of this nonsense,” “I’m putting it up and I’m going to send them a message every day, maybe every week. I’ll be changing the flags.”
That in the secular world the month of June is dedicated to LGBTQ+ Pride celebrations is no secret. Pride flags are ubiquitous; they fly from governmental, commercial and personal flag poles, and decorate city streets (where teenagers making donuts or skidding about may face arrest for vandalism). Less well-known — even among Catholics — is that long before Pride Month was a thing, the church has dedicated the month of June to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Which is wonderful. As far as I’m concerned you can’t over-promote awareness of, and devotion to, the Sacred Heart.
As with anything connected to the faith, however, you can inspire ignorance and a kneejerk curled lip toward the Sacred Heart, weakening understanding and subjecting it to ridicule, if you decide to wield it as an ideological weapon in the world.
For all I know, Mrs. Alito has a strong and sincere devotion to the Sacred Heart and is venting out of ideological frustration toward a world marching to very different tunes than her own. Perhaps she was speaking rashly and hadn’t thought the thing through.
I hope so, because it pained me, truly, to imagine someone buying a flag depicting the Sacred Heart and flying it only as a rebuke — used to be “against” anything (particularly in a spirit of partisan politics) rather than to be “for” something much greater, deeper, more lasting and more faithful than the passing pageantry of an age.
The Sacred Heart of Jesus deserves better than to be used as a standard for either militancy or triumphalism within the church — it deserves much better than to be subjected to ideologies when doing so can so frequently lead to idolatry. Because at its core, the Sacred Heart is not a battle ground but a refuge — a place in which we believers can place all of our concerns, the personal and the pressing and even the political — in complete confidence that within its boundless depths we are seen, heard and helped.
Trusting in that, we go forward into a teeming, chaotic world with a sense of peace and charity — yes, charity, even toward those with whom we may disagree — which is what Jesus asks of us in the Gospels.
Advancing charity into the world over spitting, impotent anger, can only be a good thing. Because whatever is going on in the world that’s making you feel crazed will not be resolved by your personal anger, fear, frustration or flag-flying. It simply won’t. Remaining in a continuous state of rage as you scroll through social media or read the headlines will do nothing to change whatever you want to see changed.
There are things visible and invisible. And humanity naturally has a habit of putting most of its stock and energy into the visible and thinking, “there, that’s doing something,” even though what is invisible is where the power resides.
Of ourselves we can do very little. But we can make ourselves a conduit by which the Holy Spirit may flow, create a pipeline through which real power — the unseen, supernatural stuff borne on the subversive act of praying — may pierce the veil and bring forth the purposes of God which, though always to the good, we do not always understand as well as we think we do.
I never thought I’d be quoting from Strange Gods 11 years after its publication, but this may be more true today than it was when I wrote it:
We get ideas, and we embrace them and pet them and polish them until they own us and hinder us, and we are no longer free. God — far from punishing us for having ideas — works to reach past the strange gods, to keep us with him. … Why? Only for love. We humans can’t help ourselves. We naturally try to make sense of the world by putting everything, including God, love, and life into manageable compartments. Then we label the compartments and hide within our ideas, which we come to worship, because those, at least, we think we understand.
But then God — who created a world of order that far surpasses our attempts at order — points his cannons at those heaping compartments and goes “ba-boom!” And when we ask (because we never learn), “Why did you do that when I had it all so beautifully thought out and settled?” God says, “It was blocking my love. My love couldn’t reach you with all that stuff in the way.”
I have a necklace that depicts the Sacred Heart. I wear it because I love it and because I have made a personal promise to promote its devotion as much as I can. I would be horrified if someone saw it on me in the month of June and thought I was looking for a fight, when all I want is to tell people is that they are seen, known and loved within this heart that burns to be seen, known and loved back.
I cannot think of a better message to deliver in these roiling times.
Sacred Heart Image by Margaret Rose Realy, Obl. OSB
