Heart of the Redeemer: Second Edition

This is a great and important book - a comprehensive scholarly work on the Sacred Heart, which is also filled with moving faith and reverence. That is to say, this book is rare in combining a remarkable level of scholarship with real piety and beauty! Alas, too often these two orientations are not united! There are pious books filled with genuine devotion to God, but with such a degree of simplification and excess, that I have trouble being sure the the scholarship is sound. Then there are dry academic texts, whose authors, I am sure, are well versed in exegesis, dogmatics and more, but who seem to have forgot that God exists! I am very happy to say then, that O' Donnell appears as a scholar possessed with faith and heart. In fact, it is not difficult for me to imagine certain people mistaking the author's pious approach for something lightweight. I can only pray that such folk may persist. Many sections of this book will repay careful study and re-reading. At least, I have found a great depth indeed, more than perhaps immediately meets the eye. Moreover, this is a volume, which is the result of a serious sense of mission or vocation. As the author himself writes: "It was only after a great deal of serious reflection that I decided to write this book, which is an outgrowth of studies begun in the Angelicum in Rome in 1978. I chose to write on the loving Heart of our Lord because I believe the devotion to be of vital importance today ... I firmly believe that the spirituality fostered by this devotion can best meet the spiritual needs of our age. It is a practical form of spirituality which emphasizes famialiaritis cum Christo ... in an age which is characterized by an increasingly hostile secularization, a spirituality which centers on love and aims at setting the world on fire is precisely what is needed to instaurare omnia in Christo." The moral seriousness in these words is borne out by the text itself. For here is an abundance - the clear evidence of years of dedicated research, leading to nothing less than a masterful and comprehensive synthesis in one volume of the theology and history of the Sacred Heart devotion. Clearly the author has felt this necessary. Necessary, for as he explains, there seems to be concerted effort to relegate the devotion to the Sacred Heart to a minor, optional part of the Catholic Faith, partly due to the notion that the devotion stems from nothing more than a private revelation to a cloistered, seventeenth century nun - that is to say, St Margeurite-Marie in Paray-le-Monial, France. By contrast, O' Donnell has endeavoured to show that the cult of the Sacred Heart rests on rich and complex scriptural and dogmatic foundations. Not to say, the insight and experience of many a medieval mystic ... What wealth there is here! The author begins with Old Testament reflections on the heart, before moving on to the New Testament, Patristic and Medieval Theology. Too much is on offer here for me to detail, but to gi