Providence and Obedience: Colombière, the Jesuits, and the Sacred Heart

You might be wondering why Claude La Colombière was chosen among the many saints of the Sacred Heart that could have been contemplated during this season. In fact, this season is already a virtual carnival of beloved and well-known figures of holiness: St. Francis de Sales; recently named doctor of the Church, St. John Henry Newman; Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of the Holy Cross. And here I am addressing a Jesuit saint that many may not have much devotion to. And at least some may never have heard of the saint at all.

To offer an apology for our choice, I want to attend to two important dimensions of St. Claude’s story: one, he was the first to believe and confirm St. Margaret Mary’s Alacoque’s visions at Paray-le-Monial around the Sacred Heart. And two, he was able to believe St. Margaret Mary because, in the end, he was a member of the Society of Jesus—a claim that will be born out at the end of this piece. It was this Society of Jesus that would become the most important protagonist of this devotion in the centuries after St. Margaret Mary and St. Claude’s deaths.

But none of that is why he is a saint. He is a saint because he was obedient to Christ’s love revealed in the Sacred Heart unto the end.

The Biography of St. Claude

St. Claude was born in Saint-Syphorien-d’Ozon on February 2, 1641. He would die at the age of forty-one after having served as a Jesuit orator, preacher, retreat and novice master, and spiritual director in the Society of Jesus—a company he joined in 1658. St. Claude was recognized as a gifted orator, teaching rhetoric at the College of the Trinity from 1670-73 and later as preacher at the college church in Lyon for a year. During this time, he underwent his Jesuit tertianship, and professed the fourth vow—obedience to the pope relative to the Missions. In 1675, he was made rector of the Jesuit community at Paray-le-Monial, an office that included spiritual directorship of the Visitation Sisters including St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

Before the arrival of St. Claude, St. Margaret Mary’s visions were not exactly embraced by previous directors nor her religious community. An earlier Benedictine counseled the Mother Superior that the best way of dealing with St. Margaret Mary’s visions was to give her more soup. She was hungry, not a mystic.

St. Claude recognized that St. Margaret Mary’s visions of the Sacred Heart were both congruent with Catholic doctrine and, well, true. Scholars have, in fact, noted that Jesuit prayer books (emblem books that united both text and image) may have shaped St. Margaret Mary’s very imagination relative to her encounter with Christ, giving her a store of images by which to take in her encounter with Christ.[1] One of these books from 1634, the Sacrum oratorium, concludes by inviting the reader to let her heart be united with Christ’s own heart. St. Margaret Mary had this precise vision on June 13, 1675 as St. Claude celebrated the Eucharist, offering her the Host. St. Margaret Mary saw the Host as a burning furnace, and there the hearts of St. Margaret Mary and St. Claude were united with the heart of Christ.

St. Claude, alongside St. Margaret Mary, consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart. We possess the complete text of this consecration, found in retreat notes he made when later missioned to London in 1677:

In reparation for so many outrages and for such cruel ingratitude, O adorable and loving Heart of my very loving Jesus, and that I may do all in my power to prevent myself from falling into such misery, I offer you my heart; I give myself entirely to you, and from this hour I sincerely desire to forget myself and all that concerns me so that I may do away with this barrier that prevents me from entering into the divine Heart that you have so lovingly opened to me and in which I long to enter so that I may live and die with your most faithful servants, penetrated through and through and even consumed by your love.[2]

One can see the various aspects of St. Margaret Mary’s vision: reparation, the love of Christ, and the offering of self that unites one to the very heart of Jesus.

St. Claude was not St. Margaret Mary’s spiritual director for long, even though they continued to exchange letters with one another. In 1676, he was sent to England where he became the spiritual director and preacher to the Duchess of York. There, he passed on devotion to the Sacred Heart. England’s climate was not conducive to St. Claude’s health. But the religious climate in England was also perilous. Awaiting his return to France, St. Claude was arrested in November of 1678 during a period of anti-Catholic propaganda. Jesuits were viewed suspiciously.

St. Claude was expelled from England to France. But his health was ruined. He would serve as spiritual director to Jesuit novices for two years before dying on February 15, 1682, spending one more week at Paray-le-Monial before he died. Ironically (and anticipating a later point providentially), St. Claude’s death led to the rapid spread of devotion to the Sacred Heart. St. Margaret Mary, whose religious community continued to doubt the veracity of her visions, could do so no longer. St. Claude’s writings testified to the wider Church relative to her visions. The two saints are yoked to one another, with St. Margaret Mary being canonized in 1920 and St. Claude canonized in 1992 by St. John Paul II.

Now, what does any of this have to do with the history of the Jesuits? St. Margaret Mary once said that the future of the devotion depended upon the sons of St. Ignatius. And indeed, in future years, it was the Jesuits who took responsibility for the spread of this devotion.[3] Because of Jesuit theological and devotional writing on the Sacred Heart, the devotion spread from France throughout the globe, including to China, Ecuador, and the United States. After the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, the Society of Jesus was welcomed in very few places, including Russia. During this time, former members of the Society continued to place their hope in the providential care of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, even giving thanks for Jesus’s providential care for their eventual restoration in 1815.[4] Over the next century and a half, it was the Jesuits who formed the Apostleship of Prayer and League of the Sacred Heart. Theologians as speculative as Karl Rahner defended devotion to the Sacred Heart, noting that the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the divine-human love of the God-man, “brings about its historical presence and salvific single-mindedness in the sinful world, and so provides us with the pledge that it and not the just anger of God is the first and ultimate word of God to the world.”[5] And the most important Jesuit in the last one hundred years, Pope Francis, wrote his final encyclical on the heart of Jesus.

Why Did the Jesuits Resonate with the Sacred Heart?

Now, why did St. Claude discern in St. Margaret Mary’s visions an orthodox devotion, one that could transform the life of every devotee? In short, see: St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.

If you have spent any time in a Jesuit institution, you have probably heard various accounts of these exercises—many of which, I think, tend to tone down the intensity of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s particular spiritual genius. Finding God in all things. Men and women for others. Make sure that you shed tears everyday out of awareness of your own emptiness before the grandeur of the God who loves you (that one has not quite caught on yet). St. Ignatius declares that the foundation of the exercises is the following: “Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.”

Let’s be honest, in reading this, you probably thought to yourself, “Well, that’s lovely. How beautiful human beings are created for such things.” But let’s be concise: in St. Ignatius, it is not the human person in general who is created for this. It is you. You, in all your sometimes sinful, sometimes apathetic, sometimes splendid particularity. Karl Rahner in his commentary on the exercises notes that the purpose of the exercises is a personal election. God has not just called human beings in general; God has called me. Rahner writes:

We should try to appreciate the grandeur and the weight of this sentence, and the same time look at the brutality, the darkness, the division, the poverty and sinfulness of the world and our own hearts, and then say: He is still infinite love! And that not in a vague, indefinable sense, but in such a way that He in His glory wants to be our inheritance and life. . . . This is not an ordinary gift; it is rather the self-gift of God of Himself to each and every one of us in our own unique situation. We can not only say “we,” but each one must also say: “I” am here.[6]

Elsewhere, Hans Urs von Balthasar argues that the rest of the exercises is dedicated to this fact. “God has called you! Jesus’ voice still speaks to you. You are called, and the decision each of us must make: am I obedient to that call? Do I receive the loving call that I am given, especially when it is difficult, or do I complain about the whole thing?“[7]

You can see why the Jesuits might have recognized something universally important in the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus: it resonated with their own sense that Jesus, in his burning and purifying fire, loves you. Each day, God calls you. Everything that happens to you on this earth is part of God’s call. And the task before you is obedience to God’s Providential care, even if sometimes it stings a bit. Often enough, as the Psalmist reminds us, it stings more than a bit.

St. Claude—He Was a Jesuit

Now, most of St. Claude’s writings—his Sermons, his Reflexions chretiennes sur divers sujects de piete, his Meditations sur la Passion, his Retraite spirituelle, and his Lettres spirituelles—do not pertain to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. But they do relate to the following themes: the love of God who wants to unite himself to each of us; his providential will in our lives; and therefore, the need for obedience to his will. In a 1678 letter, St. Claude writes:

You think you would be less distracted if you were away from the circumstances in which God has placed you; I think, on the contrary, that you would have fewer distractions if you accepted things with more conformity to God’s will and if, in your work, you thought of yourself as a servant of Jesus Christ whom he employs as it seems best to him and who is equally content in whatever service is exacted from her. Try to live in your present state as though you were never to leave it; think more of making good use of your crosses than of getting rid of them under pretext of having more liberty with which to serve God.[8]

Okay, St. Claude, did you just hear me complaining about the number of emails I have to answer? The student who takes up so much time that I am not able to get to Mass or do mid-day prayer? The long line at customs in Amsterdam’s airport that forced me to be almost late for my last flight? And yet, here St. Claude speaks plainly: embrace all that happens to you as the will of God, as an occasion to serve God.

Now, if you did not really believe in a good God, all of this might seem rather dreadful. If your vision of God is something akin to Jonathan Edwards’s sinners in the hands of an angry God, of a certain Jansenist fear of divine judgment (something that the Jesuit spent years fighting against), then you would see this will of God as nothing more than a certain divine sadism. Your boss treats you like you do not matter, like you are expendable: well, God is punishing you for your many sins. God hates you, and you deserve it. Maybe, the theme of next year’s Saturdays with the Saints?

This is not the God of St. Claude. In a sermon he delivered on submission to the will of God, he preaches:

Yes, Christians, everything that happens to us in this life happens by the order or permission of a God who always has loved us, and who loves us still more than we love ourselves. He regards us as his creatures, as his children, as his heirs, as his reflections. The benefits that we have received from him have surpassed all our desires; they surpass even our imaginings, and those [benefits] that we receive from him every day are without measure and without number. He has drawn us out of the void, and he is constantly dedicated to save our being and life. He has washed us in the blood of his own Son, and he feeds us today with the flesh of his only Son. Could a heart so tender and so loving resolve to do us the slightest evil; could it even allow that it be done to us, being able to stop it, as he can?[9]

God loves you, St. Claude says, and therefore God does nothing to you that would be harmful. We must embrace all things as ways of bringing us more closely into union with God. Even in the worst of situations, God providentially cares for us. The tender heart of Jesus is worried about us.

Now, embracing this fact takes a good deal of ascesis. We are not naturally inclined to this attitude. For example, I was in fact recently in Amsterdam waiting ninety minutes to get through customs. I took out my breviary to sanctify the rather hostile environment of a ninety-minute customs line. But in doing so, I found myself still very annoyed. How dare the woman behind me complain during sixty of our ninety minutes about waiting? Or what about the two women who cut in front of all of us in line? Surely, this is not the will of God, but moments of satanic actors who dare to be thrown into the chilliest, lowest level of hell.

And it is here that St. Claude says something rather interesting about the providence of God. After all, God is not pulling the strings on puppets, creating women who cut lines or complain about customs. Still, God has placed these people in my presence providentially. I can trust that God cares for me, considers me in all these moments. Again, from St. Claude’s sermons:

But to be happy to depend for everything on his paternal Providence; to wait, without unease and in the most urgent occasions, for the help that he has promised to us; to do more fundamentally on his word than on all human means; to rely on him for all our cares; to sleep, so to speak, in his arms in the strongest of horrible storms—this is what is called to believe truly that there is a God, and to have from him an idea corresponding to his infinite grandeur.[10]

It is not so much that God is a puppet master, but that even in the darkest of darkness, there is the burning, flaming love of Christ. God brings us through this darkness toward new life. God is good enough that we can believe this, God loves us enough that we can believe this. Sacred Heart of Jesus, fully human and divine, fully concerned with me, I trust in you.

Conclusion: St. Claude, Providential Love, and Living in a Dark Age

All of this, I suspect, seems rather lovely. And for those of us stuck in custom lines or dealing with a beautiful, eight-year-old daughter who expresses her growing maturity through yelling at you, it is easy enough. Rather than gripe and complain about such misery, I can unite myself to Christ—recognizing that each of these moments is what God has called me to.

But things get a bit more complicated when we are dealing with those moments that are not mere annoyances but occasions of suffering, even injustice where we possess no control. Sitting on a plane last Sunday morning in Warsaw, I was watching (on ESPN) as the various avatars revealed that Notre Dame had lost to Texas A&M. I shut off my phone, and I opened my breviary. At that moment, boarding said airplane, there were four Ukrainians, each of whom came on the plane with the assistance of a gate agent. Four Ukrainian men, each boarding the plane, each missing at least one limb.

The dilemma with obedience to divine providence is that somehow, it must take account of such moments. Is God’s providential will enacted through violence? Did God really intend these men to lose their limbs as a way of inviting them toward deeper union with Christ?

Well, of course not. We know that. The Catechism knows that. It states quite clearly that God never wills an evil for the sake of a good. Rather, God is the loving Creator who transforms darkness into light.

But in such a world, perhaps, St. Claude can help us even more. After all, much of the evil in this world of ours is the result of a scarcity of love. The vision experienced by St. Margaret Mary, the vision that St. Claude devoted much of his life to, was aware that God loves us. But we do not always love God in return. It is not just a fault here or there, but that human hearts have grown so cold that we do damage to Christ. Such damage, of course, is not offense against some offended divine being: how dare you not honor me as you should, don’t you know who I am? It is the coldness that leads to a painful apathy toward God and neighbor. Toward the violence of war, of priests and religious who abuse the least of these and cover it up, for all of us who sometimes let politics shape our commitment to the works of mercy.

St. Claude addressed this love in spiritual retreats. He spoke about the intimate presence of this love in the neighbor:

God is in the midst of us, and it seems that we do not recognize him. He is in our neighbor and desires to be served, loved, and honored in him, and he will reward us more than if we served him in person. How do I behave toward my neighbor? How toward my brothers? If I except a single one, it is not Jesus Christ I consider in them. I do not recognize him in them. If I love them, it is merely so that I may be liked and considered, or because their character suits mine. . . . Let each one see Jesus Christ in his neighbor.[11]

Now, we have returned at last to why St. Claude, after all, is a saint. It is not because he was a spiritual director; many exist who have not been canonized. Instead, he recognized how radical the love of Christ is, how it is present in the flesh and blood of our neighbor who calls us in need. For him, it was St. Margaret Mary. It was his death sentence to England to care for recusant English Catholics. It is the countless people to whom he preached the Gospel: this is real, Christ’s love is real, and if you let it, it could change everything.

I have been thinking a lot right now about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, wondering about how to ask St. Claude’s intercession. So much right now seems loveless. The wars throughout the world. Violence taking place throughout the U.S. as school children go to Mass or people being shot while debating on college campuses. There are migrants throughout this globe who are treated as expendable objects, political footballs who are bounced back and forth to various states and countries depending on whatever political narrative they serve.

What the hell is wrong with us?

St. Claude in his preaching recognized that obedience to God’s will meant also that we are not obedient to God’s will. Quite the opposite. God has loved us, and we respond in this way!

In some ways, I guess we are right to have to attend to reparation. Pope Francis, that brother in St. Claude’s order, said the following about reparation:

In union with Christ, amid the ruins we have left in this world by our sins, we are called to build a new civilization of love. That is what it means to make reparation as the heart of Christ would have us do. Amid the devastation wrought by evil, the heart of Christ desires that we cooperate with him in restoring goodness and beauty to our world (Dilexit nos, §182).

The sins of this world, the suffering of all, the excessive violence and throwaway culture that denies the dignity of the unborn, the migrant, the prisoner, and the elderly, concern me! If Christ loves me, in all my particularity, then I in all my particularity can do something about this lack of love. I can return this gift of love to the Sacred Heart.

And in fact, I am called to do so. St. Claude, of course, was not granted a vision of our own day where violence and suffering seem to be the coin of the realm. But he knew that where there was lovelessness, where there was anything but the love of Christ’s Sacred Heart, I could offer myself.

All this returns to my final point. Maybe all of us wish that we could live in a different time, a time full of more peace, less violence, a time of rainbows and bunnies. But if we take St. Claude seriously, his devotion to the Sacred Heart seriously, God has called us to be men and women of this time. Not to run away from it but to consecrate ourselves to the Sacred Heart. Obedience to God’s will, for each of us, means loving like Christ in this context. Repairing through concrete acts of devotion and charity the damage done by denizens of a loveless citizenship who imagines that every solution can be found in technological innovation or financial gain. As St. John Paul II preached at the canonization of St. Claude:

Devotion to the Heart of Christ would be a source of balance and spiritual strengthening for Christian communities so often faced with increasing unbelief over the coming centuries: an impersonal conception of God will spread; individuals, moving away from a personal encounter with Christ and the sources of grace, will want to be the sole masters of their history and to become a law unto themselves, to the point of being ruthless in pursuing their own ambitions. The message of Paray, accessible to the humble as well as to the great of this world, answers such aberrations by clarifying the relationship of the human person with God and with the world of the light which comes from the heart of God: in conformity with the Church’s Tradition, it turns his gaze towards the cross of the world’s Redeemer, towards “him whom they have pierced” (Jn 19:37).

Here is the medicine that the heart of Christ offers. The beating, divine and human heart of Christ who continues to love this strange world of ours. And who calls you and me, in all our particularity, to do something about this lovelessness. St. Claude, St. Margaret Mary, pray for us.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article was originally delivered as a Saturdays With the Saints lecture, sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life, on September 20, 2024. Fr. Greg Haake, C.S.C. will deliver the next lecture in the series on November 8, 2025 at 10:30AM in the Andrews Auditorium of Geddes Hall.

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