The Divine Footnotes

Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta & St. Faustina Kowalska

 

IT has been reserved for these days, at the end of our era, for God to add two divine footnotes to the Sacred Scriptures.

 

THE BLESSED BEATS

In a powerful vision, St. Gertrude the Great (d. 1302) was allowed to rest her head near the wound in Jesus’ breast. As she listened to His beating Heart, she asked St. John the Beloved Apostle how it was that he, whose head had reposed on the breast of the Savior at the Last Supper, kept complete silence in his writings about the throbbing of the adorable Heart of his Master. She expressed regret to him that he had said nothing about it for our instruction. But the saint replied:

My mission was to write for the Church, still in its infancy, something about the uncreated Word of God the Father, something which of itself alone would give exercise to every human intellect to the end of time, something that no one would ever succeed in fully understanding. As for the language of these blessed beats of the Heart of Jesus, it is reserved for the last ages when the world, grown old and become cold in the love of God, will need to be warmed again by the revelation of these mysteries. —Legatus divinae pietatis, IV, 305; “Revelationes Gertrudianae”, ed. Poitiers and Paris, 1877

Consider for a moment that the human heart is composed of “two sides.” The one side draws blood into the heart from all the tissues of the body and pushes that blood into the lungs; the other side draws that replenished (oxygenated) blood from the lungs back into the heart, which is then pumped again into the body’s tissues and organs to bring new life, as it were.

Likewise, one could say that there are “two sides” to Divine Revelation, which was incarnated in the Word made flesh. As a fulfilment of the Old Covenant, God draws all of human history into the Heart of Christ, who transforms it through the breath of the Holy Spirit; this new life is then “pushed” into the present moment and future to “restore all things” in the New Covenant. The “drawing in” is Christ’s act of taking our sins upon Himself; the “sending out” is Christ making all things new.

Thus, just as the human heart’s function is to pump blood to the entire body so that it grows into full adulthood, so too, the Heart of Christ functions to bring the entire Body of Christ into full stature, that is, perfection. 

And he gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ… (Eph 4:11-13; cf. Col 1:28)

What I’ve explained above is already known to us in the Public Revelation of the Church. By putting our ear to the Heart of Christ, however, we learn the details and minutiae of how all this will be accomplished. That is the role of so-called “private revelation” or prophecy. 

It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church. —Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 67

 

THE DIVINE FOOTNOTES

In the Gospels, we are given two passages in particular that reveal the two sides of Christ’s Heart. The first passage reveals the function of that Blessed Side that draws all things to Himself through Divine Mercy:

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. (John 3:16)

The second passage reveals the goal of that second Side, which is to restore all things in Christ in the Divine Will:

This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven. (Matt 6:9-10)

Thus, the revelations of Jesus to St. Faustina on the Divine Mercy are simply a footnote to John 3:16. They are the “language of the blessed beats” of the Sacred Heart that take the word “love” from that Scripture passage and, as though passing it through the prism of Faustina, break it into an array of sublime truths about His love.

So too, the revelations to Luisa on the Divine Will merely fractionate the words “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” into the how and why their fulfillment is the ultimate perfection and “full stature” of man that Christ merited for us on the Cross. They are, in a word, the restoration of what Adam lost in the Garden of Eden. 

He lost the beautiful day of the Divine Will, and degraded himself so much as to arouse pity… [Jesus] prepared for him the bath to wash him of all his sins, to fortify Him, to embellish him, in such a way as to render him worthy to receive again that Divine Will he had rejected, which formed his sanctity and his happiness. Child, there was not one work or pain that He suffered, which did not seek to reorder again the Divine Will in the creatures. —Our Lady to Luisa, The Virgin in the Kingdom of the Divine Will, Day Twenty-three (a)[5], benedictinesofthedivinewill.com 

Hence it follows that to restore all things in Christ and to lead men back to submission to God is one and the same aim. —POPE ST. PIUS X, E Supremi, n. 8

 

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SACRED HEART

The sublime language of the Divine Mercy and Divine Will revelations constitute the prophetic Voice of the “blessed beats” of the Sacred Heart. The Divine Mercy is that pulsation that draws the sins of mankind into the refulgence of God’s love symbolized by the soldier’s lance; the Divine Will is the pulsation of new life that God intends for His Church symbolized by the Blood and Water which gushed forth from His Heart. These revelations are timed precisely “for the last ages when the world, grown old and become cold in the love of God, will need to be warmed again by the revelation of these mysteries.” 

Thus, the Sacred Heart of Jesus will Triumph when, through the graces of His Divine Mercy, man has divested himself of his human will and allowed the Divine Will to reign in him.

My kingdom on earth is My life in the human soul. —Jesus to St. Faustina, Divine Mercy in My Soul, Diary, n. 1784

…for…

The Church “is the Reign of Christ already present in mystery.” —Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 763

In other words, when the Heart of Jesus reigns uninhibited in His Church, then this realization of the ‘Our Father’ will bring Christ’s other prophecy to fulfilment:

This gospel of the kingdom [of the Divine will] will be preached throughout the world as a witness to all nations, and then the end will come. (Matthew 24:14)

All because of two little footnotes in salvation history.

 

 

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