Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. 2025 (Letter)
Thursday June 26, 2025
Rome, 27 June 2025
MSC General Leadership Team.
To all Missionaries of the Sacred Heart,
Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Dear Confreres,
On this Solemnity, so full of meaning, we reach out to you in communion and hope. Each year, this Feast gathers us around the Heart of the One who first loved us. He loves us with a human heart and calls us to be the Heart of God amid the core realities of our modem world.
On behalf of the entire General Administration, I take this opportunity to pause and honour the heartbeat of your mission: in each one of you, in each community, in every comer where our vocation as Missionaries of the Sacred Heart continues to beat with strength, humility, and fidelity.
We celebrate this Solemnity in a wounded world. The wars and hostility erupting across the planet, lament the drama of a divided humanity, of perpetuated hatred, and of life disregarded. Millions of our brothers and sisters live through forced displacement, violence, and despair. Our world stands like a child on the edge of an era marked by seismic shifts, relentless transformations, and earth-shaking disruptions. Faced with these realities, we cannot afford to lose the focus of our missionary vocation in hopelessness and exhaustion.
Pope Francis reminds us in his last encyclical, Dilexit nos, that the Heart of Christ shines as a source oflight and love, capable of unifying what is scattered and ofrestoring to the world what it most deeply needs: its heart. We are called to have a heart wounded by the world’s pain but not resigned to it; a heart open to the outcast, willing to get its hands dirty, to heal wounds, and to reach out to those who have fallen. From this springs our hope.
As a Congregation, we too are living through this tumultuous era. Unanticipated challenges are compelling us to navigate differently and adapt our structures to accommodate new and emerging realities. Not only do we need to reorganize the external structures, but so too our ways of life and mission, so that they respond more faithfully to the charism we have received.
Under the theme of our upcoming General Conference-“Walking Together, Building Structures that Serve“-we seek every decision to be inspired by a truly synodal spirituality based on listening, communal discernment, and creative initiatives.
On this day, when we share the heartbeat of Jesus, who calls us with renewed strength, the four movements of the Spirituality of the Heart continue to offer light and direction to our missionary identity:
Encounter: with God, with ourselves, and with others-especially the excluded.
Intimacy: which grounds us in prayer, fraternal life, and deep trust.
Conversion: which frees us from fear and selfishness to open us to the Kingdom.
Mission: which sends us to love without borders, with passion and tenderness, with our feet on the ground, and with our hearts in God.
This Feast of the Sacred Heart is not merely a devotion: it is an urgent invitation to renew our way of being, to examine our prophetic choices, and not to fear the necessary changes. Every community, every confrere, is called to be a sign of the merciful love of the Heart of Jesus wherever we are.
I invite you to celebrate this day with imagination, with a solidarity that is joyful and incarnate, with living hope, and with a depth that springs from the heart. I am confident you will live it prayerfully and with a shared fraternity. May we willingly embrace both the intimacy of our common MSC life and the intimacy of our journey together with the People of God. Let us proclaim once again with conviction: “Here I am, Lord, to be your Heart in the world”.
I hold each of you in my heart with deep gratitude. I especially entrust those facing illness, solitude, or challenging missions to the Heart of Christ, the wellspring of consolation and hope. In that same gesture of faith, we place our missionary life into the hands of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart: may she continue to teach us how to trust, how to walk with courage, and how to carry within the depths of our story, the faithful love of her Son.
Fraternally in the Heart of Jesus,
Abzalón Alvarado, MSC [Auth.]
Chris Chaplin, MSC [Ed.]
Simon Lumpini, MSC
Bram Tulusan, MSC
Genie Pejo, MSC
MSC General Leadership Team.
