Who are we?
We are called the Missionaries of
the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The initials MSC are taken from our Latin
title Missionarii Sacratissimi Cordis and it is by this
abbreviation that we are best known. Our Congregation was founded by
a young French diocesan priest, Jules Chevalier, who in 1854 at thirty years
of age gathered a small group of like-minded priests together to
form the first community of MSCs under the protection of Mary
to whom he gave the title, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart. Their
concern was global, but they began with efforts to restore the
vitality of the faith in rural France.
Over 150 years later we are
present in 54 countries and number 2000 members. Our
ministries are varied, but all are trying to respond to the signs of
the times, leading people to a deeper experience of God's love for
them.
The backdrop to Jules
Chevalier's vision
At times we may feel that, more
than ever in the past, ours is a time of drastic change and
upheaval, but if we could go back in time to just fifty years before
Jules founded the MSCs we might well find ourselves in an even more
chaotic situation. Revolution had come to France in 1789 proclaiming
its much overdue ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (liberty,
equality, brotherhood). This Revolution, and the many that followed,
fundamentally pushed Europe and much of the world towards a bill of
human rights and towards democracy, but it is also true that brutal
violence often overwhelmed the nobler passion for greater freedom,
and that the ideal of brotherhood was often tarnished by new greed,
power and oppression. It left a society for which the old values had
gone and new values had been bloodied – and it often left the common
people, who should have been the first beneficiaries of the fruits
of the revolution, confused and indifferent, without values or
direction, and often as impoverished as they had been before.
That was the time in which Jules
Chevalier grew up. Much of the initial furore had died down - that
ferocious energy which translated the search for equality into a
liquidation of all that was seen as “against people”, including the
nobility and the wealthy, the priests and the intellectuals. Much of
the church and society of his day dreamed again of restoring the
“old order”, but many people of good will were torn between that
what the Church had been for centuries and that which was good in
the new ideas on reason and freedom.
For Jules – especially in the
years of growth towards ordination to the priesthood – the choice
was not between restoring the old or ruthlessly pursuing the new
values and structures. He dreamt of a new world, but one that was
built on the experience of God’s love in our lives. God loves the
world and its people – and when that becomes a living faith in us,
we too may start believing in the force of love, strong enough to
overcome any division we make between poor and rich, powerful and
oppressed, privileged and marginalized. In Jesus of Nazareth –
God-Incarnate, God living as one of us – he recognized God’s love
for humankind most definitely expressed: Jesus reaching out to those
who were oppressed and without direction, those sick in mind or
body, those not recognized, respected or valued by established
society. A man who could forget himself – he did not stand on his
position or power – because he always remembered others. He dared to
live from the heart and kept on telling people that this is how God
relates to us and how he wants us to relate to one another. And with
that, Jules Chevalier enriched the then very popular devotion to the
Sacred Heart and formed it into a Spirituality of the Heart, a way
of following him by living from the heart.
1854 - the beginning of a new
religious family committed to spreading God's love
Just over one hundred fifty years
ago, on December 8, 1854 – in Issoudun, France – Jules Chevalier
founded the Congregation of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, a
religious congregation for men who as priests and brothers would
live-out and spread that spirituality all over the world. Soon (in
1874) they were followed by a congregation for Sisters: the
Daughters of our Lady of the Sacred Heart. Later the two
congregations were complemented by a third, the Missionary Sisters
of the Sacred Heart. And from the very beginning, Jules Chevalier
envisioned the same spirituality as a driving force not only for
vowed priests, nuns and brothers, but also for committed lay people.
It was the harsh reality of the
Government's persecution of religious orders and congregations that
drove the early MSCs out of France in 1880. What must have felt like
a catastrophe at that time, turned eventually into a blessing. New
homes were found in Spain and in the Netherlands, and from there the
Congregation rapidly spread out all over the world.
Read more about
Jules Chevalier, our Mission,
the MSC presence in Europe, our Spirituality,
the place of
Mary in our Spirituality, and vocations
and formation information.
Text courtesy of the Philippines Province
