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Reflection on Today’s Feast

By Fr. Michael Hilbert, SJ

After almost 50 years as a Jesuit, I thought I knew something about each of the many saints and blessed of the Society. I am grateful to the Vocations Office for the opportunity to learn about one whose life and holiness were entirely unknown to me.

Blessed Bernardo Francisco de Hoyos, S.J., I have now learned, was a Spanish Jesuit who lived in the 18th century but was beatified only in the 21st. I know we Jesuits are not very good at promoting our own for beatification and canonization, but why did it take almost 300 years in this case? Apparently the answer is to be found, first, in the tortuous history of the Society and, second, in the development of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

When Blessed Bernardo died, on 29 November 1735 at the age of 24, the Society was going through a rough patch, having to defend itself against Jansenism, a heresy that had a very low opinion of human nature, insisting that the human will was incapable of resisting divine grace. Jansenism can be summed up as a denial of our participation, via the exercise of free will, in our salvation. The Jesuits had a much more optimistic view of human nature and ascribed a greater role to free will. The controversy lasted for most of the 18th century, giving rise to numerous power struggles among the universities as well as the crowned heads of Europe. As a consequence, Bernardo’s cause for beatification was never presented. When in 1773, the theological-political problems culminated in the suppression of the Society, many tasks were left undone, and Bernardo would have been forgotten, if not for the second factor: his devotion to the Sacred Heart.

And thus we transition from the external facts of his delayed road to beatification to the interior reality of Bernardo’s intimate love for Jesus and tender and particular devotion to the Sacred Heart.

What attracts me to this Spanish mystic, as I read his journals and letters, is the spiritual union he experienced with the heart of Christ. Indeed, if St. Ignatius wanted Jesuits to live “under the name of Jesus,” Bernardo described how he lived “in the heart of Christ.” He was deeply and truly in love with the Lord and experienced a transcendental companionship full of affection and favor and spiritual gifts. As the Lord said to Bernardo in a vision, “I will give you lavish gifts, and the first is this vision, which I have made to burn in your heart.”

Bernardo’s spiritual director, Fr. Juan de Loyola, S.J., in his biography of the young mystic, recounts the overwhelming kindness and generosity with which Jesus called Bernardo to be a companion. “It is not easy to explain how, with this singular fondness, Bernardo only loved, admired, praised, magnified, thanked, adored, venerated and exalted the grandeurs of his beloved.”

Yes, this is florid, even melodramatic, language, not unusual for the time and place, and we have to situate it in the tradition of a “spiritual marriage” or union, employed by St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross to designate that union of a soul with God as the most exalted condition attainable by the soul in this life.

Bernardo received this call and mission from Christ when he was 22 years old, and he immediately consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart. He wrote, “I felt in my spirit an extraordinary motion—strong, gentle, not abrupt or impetuous. I then placed myself before the Blessed Sacrament, offering myself to his Sacred Heart.”

To fall in love with Christ, to be loved and transformed by the Sacred Heart, to have a contemplative sense of God’s constant presence while actively spending oneself in apostolic work: for these things I pray daily, and now I have a new companion to intercede for me.

Bl. Bernardo Francis de Hoyos, pray for us!

Fr. Michael Hilbert, SJ, is the associate pastor at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in New York and former professor of Canon Law.

Previous Reflections

November 29, 2021 – By Fr. Harry Geib, SJ

First Apostle of the Sacred Heart in Spain

Fifty years after St. Claude La Colombiere, SJ, consecrated himself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Bernardo Francis de Hoyos did the same as a young Jesuit priest in Valladolid, Spain. He was 22 years of age and would become known as the “Spanish Apostle of the Sacred Heart.”

Born in Valladolid, Spain, he was named after St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Francis Xavier.  With the special permission of his family, and that of the Jesuit provincial, he entered the novitiate at the very young age of 14. His years as a novice (1726-28) coincided with the canonizations of the young Jesuits Aloysius Gonzaga and Stanislaus Kostka, but it was the example of John Berchmans that greatly influenced the young novice Bernardo.

His time in philosophy studies (1728-1731) was a period of interior purification tested by the dryness of the dark night of the soul. But that would change when he began his theology studies at the College of St. Ambrose of Valladolid. At the College of St. Ambrose, Bernardo experienced during his prayer Christ missioning him to propagate devotion to the Sacred Heart. As Bernardo wrote, “I then placed myself before the Blessed Sacrament, offering myself to His Sacred Heart in order to cooperate as much as possible…in propagating devotion to it.”

He became what we would today consider a skilled director of communications for the Sacred Heart devotion. Gathering several Jesuits for this apostolate, they distributed leaflets and prayer cards everywhere, founded confraternities and associations in honor of the Sacred Heart, wrote to bishops and even King Philip V asking support in requesting the Holy See’s approval of a special liturgical feast of the Sacred Heart. 

Ordained in 1735, Bernardo began his tertianship (the final stage of Jesuit formation) several month later. But he was unable to finish his tertianship because he contracted typhus and died on November 29, 1735, at the age of 24.

Let us finish with Bernardo’s own words:

“I see that everything in my heart is moving towards God, drawn like iron to a magnet. It desires only God, searches only for God, and longs only for God…”

On this special day in honor of Bl. Bernardo Francis de Hoyos, let us give praise to God in thanksgiving for the love of Christ’s Sacred Heart for each of us. May we always be grateful.