Jansenism was a heresy found over the past 400 years that put the emphasis on God’s justice instead of God’s mercy. Jansenism is a bit like a mix between Calvinism and Catholicism. Because of St. Margaret Mary and St. Therese’s teaching of total trust in God, they are both often credited with putting the final nail in the coffin of Jansenism. Indeed, that heresy was particularly strong in France in the 18th and 19th centuries. Those two female saints are rightly credited for nearly ending Jansenism.
However, modernism is the major heresy that threatens the Church today. For the past 50 years, modernists have often labeled traditional Catholics as “Jansenists.” That appellation seems to fit the bill since we rad-trads are supposed to talk and act like gloomy Calvinists. In the past, Jansenists (and allegedly traditionalists today) put the emphasis on God’s justice, while discounting His mercy. Indeed, both Jansenists and traditionalists seem to think a lot of people go to hell. It all seems like a grand-slam against traditionalists.
Therefore, the recent document from Rome titled Dilexit Nos purports to be about the Sacred Heart crushing Jansenism: “The promotion of Eucharistic communion on the first Friday of each month, for example, sent a powerful message at a time when many people had stopped receiving communion because they were no longer confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness and regarded communion as a kind of reward for the perfect. In the context of Jansenism, the spread of this practice proved immensely beneficial.—#24.
The above paragraph is diabolically tricky. While it is true that Jansenists were wrong to refuse Holy Communion to so many people, and while I entirely agree with Pope St. Pius X in encouraging lay people to receive Holy Communion much more frequently, we have the opposite problem of Jansenism now in the Church: Presumption and license in approaching the sacraments like never before in history.
Keep in mind that Dilexit comes the same guy who wrote Amoris Laetitia. In Amoris, he tells divorced and remarried people to receive Holy Communion without confession or even an annulment. That is an outright command to sacrilege both the Eucharist and Marriage. Thus, the pendulum has swung to the exact opposite of Jansenism today, namely, license to the point of sacrileging the Eucharist. What could be more evil than a man telling a billion people to sacrilege the Eucharist? Of course, the few Catholics who resist this call to sacrilege are not “Jansenists.”
When Jesus Christ revealed His Sacred Heart in a new way to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in Paray-le-Monial, France, in the 17th century, we can easily identify the central message of Christ’s own words to her:
Behold the Heart which has so loved men that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, in order to testify Its love; and in return, I receive from the greater part only ingratitude, by their irreverence and sacrilege, and by the coldness and contempt they have for Me in this Sacrament of Love. But what I feel most keenly is that it is hearts which are consecrated to Me, that treat Me thus. Therefore, I ask of you that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that My Heart shall expand Itself to shed in abundance the influence of Its Divine Love upon those who shall thus honor It, and cause It to be honored.
As we gaze upon that Sacred Heart “which has so loved men” we learn from Christ Himself in the above quote that one of the most loving and adoring things we can do back to him is to “make reparation” and to “make amends for the indignities which it has received.” St. John of the Cross said “Love is repaid by love alone.” Catholics (especially those in religion) do this first by adoring God, and secondly by making sacrifices to save souls from the eternal flames of hell.
These are the two main reasons that St. Margaret Mary and St. Therese entered the convents: To worship God and make sacrifice that fewer souls might go to hell. This is not “Jansenism.” These are the saints of complete trust in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Yet in the document Dilexit Nos, we see that the Catholic Church’s teachings on salvation, heaven and hell are totally missing.
This is on purpose.
On the topic of St. Therese of Lisieux in Dilexit, it reads: “To help us reflect more deeply on this mystery, we can turn once more to the luminous spirituality of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus. Therese was aware that in certain quarters an extreme form of reparation had developed, based on a willingness to offer oneself in sacrifice for others, and to become in some sense a ‘lightning rod’ for the chastisements of divine justice. In her words, ‘I thought about the souls who offer themselves as victims of God’s justice in order to turn away the punishments reserved to sinners, drawing them upon themselves.'”—#195.
This implies that St. Therese rejected “a willingness to offer oneself in sacrifice for others.” Such an assertion is an outright distortion of the great saint, not to mention a deconstruction of recent Church history.
St. Therese began a sacrificial part of saving souls from hell by penance even before entering Carmel. In 1887, Therese was age 14. Still at home, she learned there was a murderer on death row named Pranzini. His was death imminent, but he was impenitent. Again, as a 14 year old, she entered a very rigorous fast and vigil for his soul. He showed a sign of repentance immediately before being guillotined by kissing the crucifix. She considered this a victory that her penance of fast and vigil helped save a soul who otherwise would have gone to hell. She wrote about getting the news the next morning:
“The day after his execution I hastily opened the paper…and what did I see? Tears betrayed my emotion; I was obliged to run out of the room. Pranzini had mounted the scaffold without confessing or receiving absolution, and… turned round, seized the crucifix which the Priest was offering to him, and kissed Our Lord’s Sacred Wounds three times… I had obtained the sign I asked for, and to me it was especially sweet. Was it not when I saw the Precious Blood flowing from the Wounds of Jesus that the thirst for souls first took possession of me?… My prayer was granted to the letter.”
So, Jesus saved Pranzini through Therese even before she was a nun. She was only 14 years old. I find it also fascinating that in the writings of St. Therese of Lisieux, we can find no opposition to the death penalty. Why? Because she knew it was not only an aspect of required justice in any ordered society, but often precipitated the salvation of souls (the very thing she lived for in Carmel.)
St. Therese could have never known that 116 years after her death, a major heretic would arise in Rome claiming the death penalty would be always “inadmissible.” She would never agree with any such heresy, especially when she saw the death penalty precipitate a conversion of someone who would have otherwise been lost.
The notion that the trusting-way of St. Therese is the opposite of the way of penance is a totally false-notion. But it is so widespread today that it is proof that modernists have co-opted such a great saint. Just because she told us to have an “audacious” trust in the mercy of Jesus Christ does not mean she avoided penance. Rather, it was her doctrine of “daring trust” in the Sacred Heart of Jesus that led her to more penance than most the other sisters in Carmel. Yes, you read that correctly. We see that reality in St. Therese’s canonization records:
“My mother, looking at the Blessed Virgin this evening, I understood that it was not true, I understood that she had suffered not only in her soul, but also in her body. She suffered a lot during her travels from cold, heat, fatigue… She fasted many times… Yes, she knows what it is to suffer!”
Notice then that the notion of heavy penance does not belong to Jansenists. Rather, it belongs to the saint who helped crush Jansenism with her great trust in the Sacred Heart.
But both St. Margaret Mary and St. Therese show us that trust in God and penance done for the salvation of souls are not mutually exclusive. This is the true way of the Sacred Heart of Jesus that modernists purposely refuse to understand because they deny some people go to heaven and others to hell.
How do I know the author of Dilexit does not believe the Sacred Heart is about salvation? Because that same author publicly stated “I like to think of hell as empty.” He also recently said “All religions are a path to God.” Therefore, it is not a stretch to come to the conclusion that he holds neither Jesus nor His Sacred Heart are necessary for salvation. And that is why you can’t find the word “Catholic” even one time in that 31,000 word document Dilexit allegedly written on the Sacred Heart. (I’m not exaggerating. Do the word search yourself. You’ll only find the word “Catholic” in the biographical footnotes at the very end.)
But you will find these two sentences in it: “The present document [Dilexit] can help us see that the teaching of the social Encyclicals Laudato Sí and Fratelli Tutti is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ. For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.”—#217.
In other words, according to him, the Sacred Heart is simply about loving man and planet earth, not God. Go re-read Laudato Sí or Fratelli Tutti if you doubt me on this horrible (but obvious) conclusion.
I will resist dark errors in all three documents, for “love is repaid by love alone.” In contemplating the love of the Sacred Heart that was pierced for us and in expiation to God’s justice, we should respond to Christ in adoration and atonement for the salvation of souls, not as social justice warriors with a political agenda. An ancient way of sacrificial love has nothing to do with “Jansenism,” for even the Apostle Paul wrote: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.”—Col 1:24. That is how we imitate the love of the Sacred Heart “which has so loved men.”