For Catholics, June Isn’t ‘Pride Month,’ It’s Dedicated To The Sacred Heart Of Jesus

Unless you live in a cave, you’ve probably noticed that June is “Pride Month,” when corporate America and nearly every public institution in the country swap out their logos for rainbow flags and engage in an appalling spectacle of empty, hypocritical virtue-signaling.

Already in the first week of June we’ve had the Brooklyn Net’s insane pride flag graphic, the U.S. Marine Corps tweet with the rainbow-colored bullets, and FIFA’s tweet boasting about its embrace of Pride Month in the same breath as it promotes the upcoming FIFA World Cup in Qatar, where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death.

Corporate America, professional sports, Hollywood, and the entire executive branch of the federal government now claim June for the so-called “LGBTQIA+ community.” As far as they’re concerned, if you’re not sufficiently on board with “Pride Month,” you’re a bigot. Indeed, the whole concept of “Pride Month,” as my colleague Chris Bedford noted recently, has become less about inclusion and acceptance and more about “targeted campaigns to force submission to left-wing policies often far afield from even the radical goals of America’s first gay activists.”

Christians and conservatives don’t have to accept this. We can reclaim June. One way to do that is to return to the well of the Catholic faith and draw from its depths. For Catholics, the month of June isn’t “Pride Month,” it’s dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and has been for centuries.

The feast of the Sacred Heart has been celebrated by Catholics since the late seventeenth century, following a series of appearances Jesus made to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque in the 1670s asking her to promote a feast in honor of His Sacred Heart. The feast falls on the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi, which means it always falls during the month of June. After the feast was officially recognized by the Catholic Church in 1856, the entire month of June became dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and His divine love for humanity, with Catholics engaging in a host of devotional practices leading up to the feast itself.

All of this might be unfamiliar to non-Catholic Christians, but there’s no reason they can’t celebrate and take part along with their Catholic brothers and sisters. Devotion to the Sacred Heart, unlike the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, doesn’t involve a Eucharistic procession through the streets with priests in full vestments and all the pomp and circumstance that non-Catholics sometimes find off-putting.

Rather, devotion to the Sacred Heart is a personal and private commitment to enthrone Jesus as king in one’s own heart and king over one’s own home or family. Evangelicals might call it a rededication to making Jesus one’s “personal Lord and Savior.” Whatever you call it, the idea is to mark out June as a month dedicated to following Jesus as your king, drawing close to Him in devotion, and recognizing Him as truly the king of all hearts, the king of all kings, and the Savior of the world.

This is something all Christians, regardless of denomination, could and should get behind. If we believe that Jesus Christ is king, let’s make Him the king over our private lives, over our families and homes, and order our days in the month of June to honor His kingship and draw near to Him in devotion.

By doing so, we’ll gain a new understanding of His profound love for us, and in turn we’ll gain a deeper love for one another — the kind of compassion and charity that “Pride Month” once claimed to foster but which it now actively undermines.

It should be obvious by now that unless Christians everywhere stand against corporate mass culture, our civilization will collapse. It’s time — long past time — to reassert devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus over and against “Pride Month,” and reclaim the month of June for the king of hearts.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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