Today, August 12, we begin a year-long remembrance of our founder, Fr. Leo John Dehon, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of his death. He died in Brussels, Belgium, on August 12, 1925.
Born in 1843 into a French aristocratic family, Fr. Dehon went on to become a champion of the working class, founded schools, established a newspaper, and became immersed in a wide variety of social projects. He established the Priests of the Sacred Heart in 1878; a religious community now found in over 40 countries on five continents.
This morning Dr. Paul Monson, Vice President of Intellectual Formation and Academic Dean at Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology, shared the following reflection in commemoration of the founder’s death and the start of a new academic year: “Exactly 99 years ago, at 12:10pm on August 12, 1925, the human heart of Léon-Gustave Dehon ceased to beat. The soul of this restless heart entrusted itself to the mercy and love of Christ’s Sacred Heart, a heart to which Fr. Dehon had dedicated his life. A life of zeal and risks. A life of triumphs and failures. A life ending in exile, a life of a rejected migrant. Fr. Dehon died in Brussels, not his native France. Twice the world had driven him and his companions from St. Quentin, the birthplace of the Priests of the Sacred Heart. First anticlerical laws in 1903, then German bayonets in 1917. His young congregation lay scattered and ravaged by war. Post-pandemic trauma and economic fears enveloped a fraught political landscape. At his funeral a week later in St. Quentin’s basilica, Fr. Dehon’s body lay under a temporary roof supported by a maze of scaffolding, holding up collapsed walls riddled with bullet holes.
“As colleagues in this same Sacred Heart, we begin an academic year that awaits the centenary of Fr. Dehon’s death. This year is an opportunity to learn more about Fr. Dehon, in his life, in his mission, and in his legacy through the Dehonian presence throughout the world. And the simple reason is that Fr. Dehon’s life is a window into hope. Before attending the congregation’s eighth general chapter in 1919, Fr. Dehon toured the ruins of St. Quentin. There he found not despair but rather inspiration, inspiration for greater spiritual unity through love. Last month Fr. Dehon’s spiritual descendants met for their twenty-fifth general chapter in Rome and issued a final message rooted in sint unum, a Dehonian call to become one through the transformative love of Christ.
“Amid Fr. Dehon’s last will, his companions found a simple paper titled, ‘Pact of Love.’ It read: ‘I vow that the intention for all my actions will be pure love for Jesus and His Sacred Heart. I ask You to touch my heart and inflame it with love for You, so that I may not only have the intention and desire to love You, but also the happiness of feeling, through the effect of Your holy grace, all the affections of my heart centered on You alone.’ It is a prayer worth pondering over the course of this year.
“Whatever our intentions, whatever the path that brought us to SHSST, a life that ended 99 years ago has impacted our lives. May we pray that our efforts this year impact lives far into the future, in ways great and small, in and through the Heart that animated the heart of Fr. Dehon.”
