St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Devotion to the Sacred Heart

Every fall, the McGrath Institute for Church Life hosts the wildly popular “Saturdays with the Saints” lecture series. For one hour on the morning of Notre Dame home football games, a scholar typically from Notre Dame delivers a public lecture on a saint. The room is always full and, in fact, there are auxiliary rooms to hold the overflow crowd. People who gather on campus for football games apparently also really want to learn about the saints. We’ve been hosting this series for 15 years now, and this year we focused on “Saints of the Sacred Heart.”

I want to offer you, our dear listeners, a little taste of this series through our humble podcast. In episodes to come, I’ll talk with some of the lecturers from the 2025 series about the saint of the Sacred Heart that they themselves spoke on. But it is hard to do that with the presenter from the first lecture in this year’s series because that lecturer is me. So, here’s what I’m doing today. I am going to deliver my lecture here, on our podcast. I’ll link in the show notes the few slides I included, but otherwise you will hear what the audience at Saturdays with the Saints heard. 

My saint was St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, specifically as the saint who ushered in the rebirth of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the modern world. I hope you enjoy.

Follow-up Resources:

• The slides that accompanied this lecture are available here.
• Learn more about the “Saturdays with the Saints” series: https://mcgrath.nd.edu/events/saturdays-with-the-saints/
• “Dilexit Nos – Part 1, a conversation with Joshua McManaway and Melissa Moschella” (about Pope Francis’s encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus), podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Dilexit Nos – Part 2, a conversation with Brett Robinson and Abigail Favale” (about Pope Francis’s encyclical on the Sacred Heart of Jesus), podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.