ABSTRACT
As the Counter-Reformation movement par excellence, the Society of Jesus set itself against the theological, liturgical, ecclesiastical, and metaphysical programs of the Protestant Reformers in order to champion the interests of the Catholic Church and to reverse the inroads made in northern Europe by Lutherans and Calvinists. In France, a principal target was the Huguenots, a Calvinist sect subjected to violent persecution by Cardinal Richelieu. Their persecution was continued after Richelieu’s death by Louis XIV, who revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Alacoque herself had cheered the effort to convert the Huguenots through the ministrations of the Sacred Heart and had blamed these “heretics” and “infidels” for the delay in securing an engraved image of the Sacred Heart for wide distribution when the priest engaged in the task was distracted by efforts among the Huguenots. 21 But reform was also pursued within the Catholic Church by proponents of Jansenism, which began with the eponymous Cornelius Jansen’s study of Augustine’s theology, Augustinus (1640), and extended to the eve of the French Revolution.
