ABSTRACT
A series of encyclicals by modern popes from Leo XIII to Pius XII celebrated the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the devotion continued to enjoy popular support during the first half of the century. But there are several ways in which the devotion’s iconography has been transcended and challenged, bringing this history to the present moment. The imagery has not been without its modern critics for reasons varying from theology to aesthetics. In 1958 the German Catholic theologian Richard Egenter published Kitsch und Christenleben, which was later translated into English as The Desecration of Christ, an unrelenting attack on “kitsch” in the Catholic Church. He included depictions of the Sacred Heart among the images he despised as tasteless and inimical to the faith. Egenter recalled a familiar theme when he lamented in a contemporary example of a Sacred Heart holy card “the incompatibility of realism and symbolism… the representation of a realistic heart on top of our Lord’s clothes is immediately repugnant.” 79 Egenter expressed further contempt for the presumption of placing Jesus and the human soul in parity, something visually coordinated in the conventional portrait iconography. The verse of a popular hymn to the Sacred Heart provided him with a lyrical instance: As thou art meek and lowly And ever pure of heart, So may my heart be wholly Of thine the counterpart. 80
