At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them because they were troubled and abandoned. (Matthew 9:36)
The Sacred Heart invites man to partake in the inner Life of God, which injustice and death itself cannot diminish. Pope Leo XIII, himself, believed that public consecration to the Sacred Heart would quell the “waves so rough” that crash upon man and leave him filled with “anxiety and peril” and that it would make “our many wounds be healed and all justice spring forth again with the hope of restored authority.”(Pope Leo XIII. Annum Sacrum, nn. 10-11) From conformity to the Heart of Christ, the minister of Christ’s healing ministry will be moved like Him to care for the patient and will manifest the care that is Catholic health care.
Catholic hospitals and health care providers should consecrate their entity’s and practices to the Sacred Heart by means of a public ceremony, and this consecration should be fostered by supporting devotions and educational tools in order to assist the staff and patients in understanding the act as living and ongoing.
Only by a lively devotion to the Sacred Heart, manifested in devotional, educational, medical and charitable practices, will Catholic healthcare providers be able to “guard jealously …the true task of medicine,” which is the principle, “to cure if possible, always to care.” (John Paul II. To the participants in the International Congress on “Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas,” n. 7 (2004).