Dedicated to Guillermo and Marlane, for their magnificent work in preserving and transmitting the memory of the Mexican blesseds and martyrs, all of them great lovers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
The novena of St. José María Robles Hurtado and the work of the Enthronement of the Sacred Heart promoted by Fr. Mateo Crawley-Boevey, SS.CC., can be understood as two complementary expressions of the same spiritual tradition originating with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. They should not, however, be placed in a direct relationship of dependence upon one another. Alfred Yenveux, O.M.I., systematized in Paris the spiritual doctrine of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and his work circulated in Spanish through the translation of Fr. Luis María Ortiz, S.J., published by Razón y Fe in 1910. Robles received this systematized tradition and condensed it into a brief, ordered, and extraordinarily portable novena. Crawley-Boevey, for his part, developed the Enthronement as a concrete means of introducing the loving Kingship of the Heart of Jesus into family life. Both paths therefore begin from the same intuition: Christ must reign not in an abstract manner, but by progressively penetrating the person, the family, and, through them, society.
Robles's novena concentrates especially on the first movement of this progression: the reign of Christ in the soul. Its structure is not simply a sequence of nine petitions. It is an itinerary of transformation. The Heart of Jesus appears as treasure, boat, prison, crucible, tomb, school, paternal bosom, friend, and place of abandonment. The soul enters into it in order to be re-formed. The fourth day expresses the logic of the entire text with particular force: “we need to die mystically, every day.” This is not a negation of natural life, but rather a progressive death to self-sufficiency, vanity, disordered attachment to creatures, and, finally, one's own will. The point of arrival is abandonment: allowing one's own will to die in the divine will. Robles's pedagogy thus leads from self-possession to self-surrender, from interior dispersion to unification in the Heart of Christ.
Crawley-Boevey develops with particular effectiveness the second movement: the reign of Christ in the family. His text on the Enthronement defines the practice as “the official and social recognition of the loving Kingship of the Heart of Jesus in a Christian family.” The image is decisive. Jesus arrives at the threshold of the house, asks to be received, enters as a guest, is treated as a friend, and finally occupies the place of honor as King. Hence Crawley's insistence on Bethany. The ideal is not a distant devotion, nor an image hung upon the wall as a mere ornament, but a true shared life: Jesus is to be consulted, loved, acknowledged, and included in the ordinary life of the household. Crawley therefore insists that the consecration must be a “lived consecration and not a formula.” The Enthronement is not fulfilled when the ceremony ends, but when Christ begins effectively to inform the family's prayer, the education of its children, its suffering and joys, its Eucharistic life, its reparation, and its decisions.
The complementarity between the two texts can be expressed through a simple image: in Robles, the soul enters the Heart of Jesus; in Crawley, Jesus enters the home. Robles's movement is inward: the person is drawn into the divine Heart to be purified, formed, and transformed. Crawley's movement projects outward: Christ, personally known and loved, enters the house, occupies its center, and from there begins to order family relationships. Yet both movements belong to a single dynamic. Christ's reign begins in the soul, extends into the home, and from the family projects itself upon society. Crawley states this explicitly when he presents the Christian family as the foundation for social reconstruction: to attain the Social Reign of Jesus Christ, society must be rebuilt from its foundations—that is, from Nazareth and from the profoundly Christian family.
This sequence helps us better understand the language of Christ the King in the Mexican Catholic world. The cry “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” need not be interpreted as the sudden politicization of a previously private devotion. Within this tradition, the Kingship of Christ possesses an expansive logic from the beginning: interior reign, family reign, and social reign. Christ must first reign over the person; then over the family; finally, this interior and domestic order is meant to radiate outward into society. Robles's novena and Crawley's Enthronement represent two particularly effective moments in this pedagogy. The first forms the Christian subject; the second forms the Christian home. When the Kingship of Christ is publicly denied, the believer has already learned to recognize it inwardly in his own will and domestically within his family.
This relationship acquires particular force when considered against the background of religious persecution in Mexico. The historical importance of these practices lies not only in their content but also in their portability. Robles's novena concentrates an extensive spirituality of the Sacred Heart into a few pages that can be carried, repeated, memorized, and prayed even when the ordinary infrastructure of Catholic formation has been weakened. It does not depend upon a library, a school, or a complex association. Its true location is the person. The Enthronement, in turn, transforms the home into a domestic sanctuary. If schools are closed, associations dispersed, or normal access to parish life impeded, the Christian household can still remain, with its image of the Sacred Heart, family prayer, First Fridays, the Holy Hour, and, whenever possible, Eucharistic life. Crawley even establishes a relationship between two tabernacles: the tabernacle of the altar and the tabernacle of the home.
It would not be accurate to say that Robles originally composed his novena as a manual for persecution. Its spiritual architecture belongs to an earlier tradition and draws deeply upon Alacoque and Yenveux's systematization of her spirituality. But this is precisely what makes the phenomenon more interesting: a spirituality conceived for ordinary sanctification proved extraordinarily suited to extraordinary circumstances. When Robles himself lived through persecution and approached martyrdom, the vocabulary of prison, crucible, tomb, trust, friendship, and abandonment acquired a new existential density. The spirituality had not been invented by persecution; persecution revealed the extent to which that spirituality had prepared the Christian to lose everything without losing the center.
Here a fundamental difference between the two models emerges. Crawley still requires an exterior space capable of becoming Bethany: the home. Robles takes the operation one step further inward. Even when the home ceases to be safe, when the priest must go into hiding, or when visible Catholic organization is persecuted, there remains one final sanctuary that the State cannot easily close: the interiority of the believer transformed in the Heart of Christ. Hence the novena's particular suitability to the Cristero world. It fits into a pocket, but more profoundly, it fits into the memory. It can accompany the fugitive, the combatant, the displaced family, the clandestine priest, and the condemned man. The geography of devotion no longer depends entirely upon a church or even upon a house: its fundamental space is the human heart united to the Heart of Christ.
This difference can also be expressed iconographically. Crawley requires the personal figure of Christ. Pompeo Batoni's image is especially appropriate: Jesus appears as a living Person who presents His Heart and establishes a direct relationship with the person contemplating Him. The image admirably embodies the logic of Bethany: the Guest arrives, is received as Friend, and ultimately is acknowledged as King. The image associated with García Moreno, with its more explicitly regal language, expresses even more clearly the social extension of that same Kingship. For Crawley, therefore, the central symbol is not simply an isolated heart, but Christ showing His Heart. The Person knocks at the door and asks for hospitality.
For Robles, by contrast, it may be more eloquent to recover the older iconography of the Heart alone, present in the emblematic tradition of Sacred Heart spirituality: a great heart surmounted by the Cross, aflame, surrounded by thorns, and radiating light. Here the absence of Christ's complete bodily figure does not impoverish the symbol; it concentrates it. The Heart appears not primarily as something Christ presents to the believer, but as the spiritual realm into which the soul enters in order to die to itself, be purified, and be transformed in Him. The prison, crucible, tomb, and school of the novena can then be understood as different dimensions of this single interior space. If Crawley can be visually summarized as Christ entering the house, Robles can be represented as the soul entering the Heart.
The two images thus express two inverse and complementary movements. In Crawley, Christ crosses the threshold of the home; in Robles, the Christian crosses the threshold of the Heart of Christ. In one, the Sacred Heart conquers a human space and transforms it into Bethany; in the other, the human person is introduced into the Heart and transformed from within. The first makes the house a throne; the second makes the soul an offering. Both converge upon the same end: that the sovereignty of Christ cease to be merely a doctrinal affirmation and become a concrete form of existence.
In this way, the two spiritualities produce two sanctuaries capable of enduring even under pressure: the interior sanctuary of the person and the domestic sanctuary of the family. Robles teaches the believer to carry the reign of Christ within; Crawley teaches the family to make that same reign visible in the home. One interiorizes and transforms; the other receives, enthrones, and socializes. Together they help explain how the tradition of the Sacred Heart could form not merely a devotion but an entire spiritual culture: a culture in which Christ first conquers the heart, then dwells in the home, and from there ultimately lays claim to the life of society.
