The Sacred Heart, the Most Precious Blood, and Mystical Chivalry, by Theo Howard

“And Moses hid his face; for he was afraid to look upon God.” – Exodus 3:6

There is a regrettable tendency, no doubt encouraged by the frequency of rather soft and sentimental images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to see the devotion as a particularly feminine one. The truth is that veneration of Our Lord’s most Sacred Heart has long been the choice devotion of the Church’s knighthood; an icon of the Divine Love to which the knight offered himself and sought to live within, and deeply bound up with the cause for political Christianity, going back to the Crusades and beyond.

Leon Gautier famously defined Chivalry as “the Christian form of the military profession: the knight is the Christian soldier.” Precisely because the Germanic warrior ethos was Christianised, chivalry was more than a code of martial virtue. As Michael Warren Davis has pointed out, it became, so to speak, the “lay spirituality” of Medieval Europe. ….