Historically the devotion to the Sacred Heart is an outgrowth of devotion to what is believed to be Christ's sacred humanity.During the first ten centuries of Christianity, there is nothing to indicate that any worship was rendered to the wounded Heart of Jesus. The revival of religious life and the zealous activity of Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, together with the enthusiasm of the Crusaders returning from the Holy Land, gave a rise to devotion to the Passion of Jesus Christ and particularly to practices in honour of the Sacred Wounds.


From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the devotion was propagated but it did not seem to have been embellished. It was everywhere practiced by individuals and by different religious congregations, such as the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carthusians. Among the Franciscans the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has its champions in Bonaventure (d. 1274) in his Vitis Mystica ("Mystic Vine") and B. John de la Verna. Bonaventure wrote: "Who is there who would not love this wounded heart? Who would not love in return Him, who loves so much?”. It was, nevertheless, a private, individual devotion of the mystical order. Nothing of a general movement had been inaugurated, except for similarities found in the devotion to the Five Holy Wounds by the Franciscans, in which the wound in Jesus's heart figured most prominently.  ✠