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16 June 1904
On 10 June 1904, Joyce met Nora Barnacle for the first time. They met again on 16 June. On both days, the Feast of the Sacred Heart was celebrated in Irish Catholic churches. The feast originated on another 16 June, in 1675. A young nun, Margaret Mary Alacoque, had been experiencing visions of Christ exposing his heart. During the so-called "great apparition", he asked that a new feast be established to commemorate his suffering. (In the Library episode, Mulligan calls the nun "Blessed Margaret Mary Anycock!") The Feast of the Sacred Heart was formally approved in the same year. The Jesuits had popularized the devotion, and Ireland was the first nation to dedicate itself to the Sacred Heart.

When Leopold Bloom enters All Hallows Church in "Lotus Eaters", he sees women receiving Communion. "Something going on", he thinks, "some sodality". The sodality is devoted to the Sacred Heart and the women are attending mass to celebrate the feast. They have "crimson halters round their necks", suggesting slaves or animals tied and led. The halters are scapulars. Crimson, denoting bloody sacrifice, is the color of Christ's robes in Sacred Heart iconography.

Once the feast was established, so was the iconography: "an image of Jesus serenely holding his own heart, now visualized more physiologically, with Christ fixing the viewer in a penetrating gaze". Images of the Sacred Heart appear in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses. In Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery, Bloom encounters a statue of the Sacred Heart "showing it". A canvasser for newspaper advertisements, he evaluates it accordingly: "Ought to be sideways and red it should be painted like a real heart." Bloom adds that the Sacred Heart "seems anything but pleased", perhaps an allusion to Christ's complaint to Margaret Mary Alacoque during the great apparition that his suffering has gone unappreciated. Hence his request for a new feast.

The young nun claimed that Christ had made 12 promises to all who would dedicate themselves to the Sacred Heart. The 12th promise offers "salvation to the one who receives communion on nine consecutive First Fridays". Mrs. Kiernan in the Dubliners story "Grace" and Mr. Kearney in "A Mother" try to take advantage of this promise, as did Stephen's mother. A colored print of the 12 promises hangs on Eveline's wall, and there are resemblances between her and Margaret Mary Alacoque and between Frank, her "open-hearted" suitor, and the Sacred Heart. Both young women have been made a promise of salvation by a man professing love. Hugh Kenner argues that Frank has no intention of taking Eveline to Buenos Ayres and will seduce and abandon her in Liverpool, where the boat is actually headed. Since "going to Buenos Ayres" was slang for "taking up a life of prostitution", it appears that Frank does intend to take Eveline to Buenos Aires, but not to make her his wife. That Eveline's print of the 12 promises made by the Sacred Heart hangs over a "broken" harmonium confirms the close similarity between the two suitors. In "Circe", the Sacred Heart devotion is concisely parodied in the apparition of Martha Clifford, Bloom's pen pal. Like the women in All Hallows, she wears a crimson halter. She calls Bloom a "heartless flirt" and accuses him of "breach of promise".

When the ghost of Stephen's mother confronts him in "Circe", she prays, "O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O Divine Sacred Heart." Then, as Anthony Burgess has noted, she "identifies herself with the suffering Christ". The words she uses to do so, "Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary", paraphrase the most explicit reference to the Crucifixion in the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart: "Inconceivable they anguish when expiring with love, grief, and agony, on Mount Calvary." In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen declares, "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church." The ghost of his mother invoking the Sacred Heart to whom Ireland is dedicated is a composite image of all three. Exclaiming "No!" three times, he acts out his refusal to "repent" by smashing the brothel chandelier.

William York Tindall has written, "Stephen's destruction of the chandelier becomes the Tenebrae or the extinguishing of candles on Holy Thursday to symbolize the death of God." (The ceremony also takes place on Holy Wednesday and Good Friday. A page of notes on the Office of Tenebrae was found with the manuscript of Stephen Hero, and Joyce gave the title "Tenebrae" to an early poem he later discarded.) The candles are not the only symbolic light extinguished on Holy Thursday. There is also the sanctuary lamp, which hangs before the altar where the Eucharist is contained in a tabernacle. This lamp is alluded to in "Grace" as "the red speck of light". During Mass on Holy Thursday two hosts are consecrated, one for that Mass, the other for the Good Friday service. The second host is taken to a repository or tabernacle on another altar. With the Eucharist now absent, the sanctuary lamp is extinguished. The protagonist of Stephen Hero describes the setting on Good Friday: "no lights or vestments, the altar naked, the door of the tabernacle gaping open". Catholicism has thus provided the renegade artist with the symbolism to manifest Godforsakenness.

Like Tindall, Harry Blamires and Richard Ellmann see Stephen's smashing of the brothel chandelier as deliberate. But Kenner thinks that Stephen swings his stick at his mother's apparition and hits the chandelier instead. If so, then Stephen is among Christ's executioners. He raises his stick at the moment his mother's ghost identifies herself with the crucified victim. The extinguished lamp is a reminder of the darkness that descended during the Crucifixion. It also recalls the symbolically dark setting of the Good Friday liturgy. The apparition combines Mount Calvary and a Dublin church altar. Swinging his stick, Stephen both kills Christ and expels the Eucharist.

A little later, in the presence of a British soldier, Stephen announces, tapping his brow, "But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king." His statement initiates the symbolic action that follows. Edward VII appears wearing "a white jersey on which an image of the Sacred Heart" is embroidered with the insignia of various military orders. The image is a reminder of the devotion's close connection to 16 June and its ubiquity in Irish Catholic culture. It also foreshadows Stephen's coming transformation into the crucified Christ, while the military insignia foreshadow the violence the British soldier will inflict on him to make him so. Stephen is struck and collapses, allusions to the Crucifixion establishing the parallel with it. Joyce had been injured during an altercation, and he soon likened it to the Crucifixion, his bloody handkerchief reminding him of "Veronica". Stephen's plight draws Bloom to him. This is the only time in Joyce that the Sacred Heart is associated with a promise of actual salvation. The fallen Joyce was helped by Alfred H. Hunter, one model for Bloom. To parallel his rescue by Hunter with the Resurrection, Joyce makes Bloom God the Father, thereby deifying the charitable Hunter.

Ulysses is a book of reincarnations, and the Sacred Heart is reincarnated in D. B. Murphy, whom Bloom and Stephen encounter in "Eumaeus". Murphy is a sailor, like Frank, the Sacred Heart simulacrum in "Eveline". Tindall has noted that he has returned to Dublin on a ship Stephen saw yesterday morning, "her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing", with "crosstree" suggesting Christ. Murphy is "brokenhearted" and "red-bearded", with an image on his chest he gladly exposes, and is, as Kenner notes, "untrustworthy". A question he is asked about the tattoo—"Did it hurt much?"—alludes to Christ's complaint of his suffering. The tattoo includes an anchor, the figure 16, and a young man's profile "looking frowningly". "16" alludes to the previous day, which is also the day Murphy returned to Ireland, and the "great apparition" of the Sacred Heart on another 16 June. The frowning young man recalls both Christ's suffering and his displeasure over humankind's ingratitude. Stephen reacts to a comment of Bloom's with a "crosstempered" gesture, shoving his coffee cup away and symbolically rejecting communion with Bloom. "Crosstempered" is the second suggestion of Christ. Stephen's anger recalls his rage at his mother's ghost when she used the Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart to persuade him to repent. Ellmann has written, "If he could, [Murphy] would deny the significance of the sixteenth day of June." His comment applies to Stephen's exorcising of Christ and the Eucharist in "Circe". Murphy is a "circumnavigator", and his claim that the tattoo is the combined product of several nationalities is a reminder that the Catholic Church is universal.

Mulligan's "Blessed Mary Anycock!" is relevant. Margaret Mary Alacoque's Sacred Heart visions were highly erotic. There are echoes in Molly Bloom's memories of her recent sexual gratification. The young nun repeatedly compares Christ's heart to flame or fire. Molly's lover is nicknamed "Blazes". "Heart" can mean the erect penis. Molly says Boylan "put some heart up into me". She even seems to be unwittingly comparing Boylan's penis to the oversized heart used in the Sacred Heart iconography when she calls it "that tremendous big red brute of a thing".

Molly reincarnates the Sacred Heart devotion in another way. She describes Boylan's penis as "like iron or some kind of thick crowbar standing all the time", like the Roman spear that pierced Christ's body as it hung from the Cross. One Gospel for the feast is John 19:31-35: "one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, and once there came out blood an water". Molly Bloom menstruates and urinates. Richard Ellmann writes, "In allowing Molly to menstruate ... Joyce consecrates the blood in the chamberpot rather than the blood in the chalice." Molly "is the genuine Christine" Mulligan invoked at the beginning of Ulysses, and in "Ithaca", "the mystery of an invisible attractive person ... Marion (Molly) Bloom, [is] denoted by a visible splendid sign, a lamp".