Find your humanity again through the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Pope ...

THE Pope has called for a rediscovery of love and compassion in today’s “heartless” world, taking the heart of Christ as guide and inspiration.

“The symbol of the heart has often been used to express the love of Jesus Christ; some have questioned whether this symbol is still meaningful,” Pope Francis writes his new encyclical Dilexit Nos (He loved us).

“Yet living in an age of superficiality, rushing frenetically from one thing to another without really knowing why, and ending up as insatiable consumers and slaves to the mechanisms of a market unconcerned about the deeper meaning of our lives, all of us need to rediscover the importance of the heart.”

The 28,000-word letter, “On the human and divine love of the heart of Jesus Christ”, was published on Thursday in the final stages of the RC Church’s month-long Synod on Synodality (News, 17 October, 25 October).

It says that the “interior reality” of people is often “concealed behind a great deal of foliage”, based on “mere appearances, dishonesty and deception”, often leaving them “confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can create unity and harmony in their lives and actions”.

“We find ourselves immersed in societies of serial consumers who live from day to day, dominated by the hectic pace and bombarded by technology,” he says.

“Despite our every attempt to appear as something we are not, our heart is the ultimate judge, not of what we show or hide from others, but of who we truly are. . . Failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all others.”

The encyclical, announced in June, the month traditionally dedicated by the Church to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, is the Pope’s fourth since his election in March 2013, and contains reflections from the Bible, previous magisterial texts, and the writings of saints and mystics.

Presenting the text at a Vatican news conference, an Italian theologian, Archbishop Bruno Forte, said that it offered a key to understanding Pope Francis’s pontificate, including the spiritual and theological foundations of his “message to the Church and the world”.

The Pope says that the love of Christ represented in his Sacred Heart has antecedents in Greek philosophy and the Old Testament, and was embraced by St Augustine, St Ambrose, and other Church Fathers, as well as by visionaries from Julian of Norwich to St John of the Cross.

Developed by modern saints such as John Henry Newman, Thérèse of Lisieux, Faustina Kowalska, and Charles de Foucauld, it also finds echoes in modern writers and philosophers, from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Martin Heidegger, the encyclical says.

While breaking free from “self-reliant moralism”, modern people can find in Christ’s heart “a blazing furnace of divine and human love, the most sublime fulfilment to which humanity can aspire”, at a time when new wars and “petty power struggles” give the impression “that our world is losing its heart”.

They can also see it as an antidote to newly emerging forms of Gnosticism and “baneful Jansenist dualism”, as well as to the “illusory and disembodied otherworldliness” expressed in a current church obsession with “reorganisation plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programmes. . .

“Throughout history and in different parts of the world, the heart has become a symbol of personal intimacy, affection, emotional attachment and capacity for love — it is understandable, then, that the Church has chosen the image of the heart to represent the human and divine love of Jesus Christ,” the encyclical explains.

“We find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularisation that seeks to build a world free of God. In our societies, we see a proliferation of varied forms of religiosity that have nothing to do with a personal relationship with the God of love, but are new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality. . . For this reason, I turn my gaze to the heart of Christ and I invite all of us to renew our devotion to it.”

Pope Francis recounts modern exhortations to seek “unity with the heart of Christ” from popes from Leo XIII to Benedict XVI.

He also pays tribute to religious orders, congregations, shrines, and charities that encourage devotion to the heart of Christ, fostering a deeper understanding of the “communitarian, social and missionary dimension”, and says that Dilexit Nos should be viewed as an extension of his social encyclicals Laudato Si’ (May 2015), on “care for our common home”, and Fratelli Tutti (October 2020), on “fraternity and social friendship”.

Devotion to the heart of Christ can counter potential dangers from artificial intelligence, as well as from digital algorithms that diminish the value of natural encounters and simple life experiences, and suggest that “our thoughts and will” are “easily predictable and thus capable of being manipulated”.

It summons Christians to “spread goodness in our world” and find “missionary joy” in reparation, forgiveness, and service to others, the encyclical says.

“In a world where everything is bought and sold, people’s sense of their worth appears increasingly to depend on what they can accumulate with the power of money — we are constantly pushed to keep buying, consuming and distracting ourselves, held captive to a demeaning system that prevents us from looking beyond our immediate and petty needs,” the Pope writes.

“The love of Christ has no place in this perverse mechanism, yet only that love can set us free from a mad pursuit that no longer has room for a gratuitous love. . . The Church also needs that love, lest it be replaced with outdated structures and concerns, excessive attachment to our own ideas and opinions, and fanaticism in any number of forms.”